Super Mario 64's floating shadow glitch explained

Here’s a little something about Super Mario 64 you might not know about. If you’re playing the game on anything other than the Nintendo 64, you might notice that the shadow around Mario’s feet is actually lifting off the ground. You can see more on that in the tweet below.

As the date indicates in the tweet above, this fact has been known by diehard Nintendo fans for quite some time. The question is, do you know why it happens? Well now we have our response thanks to an N64 expert.

Renowned Super Mario 64 modder Kaze Emanuar has done a deep dive on the shadow phenomenon, and he’s finally cracked the code. Again, this issue only crops up if you’re playing the game on platforms other than the N64, and it appears the answer to this issue comes from emulation.

According to Kaze, shadows use decal render mode, a special render mode that can only render on top of surfaces that have the same depth coordinates. Apparently this is something that emulators struggle with or get completely wrong, and the end result is a shadow that appears floating above the ground, literally surrounding Mario’s feet.

In the grand scheme of things this might be an extremely niche detail, but every bit of Nintendo trivia is worth knowing if you’re a Nintendo diehard!