Alright, let's get pretentious.
I've come to start resenting those super popular Mario 64 hacks as of late, like B3313, the multiplayer mod, Mario 64 with Shotgun.
People came out of the woodworks making videos and articles about them, and it kinda hate how those are now "the mainstream", relatively speaking.
And it also sucks because they're all great hacks! But the fact that that if you asked most (relevant) people to think of what a Mario 64 hack is, it's either just the base vanilla game "with a wacky YouTube Content-y™ Twist and/or within the ballpark of just creepypasta (/derogatory)/beta content.
Aside from Star Road back in 2011, which while groundbreaking had some pretty mixed design, the general online populous who even still cares about Mario 64 have no idea about the game's entire massive & passionate modding scene, full of incredible and original standalone experiences, both in gameplay and narrative, for free.
Elise, a beautiful Yume Nikki-like with cutscenes and voice acting, borrowing the base game's sense of exploration as a jumping off point.
SM64 Kingdom's End, a genuinely haunting story about Mario struggling until the last moment to save a dying world.
Mario Party 64, our childhood dream of wishing we could play in the boards & minigames of Mario Party like an actual platformer brought to life.
Detective Mario: Murder on Ice, mapping the genre of text-based murder mystery (complete with typing in commands) into a 3D Mario level with surprising twists and required deduction skills.
Mario breaks EVERY BONE IN HIS BODY (case sensitive), a hilarious Monkey Ball-like
Ceaseless Climb, exploring a tricky, warped reality beyond the game's infamous Infinite Staircase
My Dress-Up Darling 64 which, and I quote from the game's Romhacking.com page's description, "being the first hack to use HVQM full-motion video"
There's rhythm games, Zelda-likes, horror games, shitposts, puzzlers, slide hacks, what-ifs, massive collabs, the absurdly sized Star Revenge *series*, huge hacking competitions with cash prizes and often dozens/hundreds of submissions meant to incentivize newcomers to try, Mario slips on a banana peel and fucking dies 64, and literally hundreds more I could name
I'm just really passionate about this little niche internet community, and I'm sad it only got the thinnest spotlight once a tiny piece of it ended up being profitable for content creators. There's so much more than what most people see.
Besides. It's free video games; Surely that alone makes it worth checking out, right...? Everything is suuuper accessible/user-friendly nowadays~