Super Mario 64’s Secret Obsession: Nintendo Stuffed Its Code With Nods to Konami’s Legendary 1994 Dating Sim

Here is a fun bit of inside baseball from the Mario era you probably did not expect: buried in Super Mario 64, the devs quietly slipped in a bunch of poetic names pulled straight from a Konami dating sim. Yes, really.

What was found in the SM64 code

According to The Cutting Room Floor (flagged by Supper Mario Broth on Bluesky), a file deep in Super Mario 64’s code includes a table that helps the game pick what kind of footstep sound to play. Most of the entries are exactly what you would think: things like "grass," "creaking floor," and "snow."

Then the list goes off-book. Tucked among the normal descriptors are 11 flowery entries labeled as placeholders. And every one of those placeholder names is a song title from Konami’s 1994 dating sim Tokimeki Memorial.

"Footsteps in the Fallen Leaves"
"Sonata for You"
"Temptation in Your Eyes"
"More Than Anyone Else in the World"

To be clear, Mario is not literally walking on "Temptation in Your Eyes." These are internal notes used during development. But they are very specific internal notes, and they are all Tokimeki Memorial track names. That is not a coincidence.

Why this is cool (and a little surprising)

Nintendo almost never namechecks other publishers’ games, especially in anything as direct as code comments or placeholder labels. So seeing a mini love letter to a Konami dating sim hiding in the guts of Super Mario 64 is a rare peek at what was on the devs’ minds at the time. If you needed a sign that Tokimeki Memorial had the entire industry on the hook in the mid-90s, this is it.

Quick refresher: Tokimeki Memorial was huge

Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial landed in 1994 and basically dragged dating sims out of a niche and into the mainstream in Japan. It set the template a ton of later visual novels followed. It was also a career pivot point for writer Koji Igarashi, who went on to lead Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1. If you want to go deep, there is an infamous, very thorough six-hour video review out there that makes a strong case for why it mattered.

So yeah: the Super Mario 64 team sneaking in Tokimeki Memorial song titles as placeholder footstep labels is the nerdiest crossover you did not know you needed. It is also a neat reminder that even the people reinventing 3D platformers were fans of the biggest games of their day.