At the time, on the PC, it was most common to use nearest neighbour filtering on textures because the fancy 3D accelerators were still pretty damn expensive, and so the hardware accelerated bilinear filtering on the N64 was pretty awesome. It was a year or two ahead of its time in terms of the average consumer-level experience, for sure.

This is what I had in my PC when the N64 came out:
http://en.wikipedia....Matrox_Mystique

The N64 blew it away.

As for the game itself: It's all about the chain chomps.

For me, the game was revolutionary because of how different it was from what came before it. At the time, I only barely knew what a PlayStation was; I was going straight from SNES to N64. When the N64 promo video came in from Nintendo Power magazine, I had to call my parents over to show them this incredible new world that Mario 64 offered; I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The fact that you could just run around like a crazy person in an "open world," combined with these new "realistic graphics," blew my little kid mind away.

Nowadays the game can't really hold my attention for more than an hour (same with the newer 3D Mario games, actually), but it was a completely new and unique experience for me Back in the Day. That's what made it "epic"--it was so different, and huge, and special. A real technological and cultural advancement for videogames. Fifteen years later, everything that makes Mario 64 special is essentially a standard in third-person platformers and other action games, so it's not likely to impress anyone who's playing it for the first time now.

Super Mario 64 has thus far been unmatched by later 3D mario games, at least in my opinion.

Some of it's major strengths:

Level design:
[indent=1]Really immersive environments (atmosphere-wise), that were really well designed (gameplay-wise). The levels were free-roaming, not linear. They had someof nooks and crannies with secrets, but not so much that finding a secret was commonplace. Each level had 6 stars to collect, and the level would reset whenever you'd enter it for the next star, and would be altered slightly with different objectives and be really replayable without feeling repetitive. You could go to levels in the order you want, dictated only by how many stars you've already collected. Each time you enter a level, you could choose which star you wanted to go after after you've accomplished the first star.

Music:
[indent=1]The music was masterfully done. It'd very much transport you into whatever environment you were in, definitely projecting different emotions and feelings: sadness in the caves, excitement and urgency when requiring speed. The best example of the music is Dire, Dire, Docks. Hazy Maze Cave is another great example, but Hazy Maze Cave's music must really be heard from inside the area and not in isolation, otherwise it just doesn't sound great on it's own, but sounds perfect when inside the cave.

What about the camera? Many believe that the camera played the important part in the game? How is that? And how did they do such a thing???

Movement and Camera:
[indent=1]One of the most important things that bring Mario 64 closer to perfection is how much they refined and polished the movement and camera control. Knowing that it was the most important part of the game, they spent months and months at the very start of development, just working on the movement. They had a flat plane, the rabbit (MIPs), and a wall for Mario to interact with. This is from memory ([size=2]though I mistakenly called the rabbit 'FLOPS'), but Wikipedia says similar.

Just to reemphasize it:

1) Immersive non-linear levels
2) 7 different missions on each level. You can replay them several times without begin boring.
It also provided a good coop experience between myself and my brothers. Each one would try a different hidden star (and the 100 coin star) and play the same level without fighting over who plays what.
3) Great movement and camera. Remembering that many stars could only be achieved by using the camera correctly.
I remember the days we spent trying to find the sixth star on the snow level. And it was only possible when we changed the camera view on the cliff.
4) Innovative Mario-like mechanics. They implemented different mechanics for the power-ups. You could wear different hats and do different stuff. That was mind-blowing for me.

For me the biggest downside was the boss fight. Fighting Bowser involved damaging the analog stick.

I never cared much for SM64 back in the day as I was playing Tomb Raider on the Playstation instead.

Saying that, it was a game that show cased the capabilities of the N64 and that machine itself was well designed toward its goal - a 3D powerhouse. For that console, SM64 was at least the "killer app".

As for Mario games...cannot stand them. The controls are annoying enough in 2D, let alone trying to jump platforms in 3D which is 10 times harder to control!