Welcome back to a new video everybody! Do you think Super Mario 64 is unsettling? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks to everyone for the support, it means a lot!

In this episode, Bowser uses psychological torture to get inside mario's head

The limitations of the console definitely create an odd sensations when you break it down.

As much as I loved this game as a kid, I could never pinpoint why it made me feel sort of sad. This hits the nail on the head. It was Mario, alone, with creepy villains sparsely spread out in barren levels with subdued music and the sense of Bowser watching every move.

This episode is a perfect example of what happens when you overthink things

Mario 64 is actually a lot creepier to me now that I’m older , just imagine exploring the castle without music, just walking around a quiet empty castle with everyone stuck inside the walls begging for help, so creepy and unnerving

The silence at the start is actually brilliant. It was the first time for many people to experience 3D gaming. The silence made the experience stand out more and made the player focus on the movement.

Top 10 Things that Scared Me in SM64: 10. It 9. Didn't 8. Really 7. Scare 6. Me 5. I 4. Found 3. It 2. Peaceful 1. THE EELS.

As a kid, I deadass believed that Bowser just murdered all the toads in the castle and I thought the ghostly apparitions of the toads you approach were the ghosts helping you save the princess from their fate.

This is very interesting to me, because I’ve been playing this game literally since I could hold a controller. It’s like a big security blanket to me, playing it feels so comfy and warm and safe. The idea that it could be creepy in any way is honestly hard to comprehend. Whenever I boot up this game I feel like I’ve come home, no matter where I am.

As a child I believed in the L is Real conspiracy and the idea that Luigi was hiding somewhere in the game made it very spooky

This game terrifies me as a little kid. My Nintendo 64 was in the basement as a kid and every time I died in this game, Bowsers laugh would scare the shit out of me and I would run upstairs. After a few seconds I would walk back down and continue playing lol

I love the notion that the technological limits of the N64 have led to people feeling like these games are creepy when the game designers more than likely never intended to do so. M64, the Zelda series, even Starfox and Goldeneye.

Wet dry world made me feel scared as a kid because of the town. I felt like the town was empty because everyone probably drowned from flooding.

I was never really afraid of this game, but the "empty" feeling of the castle hub made me feel unnerved. The only thing I really hated was the Boss Bass/Bubba in Tiny-Huge Island. I've always hated underwater enemies in games, especially when they ate me. The skull and crossbones in the secret slide in Tall, Tall Mountain bugged me, too.

This guy: “I just feel alone..” Lakitu: 👋😀📸

when i played it as a child, it didn't freak me out quite as much as it does now, looking back. however, i did always feel kinda odd roaming through all those empty spaces. when i stopped playing, it almost felt as if i had woken up from a strange dream. the aspect that adds to that feeling the most, for me, are the endless hallways that got you running towards those huge paintings. the further you'd go, the more they'd move away from you (at one point, you'd even fall, as we could see in your video). most of my nightmares are like that, especially when i was younger. really eerie for a game developed for children!

The uncannily realistic textures in some places are what gets me.

Maybe this was just me, but as a kid, I always noticed the castle didn't have any of the normal things you'd find in a living space. So like, no kitchen, no bedroom for Peach, etc (which Paper Mario did have which I think is interesting). Maybe that could also be a subconscious reason the castle feels unnerving sometimes, since you just can't find any of the rooms you'd associate with a place people actually live in?

You know a game is a classic when even if it's overtly really positive and colourful, there's this very subtle, distant macabre or melancholy quality to it. Makes it way more emotionally complex and life-like without ever needing to obviously make it known. All the legendary old games had it. That element of genuine risk or danger.

Terminally online people when a game has empty rooms 😰

“This time, it’s personalized.”

Also, the paintings, they're literally all worlds frozen in time. Everyone and thing in that world is forever stuck in a painting prison.

