The first time I ever saw my dad play a video game was on Christmas Day, nineteen-ninety-something. Sorry for sounding like the intro to an episode of the CGI Jeff Garlin sitcom The Goldbergs, but I truly don’t remember the exact year. It could have been 1997 since that’s when Yoshi’s Story came out and that was one of the two games my brother and I got with our Nintendo 64 that Christmas, but I was five. Do parents get brand new video game consoles for five-year-olds? I dunno.
But the other game we got that year, and the one my dad was showing us how to play, was Super Mario 64. It blew my tiny mind, regardless of how old I actually was.
Before that, we owned a SEGA Genesis and a game called Barney’s Hide & Seek Game where players took control of the dinosaur as he blew kisses to his friends and caught wayward balloons. So to suddenly see Mario throwing King Bob-omb down until he exploded was a whole new experience and to this day Super Mario 64 is one of my all-time favorite video games. Which is why I asked our Patreon supporters and staff this week to rank every main course in the game. We’re talking full-on courses with multiple stars and areas to explore, so don’t expect to see The Princess’s Secret Slide or Bowser in the Sky on this list. Let’s a-go.
#15 — Rainbow Ride
Let’s get this out of the way early. There are no real bad courses in Super Mario 64. But there are some that don’t work quite as well as others and Rainbow Ride is as good a pick for the worst course as any other.
Part of what made Super Mario 64 feel so different from every Mario game that came before it was the free roaming exploration that stood in stark contrast to the left-to-right side scrolling of the other games. Until you get to Rainbow Ride.
Yes, you can still move in three dimensions. Yes, there are technically areas to explore in Rainbow Ride like the giant house inspired by Jack and the Beanstalk or the flying boat that’s probably inspired by some sort of Norse mythology I didn’t google before writing this. But to access any of this, players have to ride on magic carpets that move in linear ways across a series of rainbows. It brings the gameplay to a grinding halt and feels out of step with the rest of the game. Being one of the final courses available after exploring 14 others that offer more freedom makes Rainbow Ride feel that much less impressive. At least it’s still better than the version from Super Smash Bros.
#14 — Wet-Dry World
The wildest thing about Wet-Dry World isn’t that how high you jump when entering the painting affects the water, it’s the fact that this level was part of a Got Milk? commercial around the same time as the game’s release.
Beyond that, there really isn’t much to this one. It’s a fairly small world with a few enemies that are unfortunately called skeeters and look like a first draft version of Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire’s Surskit. If you backflip into the painting so that the water is at its highest point, you can hop over a metal grate and swim through an underwater tunnel to access an abandoned town that looks like one of those fake towns they made to test the atomic bomb.
Something about this world always made me sad as a kid between its weird background of ruins and its empty-feeling areas. It feels more like a liminal space than an actual Mario level.
#13 — Dire, Dire Docks
Super Mario 64 is not a very narrative-driven game. Bowser has taken over Peach’s Castle and traps her and the Toads in the walls. Then he sort of hides in a pit in a room that leads to a place called The Dark World. It sort of falls apart if you think about it too much beyond creating an excuse for Mario to collect stars from a variety of worlds.
The reason I bring up the narrative (or lack thereof) in Super Mario 64 here is because Dire, Dire Docks features the only narrative-driven star in the entire game. After collecting 30 stars, players get the message “they say that Bowser has sneaked out of the sea and into the underground” before they can access the second Star Door and face him. But before facing Bowser, players are first forced to enter Dire, Dire Docks and board his submarine to collect a Power Star off of its main deck. The sub then disappears from all future missions. It’s sort of a baffling choice, but a cool one.
Other than that, Dire, Dire Docks is a pretty straightforward water level, for better or worse. Your mileage may vary based on how much you enjoy piloting Mario as he swims and monitoring his air levels as you dodge sharks and smaller fish.
The most interesting part of the level is that it features a Power Star that requires players to wear both the Metal Cap and the Vanish Cap simultaneously. I always wanted to combine the caps in other ways as a kid after playing that mission.
#12 — Snowman’s Land
Snowman’s Land has one of the most interesting methods of entry. It’s not the first level in the game that expects Mario to jump through a wall to get to it – Shifting Sand Land from the previous zone has that distinction – but it is a level players can completely miss if they’re not paying attention.
The room that leads to it features artwork on the walls of paintings Mario has already jumped into before, such as Jolly Roger Bay. The princess apparently has doubles of the paintings. Some of ’em. That way she knows she has a pristine one in storage. Then Mario can dive in, it gets scratched, she doesn’t care.
One of those doubles, as viewed through the mirror that takes up an entire wall in the room, is the painting for the first snow level – Cool, Cool Mountain. But the wall doesn’t actually have a painting on it outside of its reflection. Jumping against the wall then takes Mario to Snowman’s Land, another snow level that trades in negligent mother penguins for a giant snowman intent on blowing Mario’s hat off and water so cold that Mario loses health just by sitting in it.
