In the Wooded Kingdom in Super Mario Odyssey, a rock can become glitched by picking it up with correct timing from a falling platform. Whenever that rock is thrown the next time after this, it will remain suspended in mid-air.
Since NPCs enter a brief hurt animation when a rock is thrown at them, throwing the glitched rock next to an NPC will lock it into the hurt animation indefinitely, as seen with this unfortunate Shiverian in the footage.
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Behind-the-scenes photo of an unknown woman working on music or sound effects for Super Mario Bros. 3 in 1988.
While no one except Koji Kondo is credited in the “sound” section of the game’s credits, it is possible that this is Soyo Oka, known most prominently for her Super Mario Kart soundtrack, who was hired the previous year. She has worked with Koji Kondo and has in fact studied his work before even joining Nintendo, so it is possible that she either did a small uncredited amount of composing work to help him on Super Mario Bros. 3, or is merely doing some technical sound programming instead of directly composing (also uncredited).
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Top: Promotional 2013 Mario & Luigi: Dream Team ball based on the Luiginary Ball attack from the game.
Bottom: the Luiginary Ball, for reference.
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Fans of the Poltergust vacuums from the Luigi’s Mansion series may have found it strange that despite the Poltergust model numbers having increased consistently between their chronological appearances, Luigi’s Mansion 3 appears to not use that numbering scheme and call its version the Poltergust G-00 instead.
Top: however, concept art found in the game shows that the technical model number of the Poltergust G-00 is in fact 7000, and “G-00” is likely just a name E. Gadd chose to describe its functionality in a whimsical way.
Bottom: as such, this preserves the tradition of the increasing model numbers, as seen with all Poltergust appearances to date.
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In Super Mario 64, it is possible for Mario to become stuck in a state of extremely rapid eternal vibration and recoil by falling precisely onto the edge of the collision of the supports of the tilting platforms in Rainbow Ride.
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In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the Gulchrock Sea Great Lighthouse Island features an elevator that can stop at various floors on the way up. On all floors, Connie accompanies Mario and Luigi and needs to position herself in a specific spot on the ground before the elevator begins to move.
If the player does not go up the floors sequentially but instead decides to go back down a floor on the first visit and then up again, Connie will become glitched and, after a long wait, spawn in through the floor instead of walking onto the platform. For one frame, she can be seen actually phasing through the floor as she is pushed up, as seen in the isolated frame on the bottom.
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In New Super Mario Bros., the Mega Mushroom actually has a size modifier applied to it at runtime to make its model smaller than the size at which it was originally designed.
Above is what the Mega Mushroom looks like when it is allowed to spawn without size modifiers. It is likely that this was changed during development since although it does make the item look very impressive, the ability to spawn it anywhere from storage would make it get stuck on most course geometry at that size.
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In Super Mario World, the floor of the boss battle rooms of Bowser, Reznor, Morton, Roy and Ludwig is made out of invisible Empty Blocks, while the visual tiles representing the floor do not themselves have collision.
In other words, the floor Mario appears to be standing on is actually a fake illusory floor he would fall through, and he is actually standing on an invisible floor made out of Empty Blocks. This can be seen in action by using cheats to spawn a P-Switch inside these rooms, which turns the Empty Blocks into coins and makes Mario fall through.
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Unused and mostly untextured models of Mario and Wario on scooters, found in the files of the Scooter Pursuit minigame in Mario Party 8. These were likely used at some point early in development for testing.
Note that Wario is standing backwards on his scooter, assuming a pose as though he is gripping the handles while the handles are actually behind him.
While this is most likely simply a side effect of the placeholder nature of the models, it is interesting to imagine that this could have been a quirk the developers wanted Wario to display in the finished game, whereby he would stand backwards on his scooter for humorous effect.
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