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Nintendo devs were so obsessed with Konami’s legendary 1994 dating sim that they filled Super Mario 64’s code with references to it

Dustin Bailey

22 September 2025

Maybe this is why the N64 classic ended with a kiss

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(Image credit: Nintendo/zuri9138 on YouTube)

It’s difficult to overstate just how big Konami’s 1994 dating sim Tokimeki Memorial was for the Japanese game industry. It made a niche genre mainstream, and became the blueprint for the visual novels that would follow. It was so ubiquitous in its day that even the Nintendo devs working on Super Mario 64 were obsessed with it.

Buried deep in Super Mario 64’s code, as explained by The Cutting Room Floor wiki and highlighted by Supper Mario Broth on Bluesky, there’s a file which contains, among other things, “data about what sound type to use for footsteps.” Most of the descriptions here are things you’d expect, like “grass,” “creaking floor,” and “snow.”

The Super Mario 64 source code lists names for Mario’s footstep sounds. The list starts off normal but becomes poetic with names like “Footsteps in the Fallen Leaves” and “More Than Anyone Else in the World”. It turns out the names are actually taken from a 1994 dating simulator.— @mariobrothblog.bsky.social (@mariobrothblog.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-09-22T21:51:18.812Z
But then we get to names like “Footsteps in the Fallen Leaves,” “Sonata for You,” and “Temptation in Your Eyes.” There are 11 names like this, each of them described as a “placeholder,” and the flowery names all have one thing in common: they’re all names of songs from Tokimeki Memorial.

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It’s rare to see Nintendo admit to direct inspiration from another publisher’s games, much less make any direct reference to them, but you can take this as proof that even the folks behind Super Mario 64 were in love with the biggest games of their time.

Tokimeki Memorial wasn’t the first dating sim, but it made the genre dramatically more popular, and was a turning point in the career of writer Koji Igarashi, who would go on to helm Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1. If you want a much more in-depth breakdown of what makes Tokimeki Memorial special, there’s an infamous (but excellent) six-hour video review in your future.
Here are the best N64 games of all time.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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