Mario’s Tiny Odyssey Has Him Conquering the Apple Watch

Tobi, a talented coder, took on the daunting task of fitting Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 onto the small screen of an Apple Watch. This 3D masterclass from 1996 was an unusual place to start, but it works. Super Mario 64, the beautifully chaotic 1996 frolic of jumps and stars, now comes to life on your wrist, sort of.

Tobi knew he had a clear choice. Emulation, or more specifically, constructing an entire N64 simulator from scratch, was out of the question for him, and he realized it was a bridge too far. However, porting the original code was a smarter move. Fans had already reverse-engineered Super Mario 64 to produce plain C code that worked on any system. Projects such as Ckosmic’s iOS clone had already demonstrated that the method worked on Apple hardware.

Forking that iOS code sounded like a no-brainer at first; simply edit some Swift files, target watchOS, and you’re done. That was the theory anyway. However, reality quickly hit home. The watch lacks SDL2, the graphics and input handling library commonly found on larger screens, hence there are no shortcuts or simple passes. Tobi started from scratch with Sprite Kit, watchOS’s built-in 2D graphics technology.

Getting everything up and running was chaos at first, with textures as well as geometry vanishing into thin air while phasing through Mario’s feet as if from another universe. Assets were loaded half-crafted and looked completely incorrect. Tobi set to work, repairing glitch after glitch until he had a working build that allowed Mario to run, leap, gather coins, and basically be himself.

Then there was the question of controls: how do you turn Mario left, right, and jump on a watch? Touch zones work well, and with a little modding, it becomes shockingly responsive. Spin the digital crown, and the camera smoothly orbits Mario; no phone or cloud wizardry necessary. It’s completely local rendering on the S-series chip, which works offline no matter where you are.

There are still plenty of little bugs, and the ground clipping is especially annoying when jumping still, and performance suffers slightly in the busier stages, but it doesn’t matter because Mario is exploring, grabbing stars, and battling Goombas on the watch. Can you beat the entire thing? For a committed player with the patience to learn the tiny controls. Tobi’s next step is to connect a controller so that marathon sessions become a reality.

Legally speaking, Tobi has worked around any concerns, as his project ships empty and requires users to supply their own Super Mario 64 ROM, execute some scripts, and compile in Xcode (a free dev account is all that is required). Tobi intends to release the whole source code after it has been refined, allowing anyone to create their own wrist-sized N64, all offline and without requiring an internet connection.