It’s fine.
#11 — Jolly Roger Bay
This level scared the hell out of me as a kid. The first two missions when landing in the world involve dealing with a giant eel that’s taken up residence in the sunken ship. This is also the first time in a Super Mario 64 playthrough (unless you jumped into the castle moat) that a level has enough water for Mario to actually go underwater and drown if you’re not careful.
Which, in and of itself, is very jarring as a kid playing through a Mario game. Across every side scrolling adventure, Mario has had no trouble holding his breath underwater forever and now he suddenly has to be babysat unless you want to see him claw at his throat with his round polygonal hands and slump over dead.
Other than that godforsaken eel – which still torments Mario to this day – the level is pretty neat. A cavern with boobytrapped treasure and an abandoned pirate ship are enough to entice anyone’s imagination.
#10 — Tick Tock Clock
I do not like this level. Simple as that.
Like Wet-Dry World, Tick Tock Clock’s central gimmick is dependent on the way Mario leaps through the portal to enter it. To get into this one, he jumps through the face of a grandfather clock that keeps really poor time. In fact, both the minute hand and hour hand are constantly spinning and their position as Mario enters the world dictates how fast or slow the clock parts within the world move as players navigate their way through it.
Even as a kid this was my least favorite world in the game because it just doesn’t have much going on. It’s a vertical platformer that can be made easier or harder based on the speed at which the clock’s parts move but that’s all it is. It’s the inside of a clock. There’s some Bob-ombs and some spinning platforms and that’s just kind of it. I was bad at this level growing up and it was too uninteresting from a design standpoint to care about getting better at it. Sorry to the fans.
#9 — Tiny-Huge Island
Hell yeah. Now this is a world with a gimmick I can get behind.
Tiny-Huge Island is a course predicated on Mario jumping back and forth between living out Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Honey, I Blew Up the Kids as he navigates the same island from a miniscule perspective and a gigantic-sized one.
Players find a room with three identical paintings of a pair of Goombas since triples is best.
One painting is much tinier than the others and allows Mario to enter a shrunken-down version of the island and live out a kaiju fantasy. Kick a Goomba and that dude goes flying. Backflip from the base of the mountain and end up at its peak. Smush that bastard Koopa the Quick.
The other painting is colossal and leaves Mario small enough for the Goombas to stomp on him. Fire breathing Piranha Plants pop up and Mario is so tiny and the grass is so thick that he can barely jump to avoid their flames. There’s a fish with sunglasses that can eat you and kill Mario in a single bite. It’s a lot.
Curiously, the third painting in the castle — which would presumably take Mario to a normal-sized version of the world — doesn’t function as a portal at all.
#8 — Lethal Lava Land
Jolly Roger Bay showed players that this new 3D version of Mario could no longer hold his breath forever, but Lethal Lava Land showed them that touching molten lava was no longer an instant death sentence for the Italian plumber.
Instead, as any player will tell you, it now caused him to soar twenty feet in the air and shout “ha ha ha ha ha haaaa” while clutching his smoldering ass. With how much lava is in Lethal Lava Land, this was a welcome change. The platforms are crumbly, there are enemies called Bullies whose only joy in life is shoving Mario into magma and for some reason there’s a giant slide puzzle like you’d get in a birthday party goodie bag. Which is all to say there’s a dozen different ways for players to end up in the lava. And that’s before even entering the volcano full of its own boiling lava and perilous platforms.
#7 — Big Boo’s Haunt
Did you ever wish that you could play Luigi’s Mansion as Mario? Me neither.
But Big Boo’s Haunt is a pretty close approximation.
Mario enters this level by beating up a Boo in the courtyard of the Princess’s castle and then shrinking as he jumps inside the tiny cage that falls from the Boo. Is the Boo that Mario kicked to reveal the cage Big Boo? Or is the oversized Boo that Mario fights on the balcony of the mansion Big Boo? The game doesn’t care. What matters is that Mario gets to navigate a haunted house full of giant eyeballs, ghosts and a piano that grows teeth to try and eat him in what is almost definitely a reference to the Japanese horror film House if you need a reason to sit down and watch that movie. It rocks.
Maybe the most well-remembered part of this level is the creepy carousel below the mansion that can be accessed by going into the tool shed in the backyard. Great reminder to stay away from carnivals.
#6 — Shifting Sand Land
It’s an unwritten rule that every Mario game has to have a desert world. Or maybe it’s a written rule in Nintendo’s headquarters based on how strictly they stick to it. Maybe Shigeru Miyamoto has a plaque hanging in every office to remind the team to add in more sand and cacti.
Thankfully, Shifting Sand Land is a pretty fun level, particularly with its pyramid ruled by a pair of mummified hands and the condor that’ll steal the cap right off of Mario’s head.