Funny enough, I think a lot of the things you described as creepy are the things that makes this my favorite Mario game. I love the dreamlike atmosphere, the mystery, I think most of the weird faces are cute and charming (I always felt bad for the Whomp’s because they had bandaids on their backs and felt bad for hurting them). I find liminal spaces weirdly calming, and the strange disconnectedness of this entry made it more interesting for me to explore compared to Galaxy and Oddyssey. I think I especially liked the water staged despite the anxiety I’d get from Mario’s health ticking down because I’ve always liked more slow-paced games. The only things I really remember being afraid of were: the evil piano, the eel in that one water level, the time limit for being underwater, that electric ball that flies around you as you go up a pole, dying, running out of air underwater, and the platforming areas you’d go through before fighting Bowser. Everything else was a delight even though I was garbage at the game, the feeling of mystery and discovery drawing me in. I was terrified of any ‘real’ horror game/movie, but Mario 64 filled me with nothing but fascination. (As a Sidenote, even though I’m still pretty pathetic when it comes to ‘real’ horror, I loved basically every RPGmaker horror game I played during its boom and find things other people find creepy like vintage porcelain dolls pretty and cute. So, y’know, maybe its just me lol.)

I've played the game countless hours since the 90s and it never really creeped me out. The eel, the piano, and the Bowser laugh were the only things that scared me as a child.

Question for you: if you've played Mario 64 DS, did you ever feel creeped out, because looking back on it, there were a bunch of creepy things that were even exclusive to this game. A lot of what you said in this video still applies, but version this game also had things like the entirely white room behind the mirror, the lifeless character paintings, and even some of the new levels such as the Goomboss area felt oddly empty lifeless. I think the improved graphics and additional playable characters did a lot to make the game feel less creepy, but there are still a whole bunch of things that add to the weird, dreamlike feeling

Honestly every time I played SM64 I always got that disconnected feeling. I remember having fever dreams when I was younger about levels that never existed but seemed so real

I never felt like mario 64 was scary, i always focused on the gorgeus music in each level, amazing levels, and fun characters. I always tought of it as an fun platformer.

I still get chills thinking about “It is decreed that one shall pound the pillars”

I never thought the "it's just not the same" feeling applied only to Mario 64. I got that feeling playing any copy of a game that wasn't mine. Because you know it's not yours, it doesn't feel the same. You played the game your way, you got to know it your way, so when you play a different copy, that personal connection isn't there. The copy isn't personalized, but the experience is. But even so, this "creepypasta" is one of my favorites.

The most unsettling thing for me now is the room with the painting for Tiny-Huge Island. Something about how detailed the goombas are and the size of the painting gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I don’t remember being scared of it when I was a kid but I do remember not wanting to play it by myself. I think it’s the emptiness of the castle yet things are everywhere

I actually had legit nightmares about some of the maps from super mario 64 or dreams where bowser was literally chasing you around the castle.

I had no idea that anyone ever thought of Super Mario 64 as creepy and/or scary in any remote way. I certainly never have.

Even the castle theme "inside the castle walls" gives me an empty, sad feeling of isolation. I always thought I was just overthinking it as a kid but 64 really is an almost empty-feeling game. Good video.

Never felt any of this. I think the creepy pasta is a huge stretch and you gotta do some huge mental gymnastics to find the game creepy. I always found the game fun and comforting.

this game creeps me out the same way that Minecraft did when I played that game without music.. a game you’ve always played with comforting music is suddenly quiet so you feel alone and sometimes have that liminal space feeling

What you said about being inside the castle being familiar yet unnerving reminds me of a reoccurring dream/nightmare I have. I’m at home alone most of the time, it usually starts out familiar until I open a door or turn a corner that leads to a hall, stairways, or rooms I have never seen before or if I have, they are pulled from other places I have been before. Nothing bad typically happens, but it’s still very unusual being somewhere familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

The scariest thing for was just when you first walk into Peach’s castle and the suspenseful music and Bowser starts laughing. Other than that nothing scared me.

I definitely always felt a strange feeling when seeing this game for the first time. Like you're living out a dream that you can't wake up from and someone's watching..

You know what i totally understand why you mentioned empty feeling when playing this game. This game was a blast when i was a kid, played it everyday and i remember i dreamed about sm64 and i was actually stuck in that "empty" world. Really disturbing

children: "This game is so much fun" Adults: "This game is a psychological torture"

Oh my lord, 11 year old me, was not a fan of the Mad Piano. I didn't get 120 Stars in the game until years later because I didn't want to deal with it, and even then Big Boo's Haunt was the last place I tackled with strategy guide in tow. Nintendo must have realized what they did with the piano as it hasn't returned outside of a Mario Party 2 cameo as far as I'm aware. A more recent thing I found out about that's creepy to me, is how before beating Bob-Omb Battlefield for the first time, there is a gutter at the bottom of the mountain where 2 big cannonballs are rolling around, but after you beat King Bob-Omb, when you go back to Bob-Omb Battlefield for the rest of the stars, that same gutter now has 3 big cannonballs rolling around. Am I to infer that Mario killed King Bom-Omb, and now his lifeless corpse is rolling around at the bottom of the mountain? WTF Nintendo.

