BobisZack.com, Motherfuckers.
The Mario Image
Hello I am Bob is Zack and I made the following image that you may be familiar with:
I made it in June of 2020, as a 15 year old horror and liminality enthusiast. What compelled me to make this composition? I can’t quite remember. I do remember doing work in the engine to reflect the inherent liminality and eeriness it had and essentially “expose” it for the world to see. I can't believe how popular it got, probably because of that twitter account.
Wait, what engine? What twitter account? And what is liminality? Let's back up.
I (apparently) made it on June 24th, 2020. Something about liminal images attracted me in a way that no other form of media had before. They reek of something unattainable, unknowable, at least as I exist now. They have the haunting smell of childhood on them the same way your favorite person might have the lingering fetor of smoke slowly following them, like a shadow. They give us a brief glimpse of our own past through a special kind of nostalgia that is only found in these images. I made the above map a few days before the Mario 64 image and it was a good test to see if liminality would work in the source engine because I had seen a few images that were of gmod maps. I had the knowledge and I knew it would be easy, so I took a crack at it. It was neat. Nothing but yellow walls, yellow carpet, and a glock with a blood stain beneath the weapon. I feel I should mention that I saw “The Backrooms” twice in theaters and I might go again once the new cut comes out.
I don’t know what had specifically compelled me to start work on the Mario image but I have reason to believe it was because of Mish Koz’s “The Super Mario 64 Iceberg: explained” on youtube. Although that video came out a day after I had started work. Maybe it was my childhood, though as of 2026 I am 21 years old. I was not alive during the release of Super Mario 64 but I did grow up with it.
I am probably the only person on the planet that was given a Nintendo 64 for Christmas past the year 2014. I say 2014 because I don't remember the specific year, either 2015 or 2016. But it came with one game. Super Mario 64 with a save battery that had already died and an off brand reproduction controller. This was fantastic because it meant I was only one Nintendo console away from completing my full Nintendo console collection, a SNES. At 10 or 11 that was my only goal. I never did get an SNES though.
I did have a copy of Nintendo Power though, Issue 87, August 1996, to be exact. That issue had a preview for Super Mario 64, which had already been out for two months in Japan at this point. Those hazy CMYK printed images captivated a young me. I could stare at them for hours, and I did. I suppose those screenshots did leave a lasting impression on me because that feeling is what I was trying to find when I made the titular image.
I made it in the source engine, some keen eyed readers may have picked up on that. It does have that aura that source engine maps have. Contrary to popular perception I did not make it on the gmod branch I made it in my favorite branch of the source engine, the Counter-strike Global Offensive branch. It had a lot of features that I loved to make use of such as cubemaps, cascade shadow maps, scalable props, the works. It was the only version valve kept truly up to date to compete with more modern engines for a long time. I used none of those. I think I spent more time in GIMP than I did Hammer.
First were the textures. I got them from User Boocaster from the site “spriters-resource.com”. I ported them to the proper formats for source to use with VTF edit and then I moved to hammer. I don’t think I had anything greater for this project other than making the image itself so I made something that could be in Peach’s castle. You can truly see how simple it was in the editor. I think a key factor in the strangeness of the image is how nothing is aligned. The camera (placed exactly at the info_player_terrorist just tilted slightly up) isn’t centered, the door isn’t centered, nor the stairs. The only things that could be considered aligned to anything are the light and the pillar which aren’t visible. Was it intentional? I don’t know, you asked too late. I think it wasn’t though, I think everything was the size that it was because of the texture scaling. That's all I can really say about the process of making the environment, the editing is what truly made the image.
I use GIMP for nearly all of my image editing purposes just because of how versatile it is. Also it's free. I first scaled and cropped the screenshot to be 640 by 480 because that was the resolution of old PC monitors. I wanted to make it feel like a magazine scan that had been passed around the internet for decades. I don't remember what order I did it in but I added a vignette to make it look dark and RGB noise to give the image the texture of a CMYK print. I finalized the image by compressing it by using the default GIMP compression and that was that. It was done.
The first place I posted it was /x/ because all good internet horror starts there or, at least it used to. It got made fun of, obviously, then I posted it on reddit. I got taken more seriously there, where people discussed their history with the game, asked where this was in the castle, and asked how I made it. I never really said more than “i made it in csgo”. I feel that preserved the mystery.
I then shared it with a very popular twitter account that was known for posting liminal images and that's when things really took off. I feel that's truly where the propagation of the image began.
Ever since, I see it in youtube videos, collages, album art, edits, gmod maps, and even in Super Mario 64 mods. This all makes me truly happy. Capturing something that we all lost a long time ago and relaying it back for ya’ll is just so wonderful to me. I’m glad happy memories of old video games, sharing a three decade magazine with a friend I wish I could speak to once again, and of family during Christmas morning brought us all together through a 640 by 480 simulacra of recollections that never truly existed.
Home
They have the haunting smell of childhood on them the same way your favorite person might have the lingering fetor of smoke slowly following them, like a shadow. They give us a brief glimpse of our own past through a special kind of nostalgia that is only found in these images. I made the above map a few days before the Mario 64 image and it was a good test to see if liminality would work in the source engine because I had seen a few images that were of gmod maps. I had the knowledge and I knew it would be easy, so I took a crack at it. It was neat. Nothing but yellow walls, yellow carpet, and a glock with a blood stain beneath the weapon. I feel I should mention that I saw “The Backrooms” twice in theaters and I might go again once the new cut comes out.