Super Mario Galaxy on PC Is Officially One Step Closer to Being Reality
Overview & Key Takeaways
One of Mario's best adventures is close to a PC port as community announces Super Mario Galaxy has been decompiled
It's not controversial to say that 2007's Super Mario Galaxy is one of the best Super Mario games ever made. It does, however, have the typical Nintendo downside of being exclusive to the company's walled garden. For a while, that meant players needed to hold on to their Wii consoles, but the game has finally been made available on Nintendo Switch to make things a little easier. Still, everybody else is out of luck. A dedicated group of fans is about to change that.
The Luma's Workshop modding community recently shared a YouTube video showing off progress on its effort to decompile Super Mario Galaxy. Hours later, it announced in a comment on the video that it has fully decompiled the game and anticipates a release soon. The project itself has been given the title AstroCore and interested fans are encouraged to check out the Luma's Workshop Discord for updates.
Luma's Workshop also announced that its decompilation team will move on to decompiling Super Mario Galaxy 2 after some cleanup work. "We ask for your utmost patience," the team wrote, "as we are putting a lot of care into this project to make sure it's done right."
What is game decompilation?
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Those in the know may be familiar with emulation. The popular method of playing retro games involves making modern hardware mimic a game's original system to make it playable. Decompilation is a bit different, and even better in many ways. The process essentially involves taking a game's code and reverse-engineering it to make an exact copy. After this process is done, a superior port can then be made for other platforms, namely PC.
This means that decompiled games can be run natively on systems other than the ones they were originally released for. Modders can then add modern features and quality-of-life updates. Decompilation has become more and more popular of late, especially with Nintendo games. Recent decompilation projects have included PC ports of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
