In the early 1990s Shigeru Miyamoto began imagining a 3D Mario while working on Star Fox (1993), which used the Super FX chip for the Super NES. He first considered a miniature-world game called Super Mario FX, but he moved the idea to the Nintendo 64, partly because its controller had more buttons for play. Production ran from September 1994 to May 1996 with a team of about fifteen to twenty people. With no 3D jumping games to reference, the team tested Mario's movement and camera on simple grids before building levels. They placed a faux shadow under each object to help depth perception, a choice Yoshiaki Koizumi called an iron-clad necessity. Miyamoto wanted Mario to feel alive, and the team included more puzzles than earlier Mario games. A planned co-op mode with Luigi was dropped because of hardware limits.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.