Super Mario 64 came out in 1996 and for many was the first truly three-dimensional platformer. Now it can run in the real world: a developer has brought it into mixed reality, with the game appearing directly on a desk. According to the developer, the credit goes to Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, which made the process surprisingly straightforward.
The project is the work of Lucas Martinic, a developer and XR creative technologist. The game is rendered natively in 3D, without stereoscopic effects, and reaches 90 frames per second. To get there, Martinic combined Claude Opus 5.5 with PICO CLI, the tool from the PICO platform for mixed reality. The work required decompiling the original version of the game, a step where the model provided decisive help.
Image: aiwisepicks.com — https://aiwisepicks.com/tools/claude/
The project video, posted on X and shared on Reddit, shows the Super Mario 64 world filling the real space of the room. According to Road to VR, which analysed the project, the strength of the experiment is that the game is not an image projected on a screen but a three-dimensional environment the player can move through.
The story fits a series of experiments with Claude Opus 5.5 in gaming. The same model helped bring Minecraft mechanics into Elden Ring and rebuild Pokémon Red without a single image file. In these cases too, the value lies in the model's handling of code and game logic rather than graphics.
Image: zapier.com — https://zapier.com/blog/claude-ai/
The case shows how AI-assisted reverse engineering is becoming accessible to independent developers. Work that until recently required months of specialist skill is now condensed into a flow of prompts and checks. In the broader field of historic game ports, the experiments also include a Super Mario 64 port for Atari Jaguar written in assembly, which will not be distributed.
The project has been presented as a technical demonstration, and no announcement of a publicly distributed version has been made.
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