A closer look
Shigeru Miyamoto and his team revolutionized 3D gaming with Super Mario 64, but navigating the new dimension required an entirely new mechanic, leading to the creation of Lakitu as an in-game camera operator physically floating behind the protagonist on a cloud. This meant the game was fundamentally framed as a live broadcast, which is an incredibly meta narrative choice for a platformer about a plumber jumping into paintings. It provides a highly amusing implication that Mario's entire adventure to save the princess was actually a heavily documented reality television show, complete with a perpetually hovering turtle wielding a boom mic who occasionally gets stuck behind a wall and ruins your depth perception right before a crucial jump