This game felt more wholesome to me than a lot of 64 games, though he is alone in a large castle, a lot of the music was really uplifting and calming the only part that was kinda scary to me as a kid was Boo’s mansion

In my case, the creepy feeling while playing SM 64 came years later. And for marios death-animations, i was rather fascinated how believable mario got back then. The game where i was creeped out right at the beginning, was Banjo Kazooie. I had nightmares of this game, but i think it was because of the new sensations i had to get used to. But its not a surprise that we felt like this. The change from 2D to 3D games was such a big impact, where we as kids weren't prepared for. xD

For the same reasons you mention how it can be creepy, I found it wondrous, mysterious, and peaceful. But certainly ethereal. A dreamlike place. Its bathic atmosphere implies something meaningful, but any such meaning is ambiguous and unknown. Ethereal, but not scary to me. It was a quiet place filled with deep places and mysterious things, away from the clutter of life.

The Bowser painting for me. Even at my age now I still think its pretty creepy. I wish the personalization tapes were still popular

I had the same feeling, but I also loved it the way it is. It felt more like a dream to me. The music in Mario 64 was also very dream-like and when you walked through the castle the sound effects were always exaggerated with this strong reverb. It probably added to this feeling.

If you think SM64 is creepy, you’re like Spongebob and Patrick on that image where they ride the children’s rollercoaster and get scared af

Mario 64 gives me the same vibes as when I search for "liminal spaces" on the internet. Something seems kinda off yet fascinating. Moreover, no matter how much I love Odyssey or Galaxy, Mario 64 will always have a special place in my memories, a truly nostalgic and charming game.

Glad that you mentioned the endless falling being weird. Ever had an adrenaline rush from falling in a videogame? Also the graphics are a huge point to me. GTA San Andreas was also fairly spooky to me, due to the render distance, fog and unclear textures.

This game never felt creepy ! It was great. Looking back, it might seem barren out of it's frame of reference but this was the peak of immersion at the time

This game gave me nothing but feelings of peace and wonder as a child where all that emptiness was filled with your imagination. And even now as an adult its just a nostalgia joyride taking me back to simpler times

I find it dreamlike instead of creepy.

Glover always gave me the impression that everyone seemed to get from SM64. Especially the hub area in the beginning of the game. Still an N64 game weirdly enough. I guess the outdated tech really does contribute a lot to the uncanny feeling.

Oh god I’m so glad I didn’t have any of these thoughts as a kid. Never looked at it creepy for being lonely or anything. I just enjoyed the music, the game itself and looked at the game realistically being “just a game”. I only feared drowning because I didn’t wanna do it again and the quick sand because quick sand irl is scary in general.

I grew up with SM64 and played it many times over the years and never once felt creeped out while playing it. I’m sure there’s things I found creepy that others wouldn’t. What I think is most interesting is how everyone experiences things a little differently.

When I was a kid, the DS version of SM64 terrified me because of the hidden level inside that haunted mansion where you'd fight King Boo to unlock Luigi. You spend most of the level listening to King Boo's laugh to know which door (of a possible 4) to go through, because going through the wrong door takes you back to the start of the level. That laugh, paired with the merry-go-round music at the very start of the level, always terrified me. I never beat the level until I got a new copy of the game a few years ago

I was 13 when I first played it and it blew my mind at the time. I think another reason for the emptiness in the game was to not overwhelm kids in a 3D environment. In retrospect it looks somewhere between a dev sandbox and a finished game. If you look back at the first Super Mario Bros, it had that same lonely feeling in certain stages. Super Mario Bros 3 is really where they were able to make it feel like a living and breathing environment.

The game was insanely popular among all us kids in elementary and middle school, and literally none of us were scared or unsettled. This weird narrative is built upon on very recent memes that have gotten carried away. At best you could argue some of the visuals look a little garish in HD, but certainly not back then when played on a CRT. The game was very warm, bright, colorful and overall pleasant. Even Big Boo's Haunt is mostly silly spooky (in a little kid's halloween party sort of way) than actually terrifying.

