No, not Super Mario 3D World

In December of 2021, I caught the plague. Whilst quarantining in an isolated wing of the freshman dorms, I re-discovered the YouTuber CodyCantEatThis, and his adventures in bringing old 2D games into the third dimension. While his Sonic recreation used pre-made models found online, he went bigger and bolder for future projects, recreating the 2D pixel art as 3D voxel art.

I had seen these videos before, but this time I was really inspired. I wanted to go above and beyond the work that he did. Cody worked on 8 bit games like Super Mario Bros and The Legend Of Zelda. I was going to jump into the 16 Bit Era with Super Mario World.

I began by recreating all the small Mario sprites. During that maddening week and a half of solitude, the only thing that kept me sane was that little Mario. I spent every waking moment either replaying Yoshi’s Island, or hammering away at those voxels. The difficulty of recreating Mario’s sprites is that the game presents him in 3/4 view. This makes it difficult if not impossible to perfectly recreate in 3D. Luckily there is one sprite of Mario facing directly forward, shown during his spin jump. I was able to use this in conjunction with the other sprites to approximate what Mario should look like in 3D. At the end of the process, I had created over 40 unique Mario models.

Here are my favorites:

_{There’s a lot more to show, but it just makes sense for the Mario day post to feature the main man.}