Mario64 does have kind of a creepy liminal vibe to it.
Long ass empty hallways, rooms with just a giant mirror, no sound except kind of haunting/enchanting music and the echo of your footsteps.
It is objectively a pretty creepy / empty vibe to it, because in the game bowser has taken over the castle, so its supposed to be a bit spooky/creepy in a bunch of spots.
Til I’m a zoomer lol
The “every copy of Mario 64 is personalised” is a really old creepypasta / meme that was definitely a thing before most zoomers were active on the internet.
And the PTSD thing is just stupid, sorry.
When consoles were less powerful, all spaces were liminal, and as nobody expected anything else, none were. Now, the fact that it’s not bustling with photorealistic NPCs feels spooky and unsettling (along with the historical details, which feel creepy in the way that vaporwave makes you feel)
So you’re saying when say N64 was the cutting edge, everyone playing it was loving how new and realistic everything felt.
Now compare that to the younger generation that grew up with consoles way way more powerful and saw games that had fully fleshed out cities and citizens and systems to make places feel alive. So going back to tech that’s 30 years old feels very empty and unsettling by contrast?
I think this is exactly what’s happening.
I thought every new generation of games looked “photorealistic” on release. Every time I thought it couldn’t get more realistic, they got more realistic.
To be fair, now I can’t unsee it anymore, after seeing it in that light.
Honestly I don’t think it’s even necessarily a matter of photo-realism but moreso that 3d games from even later into the generation were more cluttered visually. Funny enough I’ve played some PS2 games that emulate the open sparseness style of the N64/PS1 era to invoke horror vibes.
Blatant historical revisionism.
Millenials were cooking up horrifically bad videogame creepypasta before any zoomer ever touched a keyboard.
Early 2010s millennials were all about this shit and the popularization of horror game reaction videos.
Kids today will never understand what it’s like when dealing with hard limits on computer and console was the default.
I remember when I was a kid, and we got our first two PCs (as opposed to the standard Apple IIe and occasional black& white Macintosh) in the computer room in highschool school and those machines struggled just so hard to run 90s Photoshop at all. Or having to install the memory expansion in that N64 just so it could play most games. Oh, or disk swapping (floppy or CD).
In grade school you played green-on-black Math Muncher and Oregon Trail or you got bullied up by the shithead kids who played sports.
I am a millenial, and mining out huge caves in the darkness of Minecraft gave existential terror.
In general it wasn’t too bad but there were some times playing late at night, deep underground when the ambient noise that plays when you’re near caves or whatever would spook me.
Youre not supposed to dig straight down
Luanti player here, have similar feelings when mining.
Millennials invented Creepypasta for old Nintendo games. You’ll find old video game horror stories smeared across everything from Pseudopod to SCP.
I swear to fucking God, you people have zero perspective. Who do you think wrote the Secret Level episode for Pacman?
What do you mean you people? I’ll have you know I belong to a fringe group so specific, it consists of only me! And the offense taken scales inversely to group size! Also, what you said doesn’t even apply to us!
funny anon mentions it, i found ancient DOS games creepy as fuck in my day too.
Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.
early minecraft had that vibe to me, especially the free to play creative mode they had on their website.
Name one creepy thing about Zork?
Wait a minute, I’m being told there’s a Grue at the door that needs to speak to me
As a gen z-er… can’t say I ever felt like mario64 was liminal or heard it describes that way lol
Some of the bits in the castle feel kinda weird from what I can remember as a kid
I think that probably has something to do with the castle being mostly empty. There’s the ghost of Toad(?), but not much else.
Nah all n64 games are spooky
An especially haunted copy of Hey You Pikachu
‘Pikachu! Speak’
‘Pika, your mother sucks cocks in hell, piii.’
Tell me a single spooky thing in the Pokemon games. Stadium or Snap either one.
You 2 having this conversation
Conkers bad fur day seemed alright to.me
Conker’s Bad Fur Day was fire. Played the remaster (Live & Reloaded) on Xbox, still one of my favorite games of all time.
Any Austin on Youtube has a channel that is somewhat dedicated to exploring luminal spaces in games. His videos on SM64 give a good impression about how this applies there.
Well… Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, and Markiplier are all millenials and they’re the ones that pioneered such reactions to the most mundane shit in videogames.
Zoomers didn’t start talking like that in isolation.
I thought this was about gen Z’s obsession with backrooms/horror games at first lmao
Who seriously thinks SM64 is creepy?
It is like that though. A lot of indie horror games imitate early 3d graphics, either because it’s cheap and easy, or to have emotional impact by evoking nostalgia. If you haven’t actually played 3d games of early 90s, those horror games/videos will be your only exposure to these kind of visuals, so that uneasy liminal feeling will be the first one you’ll get. So it’s a bit of inversion going on there.
What even is a liminal space? Seriously, I looked up the definition and still don’t know.
https://lemmy.world/c/liminalspace
You watched Severance? Many of the areas in the show are liminal spaces. Always a bit creepy and odd and something just feels off when you’re in them. You can’t put your finger on what it is but it’s not quite right.
I think I just don’t have the liminal space gene. I’ve watched Severance and have seen a ton of other spaces people call liminal but I’ve never felt anything creepy or unsettling about them at all.
It’s a space that has no purpose except transit. Therefore there is no thought of comfort in its design. When you see these spaces your brain has a reaction of “getting through it as soon as possible”. There is probably also something in our ancient survival instinct that lingering in open space like that could be fatal.
I know what they are. They still don’t work on me.
limen was the Latin term for “threshold”
It came from a 4chan creepypasta about noclipping out of reality
My personal guess was the writer was a philosophy of mind student or psychiatry student - the most likely place a young person would encounter the term.
This should help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp-2M_3HwFU
A liminal space is some sort of locale that we usually only experience in states of transience, where staying is strange. Something that represents a border or state that you simply pass through between two more permanent states. Waiting for the bus at night. Your residence just before dawn. An empty mall or office building where there are only remanent signs of human presence. The in-dev version of a video game where characters are either absent or just placeholders.
gm_bigcity. All the Kane Pixels shit. A place where reality feels slightly altered, and your subconscious is ringing all of the alarm bells because existing there is just wrong.
Zoomers actually like mario64
