Mario64 does have kind of a creepy liminal vibe to it.
Long ass empty hallways, rooms with just a giant mirror, no sound except kind of haunting/enchanting music and the echo of your footsteps.
It is objectively a pretty creepy / empty vibe to it, because in the game bowser has taken over the castle, so its supposed to be a bit spooky/creepy in a bunch of spots.
They aren’t wrong though. Mario 64 (and even Ocarina of Time too) were great because of how much they evolved videogames as a whole, but as pioneers they have a lot of flaws that game devs took a bit longer to figure out.
I don’t think OoT is as liminal because they put a lot of effort into adding atmosphere. There’s a lot of background animal noises and bugs flying around. It’s low tech, but the environments don’t feel empty in the same way as the polished and clean Mario 64 environments.
Doesn’t liminal specifically mean a transitory space that you are intended to move through and not linger in, like a hallway? OoT (and Mario 64) have those, but obviously not exclusively. I guess were referring to a sort of sparse aesthetic. I wish we had a better word for that.
IIRC the reason Luigi isn’t in Mario 64 is that they couldn’t afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.
It’s not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.
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Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.
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Museum Madness had that effect on me.
I kept expecting something to… catch me, felt like I was being watched, that there was some lurking enemy, or that the robot buddy dude would suddenly decide I was a threat, and turn on me, or like, accidentally explode or something.
I preferred TIE Fighter. At least I knew I was fighting something.
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Logitech 3D Pro.
TIE Fighter, G Police, Sim Copter… all the way through the Battlefields up to 4, Arma 1-3, various flight sims.
I genuinely have no idea how that thing has lasted an actual 20 years with minimal drift.
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I am a millenial, and mining out huge caves in the darkness of Minecraft gave existential terror.
Luanti player here, have similar feelings when mining.
When consoles were less powerful, all spaces were liminal, and as nobody expected anything else, none were. Now, the fact that it’s not bustling with photorealistic NPCs feels spooky and unsettling (along with the historical details, which feel creepy in the way that vaporwave makes you feel)
So you’re saying when say N64 was the cutting edge, everyone playing it was loving how new and realistic everything felt.
Now compare that to the younger generation that grew up with consoles way way more powerful and saw games that had fully fleshed out cities and citizens and systems to make places feel alive. So going back to tech that’s 30 years old feels very empty and unsettling by contrast?
Blatant historical revisionism.
Millenials were cooking up horrifically bad videogame creepypasta before any zoomer ever touched a keyboard.
lol.
BEN DROWNED
… I did kind of have my own creepy experience with an actual Majora’s Mask cart I picked up at a used game store like a decade ago.
Had one single save file.
Only had the couples mask.
Had completely forgone basically the entire rest of the the main actual game, only focused on the couple, saved maybe 3 ish ‘hours’ before the impact.
Had focused the entire playthrough on ensuring that a relationship would work out… in a world left utterly doomed by the hero not being the hero.
And of course they ultimately abadoned the entire game, leading eventually to me buying it, being utterly baffled by this … unconvential play through, the kind of person who would do that playthrough.
What even is a liminal space? Seriously, I looked up the definition and still don’t know.
by definition it’s a between space, like going from one place to another. in practice it’s a space that should have people in it but doesn’t. think an empty mall or indoor swimming pool.
the backrooms are probably the most popular example of a liminal space
