Mario Wings to the Sky… Or Does He?


I have been playing Super Mario 64 for as long as I’ve been able to write my own name. I’ve gone from playing the game alone in the basement of the house I grew up in, to playing it on my laptop in college on Sixtyforce, a Nintendo 64 emulator, to a console I bought on Craigslist from someone who was about to move to California. The advent of Super Mario 3-D All Stars  and the eventual Nintendo 64 Switch port made it possible to play the game in transit, the ultimate dream for someone like me. As I grow older and understand what the trajectory of someone’s life looks like, I hope I will be able to play it as much as I want if I enter an old folks’ home, or if I end up in hospice at the end of my life. It is perhaps an odd thing to tie oneself to, but being able to kick ass at Super Mario 64 has been integral to my personality for long enough that I’m not sure what it feels like to be without it. 

During lockdown, I played levels I’ve never, or rarely, played. In the last few years I’ve avoided playing any levels where you have to use the wing cap to collect stars, because the wing cap mechanics don’t follow physics at all. It is possible that my devotion to trying to learn how to make Mario “wing to the sky,” as one level requires, is why I can’t throw a ball with any coordination. Nevertheless, the wing cap is perhaps the most iconic emblem of my childhood. You break a brightly colored box, catch the winged hat that falls out of the box, hear the inalienable Power Star theme, jump in the air three times, and all of a sudden, you can fly

What an absolute joy, for a kid - and unprecedented, for Mario, up until this point. Wing-capped Mario signifies everything fun about Nintendo 64 video games, and was probably created in order to show off the then-novel 360-degree mechanics that Super Mario 64 featured. There’s a reason that the Super Mario 64 box features Mario in a wing cap. Paired with the Power Star theme, which is iconic on its own, the wing cap is very fun the first few times you wear it.

Most of the time that Mario is airborne, he follows a wavy flight pattern: down and up, push and pull. Again: excellent for kids. However, once you have to reach an actual destination with the wing cap (i.e. flying directly straight at something or reaching a higher plane than you would be able to on foot), things get a little hairy. 

The most painful irony is how difficult it actually is to fly high with the wing cap on. This makes me question its purpose: if I can’t actually vault as high into the sky as I want to from standing on the ground, am I actually flying? This is supposed to be wing cap Mario, not lazy-plywood-airplane-cap Mario. Yes, this issue is addressed with the subsequent Mario game, Super Mario Sunshine, but it’s absent in Super Mario 64.

When I first started playing, I would try and make Mario dip down low to get higher. I thought there was a slingshot effect to Mario’s flight pattern. This theory was bolstered by the fact that the whooshing wind sounds would in fact get louder as I’d tip Mario up out of a rapid descent. However, if I dipped Mario three inches on my CRT TV screen, he’d only rise up an inch and a half. The logic I thought of at age six still seems as though it should hold true as I enter my late twenties - the lower you go descend, the higher you can ascend.

Anyone who’s earned a star in Super Mario 64 would say, “just use the cannons.” This generally works, except that the speed with which the cannon propels Mario into the air is not maintained once the flight mechanism kicks in. Basically, you can fire out of the cannon at 60mph, but once the game realizes you have the wing cap on and the flight pattern takes effect, you’ll slow down to 45mph. Add to that, the fact that the flight pattern naturally dips and dives the way it does means that as soon as you stop being a cannonball, you’ll dip down. Cannons should solve the wing cap problem but in fact they throw another wrench in the works. 

I would like to point out that, even though I am not exceedingly good at too many things, I am good at playing Super Mario 64. I can cannon to stars in midair and I can wall-kick my way to any height I want. I know how to defeat the most bullish of bullies and my ability to navigate the dumb slide mini-games is second to none. I’m no speed-runner, but I can kick ass controlling Super Mario 64’s titular character. When I have to put on that wing cap, though, everything, for lack of a better term, is up in the air.

As I meditate on these facts, it becomes clear to me that the wing cap feature in Super Mario 64 is a metaphor for life. If collecting the stars and completing the levels symbolize achieving one’s goals in life, then the wing cap symbolizes pleasant distractions that can be roadblocks to success. Sure, it’s all fun and games when you’re flying around, but shit tends to get real when you hit a wall. Hitting a wall is often a fatal mistake in Super Mario 64, but given the fact that Mario has multiple lives, it’s more accurate to liken Mario tumbling to his doom to a “low” in life, rather than one’s actual demise. 

