I have rescued Princess Peach more times than I have cleaned my room, and I still did not see this coming. XR developer Lucas Martinic got the full Super Mario 64 running in mixed reality on a PICO headset, in real 3D, at a native 90 frames per second. Then he reached into the game, grabbed Mario by the cap and set him down on his desk. Mario just stood there on the wood grain like he pays rent.
From a cartridge to a floating window
The 81-second clip opens with Martinic holding his Super Mario 64 cartridge. A floating “magic window” opens over his desk, and the title screen fills it in full 3D. He hops into a grassy level, plays a bit with a controller, then pinches Mario and pulls him out of the frame and into the room. Mario runs around on the table and even on the kitchen floor. Then he goes back in, and the video keeps rolling through the castle and the snowy Cool, Cool Mountain levels. Somewhere a 1996 version of me just dropped his Rumble Pak.
Martinic posted the clip on X on October 27 with this caption: “Full Mario 64 in Mixed Reality! Running in real 3D (no stereoscopic crap) natively at 90FPS and also running on my desk!” By the next morning it had more than 650,000 views, about 6,600 likes and almost 2,800 bookmarks.
How he built it
According to Road to VR, Martinic first played with the idea a few months ago, starting from Jonas Jakobi’s Mario 64 project for Quest 3 from 2023. This time he started fresh from a decompiled version of the game. That is the fan-made, open-source SM64 decomp that rebuilds Mario 64’s code by hand. For the heavy lifting he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 AI model plus PICO CLI, a command-line toolkit that links AI coding assistants to PICO’s XR development tools. His verdict: the “Opus 5.5 + PICO CLI combo made it quite straightforward.” Vibecoding a 30-year-old platformer into your living room is a sentence nobody could have written five years ago.
The “no stereoscopic crap” part matters. As Road to VR explains, a lot of flat-game VR ports fake the 3D with hacks like alternate frame rendering, or by guessing a second eye view from the depth buffer. Working from the decompiled code likely lets the game render a true view for each eye. That is why the floating window looks like a tiny diorama, not a TV screen. Martinic is also no stranger to the grab-a-character trick. Back in August, the Good VR podcast tried an earlier Quest 3 build he shared. Host Ian Hamilton pulled Mario out of the castle grounds, let him run around on his desk, and watched him fall onto the floor. Then he steered him back with the analog stick.
Can you play it?
Not yet. Road to VR says there is no telling when the mod will be available. Martinic’s website just says more info is “coming soon.” On the podcast in August, he said he had not published the earlier build “because the legal stuff around it.” This time he also posted a disclaimer that he owns an original physical copy of Mario 64 and that the project is “not associated with Nintendo or PICO.” The decomp project does not include the game itself. You have to supply your own legally owned copy to build it. Nintendo also has a long history of shutting down fan projects that get too popular. So if you want to see Mario stomp across a real kitchen floor, watch the video now and keep your expectations low.
GadgetKing take
This is the most fun demo of mixed reality I have seen in a while, and it did not come from a billion-dollar studio. It came from one developer, an AI coding assistant and a game that is older than some of the people playing it. Nintendo, if you are reading this: let us pick Mario up and put him on the coffee table. Official version, any headset, take my money.
Sources: Lucas Martinic on X (video, quotes and stats), Road to VR, Good VR and The Verge. Video and images: Lucas Martinic.
More retro gaming: the ModRetro Chromatic Transparent and the retro handheld gaming console.
