Maybe time has altered your view of the game but when it came out it was truly a showcase game. It was THE killer launch title for the console and although maybe the graphics were eclipsed later in the gen
They were eclipsed the same year by the two franchises on the competitors machine, you can read the stories about the E3 at the time, and that's only staying on consoles not touching PC.
The press made the games impression seem like it reached farther than it did, and the N64 sales as well as the sales of the game indisputably show this as it was being outsold by large margins until the sequels for the other two franchises came out and then went back to outselling Mario 64 by a large margin, the slow game output was very beneficial to Mario 64's sales.
It was a good game to introduce the N64 but they should have had more technically impressive games ready too. It's not a bad looking game but it had a very short-term wow factor that wore off for most gamers worldwide which can be seen by what direction they went in after it came out. It was mainly SNES NA fans that were buying N64's because of Mario 64 and much of the early online press that were pushing Ultra 64 and grudgingly were reviewing Saturn and PSX games until the Nintendo console came out.
everyone else was having problems with implementing 3D cameras as they moved on from 2D.
So now you're moving away from graphics into cameras which I find curious. But even this is inaccurate, Mario 64 was also struggling with 3D camera, the only 3D games with functioning cameras were on PC at the time. People who believe Mario 64 introduced a "good" camera don't make sense to me, it was and still is poor and had numerous problems. I think there were 4 modes which wouldn't be needed if they had the camera figured out but they didn't, and they knew certain stages would have problems with some camera modes than others. The camera was one of the biggest complaints of the game at the time.
But that has nothing to do with graphics anyway.
Mario64 made the 3D camera control feel effortless and it just worked.
This may be one of the most common gaming revisions out there.
Other 3D third person games had difficulty for years afterwards trying to replicate the feeling of Mario64 and were plagued with problems like getting the camera stuck behind an object,
You mean the same problem Mario 64 had when the camera got stuck behind objects? We've come along way from the topic of graphics, now we are talking about cameras, and revisionist history about third person games.
Edit: sorry for going off topic, just wanted to stick up for my boy Mario from that outrageous shade being thrown.
Wasn't really any shade thrown, you went on a topic that had nothing to do with the discussion.
Back to GRAPHICS, I didn't say Mario 64 was bad graphics at the time, but even the graphics were clean but simple, Mario himself was flat shaded, many of the environments were lacking detail, some of the textured walls or ground were basically just repeats of the same texture across, there wasn't much variation, and outside of enemies much of the game was still and not animated.
I feel they could have led with a better looking game, I know Mario was the mascot but for many people it was lacking for a game coming out of this delayed SGI machine. It's also part of the reason why it hasn't aged well, though the simple visual style does give it an advantage in again than other N64 games.