Developer Lucas Martinic has got Super Mario 64, the 1996 Nintendo game that was many people's first 3D game, running in mixed reality on a PICO headset. In a video he shared this week, the game floats in his room like a window into the Mushroom Kingdom, until he reaches in, picks Mario up by the collar and puts him down on his table. Martinic says it runs at 90 frames per second.

Martinic is an XR developer, meaning he builds for virtual, augmented and mixed reality, and also runs the 3D asset library Polyfork. He first started the project a few months ago, based on an earlier version that ran Super Mario 64 on Meta's Quest 3 in 2023.

He then started again from scratch with a decompiled version of the game, which is the original program turned back into readable source code by fans. That matters because it gives a developer real access to how the game works, rather than having to fake a 3D effect by guessing a second-eye view from a flat image. T

o build it, Martinic used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 AI model along with PICO CLI, a developer toolkit that lets AI coding assistants work directly with PICO's mixed reality tools. He has called it a weekend project. There is no release date yet. Martinic says more information is "coming soon" on his website.

Road to VR's Scott Hayden wrote that the mod makes the 30-year-old classic feel magical again, and noted it seems to use true stereoscopic 3D rendering rather than common shortcuts. Martinic shared the project on Reddit as a weekend build, and posted the video on X, where it spread widely.

The fun part is obvious: Mario stepping out of the screen onto a real desk. The more useful part is how it was made. One developer, a decompiled codebase and AI coding tools took a 30-year-old console game and rebuilt it for brand-new hardware in a short time — the same pattern we saw with Max Blade's hivecoding and the AI-built Adobe clones.

For anyone with old software, from a legacy business system to a game, the cost of moving it onto new platforms is falling fast. The catch here is ownership. Mario belongs to Nintendo, which has a long history of shutting down fan projects built on its games, so this one may never be released. If you want to build on something like this, choose software you own or have permission to use.

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