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.
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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.
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.
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