Super Metroid was my childhood creepy game. It really makes you feel like a helpless human in a hopeless and completely isolated milieu. In later games, other characters were added (imo) to the game’s detriment, at least in so far as maintaining its original creep factor. If an hour and a half long 16-bit sprite based video game from the 90s can give you nightmares, you know something was done right by that dev team

I recently replayed Mario 64 for the first time in many many years. I honestly just don’t find it creepy. At no point in my entire play through did I feel even remotely creeped out. I find the over world very comforting. The silence and the birds chirping outside, followed by the music inside, it’s very calming and serene. Nothing creepy in the slightest to me.

The game is a deep fever dream. I think Mario has eaten so many Mushrooms that he no longer exists in reality so instead he exists in a trippy, liminal and warped reality where everything is smiling even the stuff that wants to hurt you.

I usually don't believe or dive deep into myths/creepypastas/legends but one myths of the Wet Dry World having a negative emotional aura hit me hard when I first played super Mario 64. I don't know what it was about WDW but whenever I played SM64 I always wanted to avoid the level. The eerily empty and claustrophobic level made me feel weird. At first I thought It was only me that felt this but later I stumbled upon this video and many others and saw about this topic which surprised me, knowing more people had experienced the same thing I did.

This game came out when I was 6, and the only thing that I remember creeping me out was the endless staircase. Loved that game growing up and still do.

The thing that always made me feel uncomfortable while playing Super Mario 64 was the suffocating, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. While you have a lot of platforms and areas to explore, the stages feel like they are very limited, like they're inside a small box and you're trying your best to escape it. I wouldn't say I'm claustrophobic, but I hate the feeling when I have to be in a tight space. This game made me feel this way. It was one of my favourite games as a kid, but it made feel physically and mentally ill when I played it for long periods of time. It still does to this day and I'm 27. It's a really weird and uncomfortable feeling that it's really hard to describe.

The lack of characters is also because of limitations. The same happens with the paintings: They were forced to exagerate poses and expressions or camera angles for those pictures because they needed the resultant low resolution image to be clearly readable (theatre actors do the same so you can see them from far away) Think it like this: Mario64 was the first game of its kind, so no one was sure about anything and they tried to do their best. All that creepyness and weird sensations you get are because we live in a natural 3d space. Being this a recreation, it feels familiar to your mind, but little details like the lack of characters and sound, weird colours or confusing low resolution backgrounds, itch in the dephs of your brain: Your logica tells you everything is ok, but natural survival instinct claims there’s something enterely wrong there, and that traduces into one simple thought mechanic: possible danger = fear. There’s nothing wrong with poor Mario’s basic 3D world. Its just your mind being tricky and intelligent.

interesting perspective, never experienced the game that way as a kid. honestly just went along with it and explored this tiny universe (like most kids i suppose). but you sure have a point with titles like sunshine being more colorful and "accompanied" with characters you can interact with. also kudos for pointing out liminal space, i knew such sensation exists but never knew what it's called. the more i know! good video also, first time i'm watching your content and it was enteraining

I found the locked doors in the castle to be scary when I was a kid, because they would make the scary bowser noise. I would try to stay as far away from them as possible until I got the key.

Starting from when I young, and even to this day, I sometimes have dreams of completely made up environments and levels inside SM64. One was a huge, descending spiral staircase with no end. One was this overgrown swamp area in the Tick Tock Clock place for some reason. One was this foggy, medieval abandoned village with water fountains everywhere. Some were just, completely surreal and fragmented setpieces with no rhyme or purpose. They have always unsettled me, but like you said, they also always gave me this kind of, nostalgic and wistful feeling whenever I think back to them. That's why fanmade levels from SM64 ROMhacks have always been so surreal to me to the point where I get genuinely uneasy trying to watch any playthroughs of them, and why the custom levels displayed in Greenio's Personalised Copy ARG affected me so badly because they looked and felt *real*, like, another universe where the 64DD was a success and SM64 got its expansion to include more stuff. Made me think back to my dreams. Of visions of things that could have occured in another reality, separate from ours. Psychological anomalies that feel so real, and yet aren't. Man, liminal spaces fucked me up bad.