“I narrowed it down after a lot of deliberation. I think shifting sand lands should be #1. It has a high variety of areas, wide open space for experimentation, Wing Cap, good difficulty and an inside segment with the pyramid, and a boss. Also the puzzle blocks that crush you.”
– KPB, patron
#5 — Hazy Maze Cave
A recurring theme in this article seems to be me realizing some sort of childhood megalohydrothalassophobia, a word I just looked up that means a fear of underwater monsters because this was another level that gave me some dread as a kid because of the name of its introductory mission, The Swimming Beast in the Cavern. I was scared to see what was down there.
Turns out, the swimming beast is actually a friendly plesiosaur named Dorrie that’s more than happy to give Mario a lift on his back, even if the signpost in front of his lake warns that he might eat Mario.
Other than that, the stage also features a lot of rolling rocks, bats and the titular hazy maze that Mario has to navigate through without suffocating. The sort of stuff you’d find in any cave, really. Thankfully, there’s also a room that connects to the Cavern of the Metal Cap, a place that lets Mario activate the green ! blocks and transform into Metal Mario, thereby no longer needing to breathe at all. Even though the Wing Cap is synonymous with this game, that Metal Cap is really the one with the most longevity, appearing in the Super Smash Bros. series and Mario Party 2. Metal Mario has even seemingly become a whole different guy than regular Mario, going on to appear in Super Smash Bros. Melee as an enemy and being a playable character in the Mario Kart and Mario Golf series.
#4 — Cool, Cool Mountain
Overall, Cool, Cool Mountain isn’t much to look at. It’s exactly what it sounds like – a tall mountain covered in snow and ice. But this course is also home to one of the most infamous things Super Mario 64 players are capable of doing – killing a baby penguin.
At the peak of the mountain is a baby penguin that’s lost its mother and needs Mario to navigate it safely back to her. She’s sitting at the base of the mountain bathing in a pool of ice water instead of looking for the kid, which seems like pretty lousy parenting. But at least she’s not betting Power Stars on races with strangers in the mountain chalet like daddy penguin. It’s a radical method, but maybe Mario is teaching them a lesson in attentiveness by dropping their baby off of a cliff.
Why do I have the sudden urge to listen to Tears in Heaven?
#3 — Bob-omb Battlefield
This is the course that started it all.
When players first arrive in the castle, the only room they can access is the one leading to Bob-omb Battlefield and it’s a great introduction to the game and its mechanics. There’s no edges to the world that players can fall off of, there’s a number of enemies to beat down and a clear boss battle at the other end of the course with King Bob-omb on the summit. Not to mention that theme song.
Bob-omb Battlefield is not a terribly exciting course on its own merits but it provides the perfect training ground for players booting up the game for the first time with its variety. It introduces the friendly pink Bob-omb Buddies to the Mario mythos and has plenty of wide open sky for Mario to soar through in his Wing Cap. Sometimes that’s all you need.
#2 — Tall, Tall Mountain
Writing about this game has me realizing for the first time that these are not creative course names. Tall, Tall Mountain is (as you may have guessed) a tall, tall mountain.
But what makes this course so special is the sense of adventure that goes along with scaling that mountain.
There’s pits to jump over and vines to swing from. Waterfalls and log rolling. A monkey that steals Mario’s cap. This easy-to-miss course tucked in a tiny painting off to the side of Wet-Dry World is one of the most vibrant courses in the game. It even has one of the signature slide levels that I think of whenever I think of Super Mario 64. I don’t think there’s a level in any 3D Mario game I enjoy quite as much as this one. And yet…
#1 — Whomp’s Fortress
Here we are with the #1 course in Super Mario 64 as voted by our Patreon supporters and staff.
Whomp’s Fortress is a course so great they even brought it back in Super Mario Galaxy 2, canonizing the idea that the castle’s paintings are portals to other lands rather than magical worlds brought to life by the Power Stars. If you’re into that whole lore thing, I guess.
Whomp has become a staple enemy of the Mario franchise since its introduction in this level, rivaling the recognizability of the Thwomps introduced in Super Mario Bros. 3. Those guys are in this level too but have ditched the spikes and gray color scheme for a bright blue that would stick with them throughout the entire Nintendo 64 era.
This level has it all: a secret shortcut, sleeping Piranha Plants and a Metal Cap block that serves no real purpose. There’s an owl in one of the trees that Mario can ride to the top of the level and drop into a cage on the floating islands that surround the fortress and a cannon Mario can use to launch himself into a wall to shatter it. As an early game course, Whomp’s Fortress offers the perfect blend of the safe exploration encouraged by Bob-omb Battlefield and the trickier platforming of later levels.
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Did you really think I’d only use this image twice? Triples makes it safe. Triples is best.
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