I didn’t always rag on the wing cap in my free time. I used to think it was the most fun you could have in the entire game. I didn’t know about wall kicks, or how to use a fast turnaround to my advantage, or how you can cheat a couple of edges in harder levels to make your life easier. I wanted to hear Mario shout ”Yahoo!” when I sent him on a Z-jump, and to tug that red winged cap on with a triumphant ”Here we go!” I wanted to be the Peter Pan to Mario’s Wendy and send him on aerial adventures through the low-resolution skies of Super Mario 64

In my memory, this devil-may-care attitude towards Super Mario 64 is directly linked to my childhood. I have a vague memory of being somewhere between five and eight and my older brother, to whom the game and Nintendo 64 belonged, specifically running Mario up to the rainbow-laden, floor-less wing cap levels, so that I could fly around with impunity. It was one of the nicer things he’d do for me - that, and the time I got glass in my foot from playing around alone out back, and he pulled the glass out of my foot and bandaged me up. I still have the scar, and I mostly stopped playing in the backyard after that. My brother would set me up on those levels to give me somewhere to play, to make me happy (and to prevent me from ruining his save file).

Once I was older, I wanted to be able to say I’d fully completed the game. This meant getting more stars than I’d gotten before: I’d beaten Bowser, which requires the player to collect 70 stars, but there are 120 total stars in the game. As I started to pursue more stars, I realized that the wing cap was more of a handicap than a feature. The wing cap is not forgiving when it comes to levels without floors. If you don’t properly land on the platform you’re aiming for (if you slide off the edge with a nosedive-landing or if you hit the side of the platform), you’re doomed. Just tonight, I tried to collect the red coins in a floor-less level in order to get a star, and I kept failing. 

This was, however, outlined from a player’s first experience with the wing cap. The level where you unlock the damn thing involves being dropped into an open sky area with a large platform in the middle. The level’s designed to look like the turrets of Peach’s castle have reached up into the stratosphere, where this magic switch lies. It’s a little more fantasy-RPG-themed than the other Mario games, but the real fantasy is revealed when you figure out that you have to collect the eight red coins that are present in every Super Mario 64 level. This is fine, if you just drop into the level from mid-sky, but you need to hit the switch on the platform, and you can’t actually reach the coins in the sky from the place where you’re standing. If you don’t believe me, read the comments on the video linked above.

This was one of the first platformer games to feature 360-degree movement (though not the first!), and the astounding 3D mechanics were enough for the general public at the time. Forget that the fun part of flying around with a winged Mario cap makes you feel like you’re drunk behind the wheel. As easy as it is to complain, and as much as I want to leave it at being a hater, the actuality is that I am just bad at flying around in this game. 

So now, I try to approach the game’s wing cap requirement in a healthier way. It doesn’t just have to be a dangerous distraction, or a gigantic pain in my ass. I am in fact able to earn the stars that require the wing cap. It is not an actual fault of the game; I’ve just been complaining for this long because it is the part of the game at which I am the worst. My therapist did not actually tell me to take this attitude towards a 26-year-old video game, but if she knew how much trouble I’m having getting all of the stars, she probably would.

Even if I’m the worst, it doesn’t mean I’m incapable. Just because I’ve failed up to this point doesn’t mean I’m going to continue failing. The way I need to look at it is that the wing cap is just an added challenge. If you were meant to spend the whole game with the wing cap on, it would be a different game. My inability to fly uninhibited speaks more to my own flaws than it does the game’s design. Loving the wing cap as a child and loathing it as an adult stems from being more focused on the objective of the game and not reveling in the excitement of being able to fly. It’s my very adult and fear-based need for control that keeps me from flying the way I need to fly. Anytime I just chill and enjoy the experience of being in the sky, I’m usually able to get the coin or the star or the nebulous invisible rings (looking at you, Mario Wings to the Sky). 

All of which to say, I know the wing cap and its mechanics very well. The game, as mentioned, is about as old as I am, and as we enter into the era of VR and what I’m assuming in ten years’ time will be game chips implanted into our brains, the effect of Mario running AND flying in 360 degrees proves to be less exciting than it once was. Still, the metaphor holds some water - there is space in adulthood to enjoy moments of whimsy, even if it means you get from place to place a little less efficiently. 

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