Boss Game Studios was an American development studio of Nintendo 64 racing games such as Top Gear Rally and World Driver Championship, active from 1994 to 2002.

At some point during the late 1990s, Boss Game Studios pitched an idea for a Mario game to Nintendo, which was rejected. No information is available on the nature of the proposal except for this concept art, which surfaced after the studio’s closure.

The artwork appears to depict Mario inadvertently waking up some sort of flat creature that begins to pursue him.

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In Super Mario 64, the celebration animation for obtaining a Power Star (known commonly as the “star dance”) makes Mario immune to death. As such, it is not normally possible for Mario to obtain a star and die before the star dance is complete; e.g. even if the star spawns above a death barrier, Mario will simply stand on the death barrier for the duration of the star dance without dying.

However, there is an exception to this, whereby it is possible to obtain a star and die if Mario starts dying before touching the star. In Whomp’s Fortress, there is a spot where Mario is instantly teleported upwards near the death barrier due to an oversight. If Mario first touches the death barrier, then teleports upward to touch the star, the immunity will not kick in because he is already in the process of dying.

The footage shows all of this in action. Note that obtaining the star does in fact count even in this scenario; Mario has 7 stars before touching it and 8 after being ejected from the course (top right corner).

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Rare officially licensed 2004 Luigi plush. These plushes have a common manufacturing defect whereby Luigi’s left eye (viewer’s right) will be lower than it should be, creating a lopsided appearance.

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Concept art for various scrapped vehicles for Mario Kart Arcade GP DX.

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In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, there is an extremely easy way to accidentally receive a Game Over simply by jumping next to a tuft of grass in the Damp Oasis stage, causing Mario to fall out of bounds into the void.

While in previous games in the series, falling out of bounds merely caused Mario to be reset to the beginning of the area and potentially lose a single HP, the punishment was dialed up severely for this game, giving the player an instant Game Over instead.

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Promotional photo of the ribbon cutting ceremony for the reopening of the Nintendo World store in New York in 2016 as “Nintendo New York”.

Present at the event were, among others, Charles Martinet and Doug Bowser, who was Vice President of Sales instead of President of Nintendo of America at the time.

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Super Mario Galaxy contains various decorative fish that are difficult to see up-close in-game due to first-person view not being available underwater. These consist of four types of regular fish and two deliberately unsettling fish that appear only in the spooky Bigmouth Galaxy and Deep Dark Galaxy areas.

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Mario Kart Wii contains a bizarre unused function called “rk_snowTest”, presumably meant to test snow, that concentrates every single snowflake in the course above the player character in a line. Note the thin vertical line of snowflakes above Koopa Troopa in the footage.

As that in no way represents how snow should actually appear or behave, it is unclear how displaying it in this manner could have possibly helped to test its functionality.

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Unauthorized severely deformed Goomba plush with its face being upside-down in relation to its body. As it is already illegally using a “Super Mario” tag, it is unlikely that the manufacturer wished to somehow avoid any copyright dispute by modifying the design, and instead simply made an error while attempting to recreate a plausible Goomba plush.

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E3 2000 footage of Paper Mario contains a very peculiar name tag for an enemy. During a battle against a Spiked Gloomba, its name is briefly seen, which is ちかトゲクリ(サンタ).

The first part is apparently an early name for Spiked Gloombas, which translates to “underground” followed by a shortening of “Spiked Goomba”; equivalent to e.g. “Underground Spikegoom” in English.

The second part is the one that is notable, as it translates to “(Santa)”. What this might mean is unknown; no other Spiked Gloombas are seen to compare their names to see if they would also be Santa, nor is any special behavior noticeable that would explain the name. In the finished game, no connections between Santa and Spiked Gloombas is ever made in any language.

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