Every Copy Of Super Mario 64 Really Is Personalized — Kind Of

Recently, I’ve been watching these videos on YouTube about the video game Super Mario 64, specifically, the creepypastas that present the game in a more disturbing light. Many of these became popular in mid-2020, around the same time as the first real full data mine of the game took place, and some have managed to stick around and become part of a subsection of popular culture.

Of these various creepy stories around the game, the one I wish to talk about for the sake of this article is “every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized.” For those who have never heard of this theory before, the copypasta around this story reads the following:

Every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized. Nintendo’s experimental AI adapts and subtly creates a slightly altered version of the game tailored specifically for you, appealing to you subconsciously in ways you don’t even notice, as well as attempting to mess with you and study how you react to it. Have you ever played someone else’s copy of Mario 64? Have you ever felt like something was just a little bit off? That’s why. That’s how. This is much more than just simple experimentation with procedural generation, however. There are many layers to this, and some of them are more sinister and malicious than others. Super Mario 64 is, at its core, an insidious and evil work of human…