If there’s one thing that we love here at Retro Dodo, it’s a good demake of a game. We recently covered a Palworld Demake for the Nintendo DS that was incredible, which coincidentally is the only time that we’re going to see the game on a Nintendo console. This time, however, we’re looking at a case where a modder is trying to bring a home console game from 1996 to a handheld that came out 5 years later. So, not so much a demake as a handheld version of a game that we would have loved on the GBA, one that we would have traveled through Bowser’s Castle itself to obtain had we had the chance.
Some of you might be thinking, ‘I can play SM64 on my phone now thanks to Delta’, but where’s the fun in that? Thanks to Time Extension, we’ve discovered modder Joshua Baretto’s plan to ‘rewrite’ the classic N64 game for the GBA. Rather than making a port, he’s rewriting it from the ground up to combat the lack of GPU or ‘native support for floating-point numbers’.
Rather than looking slick and polished like the DS version of SM64 with Yoshi, Luigi, and Wario joining Mario’s adventure, we’ve got a true-to-form GBA-style adventure with the pixelated graphics we would expect from a handheld that dropped in 2001.
Obviously, with Nintendo’s track record of wrist-slapping for using their assets, Joshua has had to create a character that looks a little like one of the elves from Santa’s Workshop in the film Rise of the Guardians. Or, for a less niche reference, a traffic cone on a black ball.
I think we can all agree that this is a mammoth task, and the YouTube video above looks incredible so far. We’ve never built a game ourselves, but I can imagine rewriting something as famous as Super Mario 64 for Game Boy Advance must be pretty nerve-wracking, especially considering how many fans it has! The code will be available for people to try in the future, so make sure to follow Joshua’s journey to discover when you can test out his creation!
