A port of "Mario 64" may be the coolest thing to happen to the PC in 2020. Yes, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Cyberpunk 2020, and more ..... .here's a beloved game that has been brilliantly reverse-engineered and programmed to work on the PC. There are plenty of better texture mod projects than Nintendo's re-release on the Nintendo Switch, but that's really just the beginning; modder Darío is already working on something more ambitious inside Mario 64.

As with Minecraft and Quake 2, ray tracing in an old, simple graphics engine is particularly spectacular. In today's games, which are already incredibly detailed, it would be difficult to make the reflections of a puddle or a beam of light coming through a window really stand out. But what if a game from 25 years ago suddenly got realistic lighting and surface reflections? That would stand out. I also think it would be really interesting. [Mario is a simple character model from 1996, but Dario's custom renderer is the best of 2020 technology, and you can see him in this drop of water. Or, as Darío puts it more eloquently:

This mod is still in progress and won't be playable for a while; Darío also has soft shadows working, but said on October 8 that the current code is "very unoptimized" and probably still has a lot of optimization left to do. However, it is actually playable (720p, 30fps) on a GTX 1080 without built-in ray tracing hardware. The final result, he speculated, would work quite well on a GTX 2000 or 3000 series card.

Darío does not intend to combine this ray-tracing renderer with other popular mod projects such as Render96, which adds high-resolution textures to Mario 64. However, the ultimate goal is "to make it a modular enough solution that they can integrate it into their projects with minimal effort if they want to."

Dario's latest tweet shows just how flexible his renderer is. Inevitably, other modders will play with this renderer and do wild things with the Mario 64 graphics.

Another mod adds two-player online co-op, which seems like a great way to replay Mario 64. Especially considering that there are many mods that swap characters. The most sensible mod of them all is obviously this one, which adds a true Mario Bros. superstar, Waluigi, to the game. Wahoo. It's just common sense.