Thanks for this video. I never understood why I got the worst chills as soon as I entered the castle or when I didn’t have enough stars to open that big doors and warning came in. Great video, thank you!

The game feels very surreal so that gives it a slight creepy factor

I've played 64 and 64 ds, and I feel like the ds version is the more unsettling of the two. Maybe it was the fact that it was a game that I could, and did, play through the night in bed. The Bowser silhouette when you die seems more sinister, and for a while I was convinced that the face would look creepier the more lives you lost. Big Boo's Haunt is downright creepy, especially the level where you unlock Luigi. I didnt want to go through the door where King Boos laugh was the loudest. Why would I go closer toward something that scared the pants off me? The fact that Bowser was able to capture Mario, Luigi, and Wario on top of Peach. Where does the fourth door in the rec room go? Why does the game pointedly tell me that I cant hear anything behind it, instead of being noninteractable or heck, not even being there in the first place? All in all, 64 has its unsettling moments, but 64 ds outright terrified me at times.

Never thought of it from this perspective, but you put into words something I had vague feelings about from the game but could never really point out...

When playing as a kid, I was goofing around the palace when I was in the room with the painting leading to whomps fortress. The basements first layer must still be loaded even when your not in it because I got to close to where the ghost that hovers until you get close and then turns and speeds towards the court yard from the other side of the wall, where it triggered the ghost laugh sound before it ran off. But from my point of view as a child, I was just running around the palaces first floor when for seemingly no reason a ghost laughed at me. After that, I was so scared to play with the sound on I muted the tv before playing for at least a year, not realizing what caused that invisible trigger until I was older and better understood how video games worked with scripts and culling.

I think we all know why there was a limited amount of enemies in each level - the hardware. Big boos mansion was one of the creepiest Mario moments for me, and I can see some of the thoughts - such as the underwater death animation or the backyard area with all the boos - but majority of the other levels were not creepy to me.

Does anyone else remember seeing the promotional renderings found in the instruction book or in strategy guides? The one of metal Mario (you know, THE metal Mario render) still gets me today - it’s clearly meant to be Hazy Maze Cave, yet that exact area isn’t anywhere in the stage. It’s almost like an official reimagining, or cut content. It’s all so funny, because Miyamoto stated in an interview he didn’t want SM64 to feel dangerous per se, but merely “mysterious”. That’s why so many characters aren’t hostile, and why there’s not many obstacle course moments throughout the game. If only the original creators could see what they’ve done to our childhoods, ha.

Never felt that Mario 64 was a horror game. I liked how quiet it was outside. Very peaceful.

This is actually crazy that Miyamoto's games are tied to his experiences as a child. Did he have a strange dream? Or was it something dark??

The carnival music got me terrified

This reminded me of how when I was little, I had a CRT TV in my room with the N64 hooked up to it, and I remember sometimes at night as I laid in bed I would stare at the screen in fear because for some reason I had this looming feeling that the screen would turn on by itself, I thought either a game would start up, or just something random would come on. I had this feeling that if I looked away it would turn on, maybe with the image of Mario drowning or something. I haven't thought about this in years and forgot about it but somehow this video made me remember it. Really unsettling even now when I think about it. I had a lot of these weird fears as a kid

mario 64 always felt like it was missing something to me as a kid, even when playing the DS port with all the bonus characters and multiplayer modes. going back to the n64 version only amplifies that feeling

This was honestly an awesome watch! Amazing work

For me, this game has a bigger sense of loneliness after I played that one Mario Kart Wii level where part of the race goes into the peach castle area. It is lonely because in Mario 64, this castle and its outside space are inescapable, and I wish I could escape and make it onto that Mario Kart race and see other faces in the race from competition. I don't know if anyone else relates to this the same way.

Apparently the canonical reason Peach’s castle is so empty is because she has two. One where all of her furniture is, and another for all of her artwork.

I always dreaded the underwater levels or any levels that involved swimming ! I would stop playing and have my cousin play through them. Another thing I always did feel “lonely” playing the game.

