Super Mario Sunshine Online Mod Turns It Into a 10-Player Portable
Super Mario Sunshine has always been the moody, paint-splattered middle child of 3D Mario—beloved by a vocal cult but rarely treated to the same post-launch love as its siblings. That changed this week. A mod called Better Super Mario Sunshine Online brings 10-player co-op to the GameCube classic, complete with 15 custom characters, synchronised progress, and a hide-and-seek mode. For handheld gamers who’ve already wrung every Shine Sprite out of the Switch version in Super Mario 3D All-Stars, this is the reason to fire up Dolphin on your Steam Deck and never look back.
From Solo Island to Full-Blown Party
The mod doesn’t just slap multiple Marios on screen. It syncs everyone’s collectible progress—blue coins, Shine Sprites, the whole slog—so your co-op run feels like an actual shared adventure, not a race to grab things first. Beyond the 10-player co-op, there’s a competitive hide-and-seek mode that fully exploits Sunshine’s movement tech: the hover nozzle, spin jumps, and that slippery-but-fluid momentum — the same spirit of recompilation that brought Pepsiman to browsers. And with characters like Wario, Luigi, Waluigi, and even Shadow the Hedgehog, the personality injection is massive. Each of the 15 characters has custom animations, which means a group of friends on Steam Decks could theoretically recreate an entire chaotic Mario Kart lobby in a platforming world.
Why Your Steam Deck Is the Ultimate Console for This Mod
Nintendo famously locked Sunshine to the GameCube (and later a barebones emulation in 3D All-Stars on Switch), which means no official online support ever. The modding community has corrected that, but the best hardware to enjoy it on is hands-down a Steam Deck running Dolphin. The GameCube emulator runs Sunshine at a locked 60 FPS with widescreen patches and upscaled resolution, and with the Deck’s suspend/resume, you can drop in and out of co-op sessions just like on a modern console. Battery life on the Deck will vary—Dolphin at 3x internal resolution pulls around 12-15W—but for an all-co-op session of blue coin hunting with friends, you’re looking at two-plus hours of play. It’s the closest thing to a modern Nintendo online experience that Sunshine has ever had, much like the nostalgic appeal of the Halo Campaign Evolved on Deck, and it runs entirely on PC hardware you already own. If you’ve been sitting on a Steam Deck wondering what classic to dive into with friends, stop wondering.