Super Mario 64 Splitscreen Multiplayer -normal ... Now

Super Mario 64 on original hardware renders about 30,000 triangles per frame at 30 FPS. Splitscreen forces the N64 to render two full scenes—closer to 55,000 triangles. Even with aggressive LOD scaling (Mario becomes a 50-polygon lump from ten meters away), the frame rate dips to 12–18 FPS in levels like Dire, Dire Docks .

Fan servers host “co-op speedruns”—one player as Mario, one as Luigi, racing to 70 stars without desync. The world record for a full 120-star co-op run is 2 hours, 14 minutes—with 47 desync resets.

The final nail: Miyamoto’s playtest notes, buried as a text dump. Translated roughly: “Two Marios is fun. But friends should play together, not compete for camera. N64 is for sharing one dream, not two halves of a screen. Focus on single-player. Save multiplayer for next hardware.” Dated October 4, 1995. Dylan and Sandra never release the build. They archive it, write a private report, and return to testing Diddy Kong Racing . The splitscreen mode remains on a single flash cart, locked in Nintendo’s NoA vault.

For weeks, he’s been feeding the file into an emulator hooked up to a prototype N64 debug unit. Most attempts crash. But tonight, with a second controller plugged into Port 2, something changes.

The screen flashes black. Then, the familiar castle courtyard renders—but split diagonally. Top-left: Mario. Bottom-right: Luigi.

Dylan’s hands tremble. He nudges Control Stick 1. Mario runs right. He nudges Control Stick 2. Luigi jumps in place.

In an alternate 1996, Nintendo’s secretive debugging team stumbles upon a fully functional splitscreen multiplayer build of Super Mario 64 —a mode so chaotic and ambitious it threatens to break not just the game, but their understanding of cooperative platforming. Part 1: The Cartridge in the Drawer It’s a humid July evening in Redmond, Washington. Dylan Nguyen, a 24-year-old QA tester for Nintendo of America, is the last one in the dimly lit debugging lab. His job is to verify bug fixes for the Japanese 1.1 revision of Super Mario 64 , but his real passion lies in the game’s unused data—scraps of text, placeholder assets, and one curious file simply labeled SPLIT_MULTI_TEST.bin .

But the real killer: memory. The N64’s 4 MB RAM (8 MB with Expansion Pak, which didn’t exist in 1995) couldn’t hold two full level instances. Their solution—instancing enemies and objects only near each player—led to bizarre bugs. In Big Boo’s Haunt , P1 would see a Boo, but P2 would see a floating book. The game’s state desynced so often that Sandra found a function called TRY_FIX_SYNC_LOOP() that literally spun forever.