Imagine finding a fucking Mario game creepy

When I was a kid in primary school, I was given this game as a Christmas gift. I was very happy, because I loved (and still love) playing videogames, so I planned to spend all my Christmas holiday playing Super Mario 64. However, as soon as I started the game and interacted with the castle, I heard Bowser’s deep and distorted laugh, and idk why but that laugh scared me so much. It scared me so much, in fact, that for MONTHS I couldn’t bring myself to progress the game, because it meant I had to hear Bowser’s laugh over and over. As I grew up, I slowly forgot about this game, so I never finished it. Sometimes now I think about finding my old Super Mario 64 again and trying to finish it, but even now as an adult, I can’t help but feel uncomfortable thinking about Bowser’s disturbing laugh again… it’s weird to me how something as small as this still influences me as a grown up :’)

Ever since I was a kid I always feared big houses, like mansions or in this case castles. Just like, the idea of a home being so huge that two people could potentially be inside it, living their lives, without knowing of the other person's prescence. That's the feeling Peach's Castle in 64 gave me, just the unnerving feeling of somebody being able to open a door in the castle and you, as Mario, being so far away from said door that you cant even hear it

This game feels like a dream. Like when Link woke the wind fish and realized that the love and friendship he created with all the characters, was all destroyed. His friends all stopped existing if he chose to wake up. The scariest élément is that it seems that nintendo realized hpw creepy their game was and over compensated with the cute elements and bright colored text and it just makes the etherial nightmare feeling increase. Zelda Ocarina of time (used same engine and released around same time) is also often quite lonely, but the story, characters and even enemies give it life.

In the second half of Dire Dire Docks after the submarine is gone, the big hole that sucks you into the void was scary to me when I was young. The fish that can eat you in Tiny-Huge Island was stressful, the way you just cease to exist when it swallows you was unsettling

I think it’s a mixture of realness and dreamlike qualities that get mixed up in our little kid brains. Conflating the two in our memories. I think this is mostly with early 3D games. Polygons that are almost real but just not quite there. And environments and music that is simply dreamlike is the only way I can explain it. Great video

I’ve just felt people love scaring themselves and try too hard to make this game creepy. It’s one of the greatest games of all time and in all of my years I never felt it was scary.

5:54 By definition, Peaches castle is actually the *most* liminal space in the game. Liminal space definition: In architecture, liminal spaces are defined as "the physical spaces between one destination and the next." Common examples of such spaces include hallways, airports, and streets. The castle is the space between every level, and by definition is a liminal space.

Never thought it was scary, for us that was pretty much grown or grown when it came out was shocked by its technical achievements. It seemed kinda sandboxy and upbeat. You must have been real young when it came out.

This game was made to be fun, peaceful, creepy, haunting, full, empty, loud, and quiet all at the same time. While you are in one realm of the game whether it be a simple room of the castle or a painting, the rest of the map is completely blank. Nothing happens in another room that you can't hear or see, but the weirdness of the whole place and how different everything seems to feel in various parts of the game makes you just want to play more until you get the poor princess out of this God forsaken place. I had multiple dreams of being in a place like this, where it all felt fake and the walls were wet, felt like I needed to find something or help someone but was way too creeped out to do it cause I always felt something was watching me. Whoever created this game simply knew what they were doing, idk if they were human or not, but they created this masterpiece for people who have crazy imaginations

I find a lot of these theories/creepypastas fascinating, and they're very fun to read and watch but SM64 itself has never really creeped me out at all. it's probably because I grew up with the DS port where the castle definitely felt more alive and "lived in," with the rabbits everywhere and the rec room and such, which made it seem much less like a liminal space. that probably extended over when I played the original, as if my experiences in the DS version were telling me "there's nothing scary about this castle my guy, just focus on not dying for the 100th time in RR" nowadays I'm an avid watcher of SM64 speedruns, and seeing people tear apart stages like SSL and WDW on a regular basis takes away any creepiness factor that I would've gotten from them. don't get me started on the TASes. the geometry of the desolate castle exterior is just another tool for the almighty reality warper mario to be used to phase through reality and travel dozens of parallel universes away in his quest to open the moat door underwater and gank bowser in the fire sea where he would least expect it

As a kid i always dreamed of mario 64 rooms that i know dont exist but that for some reason i could feel they were there, when mario 64 made a comeback in this years i knew i wasnt alone in this.

*Scene of SpongeBob and Patrick on the mini roller coaster*

I think the whole Mario64 being creepy conversation is a Reed Richards level of reaching