funny anon mentions it, i found ancient DOS games creepy as fuck in my day too.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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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.
Honestly I felt the same when the game came out.
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.
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.
I was never a fan of Mario.
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)
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
They aren't wrong though. Mario 64 (and even Ocarina of Time too) were great because of how much they evolved videogames as a whole, but as pioneers they have a lot of flaws that game devs took a bit longer to figure out.
IIRC the reason Luigi isn't in Mario 64 is that they couldn't afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.
It's not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.
Small correction - Mario 64 was on an 8MB cartridge.
There were some 4MB games, but a 1MB cartridge never existed.
Mmm. The source I found probably got megabytes and megabits mixed up. Cartridges often seemed to have their capacity listed in megabits for some reason.
Yeah possibly, if they converted in the wrong direction.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 8MB cartridges like Mario 64 were generally advertised as 64 Megabit. But if someone got mixed up they could’ve assumed the 8MB figure was actually 8Mbit and then divided by 8 to reach the wrong conclusion of 1MB.
As to why they advertised things using megabits back in the day, that’s pretty easy: bigger numbers seem more impressive in marketing!
I don't think OoT is as liminal because they put a lot of effort into adding atmosphere. There's a lot of background animal noises and bugs flying around. It's low tech, but the environments don't feel empty in the same way as the polished and clean Mario 64 environments.
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What even is a liminal space? Seriously, I looked up the definition and still don’t know.
by definition it's a between space, like going from one place to another. in practice it's a space that should have people in it but doesn't. think an empty mall or indoor swimming pool.
the backrooms are probably the most popular example of a liminal space
I think it also has to be a bit off. Like an empty mall, but evety store is a Gap, or an empty swimming pool, but there are no ladders, or exit doors.
Something like that.
No, not really: a liminal space is a space that is in between spaces that we want to use.
Quote Wikipedia:
In architecture, liminal spaces are defined as "the physical spaces between one destination and the next." Common examples of such spaces include hallways, airports, and streets.
But it appears that current speak has changed the word to give it this meaning of eerieness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space/_(aesthetic)
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.
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.
In the basic definition, it's a space between spaces. A space that only exists for you to move from one space to another. Like a corridor or stairway. Somewhere you're not meant to stay.
It's definitely been co-opted to mean "a creepy place".
An empty walkway between the gallery and the auditorium at a theatre generally could be considered one. The emptyness being key here. With lots of people around it's fine.
I wonder what cleaners feel in these places.
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.
In your case its that empty space within your brain that should be filled with thoughts and imagination but is just a long gray hallway with a few abandoned preshool desks and offsetting green fluorescent lighting flickering.
Second quote sounds like a huge strawman. Did anyone acutally say anything remotely similar that anon heard or read about?
That said, I can kinda see it. SM64 looks super weird if you're not used to the style, and it adds that "early 3d graphics" weirdness to it that younger people might only know from horror games. And TBH Mario games have always been kinda trippy.
Any Austin is great though.
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.
Or having to install the memory expansion in that N64 just so it could play most games
There are only two games that require the expansion pack...
B3313 comes to mind when you want liminal space vibes. It literally feels like dreams a ROM-hacker would have. I've had similar dreams when I was ROM-Hacking Luigi's Mansion.
Anyway, I am as old as Mario 64 and I do agree on the spook vibes. Mainly the graphics at that era have this horrifying vibe to them. Mainly Super Mario RPG comes to mind for horrifying graphics.
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 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.
People who were not indoctrinated by 20 plus years of mario?
My friends all had SM64, but for some reason I never actually played it until it came out on the Switch. I can get why people like it nostalgically, but it plays awfully. The camera is basically impossible to control so you spend most of the game guessing what's going on around you
That seems to be a theme with 90s 3D games: the camera has a mind of its own and can make navigation really annoying.
I frequently compare Elden ring’s camera to Mario 64. It’s just good enough until you’re in an enclosed space. Plenty of romhacks have solved the issue with fixed camera angles or fully outdoor level design.
Getting old is weird.
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