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Check out these beautiful handmade Super Mario 64 dioramas from a ’90s guidebook

Super Mario 64 Complete Clear Guide Book is available to view online, in its entirety

a sculpture of princess peach’s castle Image: Nintendo
Petrana Radulovic is an entertainment reporter specializing in animation, fandom culture, theme parks, Disney, and young adult fantasy franchises.

Super Mario 64 Complete Clear Guide Book, the infamous strategy guide for Super Mario 64, is available in full online for the first time.

As Kotaku mentions, hard copies of this guide are rare but not impossible to find, though they often go for hundreds of dollars. But thanks to Comfort Food Video Games’ Dave Shevlin, the full guide is now uploaded on the Internet Archive, for all to enjoy — and that includes high-quality illustrations of the guide’s custom dioramas.

Yes, in addition to including developer commentary, the guide also has gorgeous handcrafted dioramas of the levels in the game. They were created specifically for this guide, as seeing the 3D levels in a 2D space helps players visualize what they need to do, in order to beat the level. The guide is entirely in Japanese, but the visual language of artfully crafted sculptures is universal.

a desert level in super mario 64, rendered in sculpture form Image: Nintendo
a mountain level in super mario 64 as a sculpture Image: Nintendo

The raw, unprocessed, and uncropped pages are also available to download as a ZIP file on the website.