Original illustration featuring a rare back view of Wart from Super Mario Bros. 2, from an officially licensed 1990 mylar balloon.

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Development files for Super Mario World contain graphics for a shark enemy in a remarkably similar style to the finished game’s dolphins, even using the same basic tail fin shape. Other graphics of these sharks are also found within the same graphics files as the dolphins, further suggesting they were related.

While this is purely speculation, the similar nature of these two entities suggests they could have appeared alongside each other with the sharks acting as a dangerous element to add challenge to the act of jumping from dolphin to dolphin.

If some of the dolphins were replaced with sharks, Mario would not only need to time the jumps to land on the next dolphin, but also to avoid any sharks that would have possibly jumped in the same arc.

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Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door contains an unused battle event called “btl_un_ufo”, or “Battle Unit UFO”. Note that the graphics of the UFO did not survive, with only the behavior remaining in the files. As such, the UFO was substituted with a Buzzy Beetle and the object it drops with a star.

The UFO would appear above the enemies and drop an object onto one of the enemies. What the object would have done is unknown, as that code has been expunged as well. The only known factor is that the event would appear randomly and choose a random enemy; it is likely that this would grant that enemy some special powers or abilities, or give Mario an extra reward for defeating it.

It is likely that the UFO was supposed to be a Sentinel from Tubba Blubba’s Castle from the original Paper Mario (bottom image), as indicated by the object’s internal name (キャッチャン) that matches up with the name from the original game.

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Collection of small Yoshi figurines hidden at random within officially licensed Mario bath bombs from Japan.

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Mario Party contains a curious set of textures for a Dice Block that only has six sides. This might appear completely normal to players only familiar with some of the more recent installments of the series, but until Mario Party 9, Dice Blocks did not act like regular six-sided dice.

Instead, they merely had a six-sided shape, but their surface would cycle through the numbers 1 through 10, acting like a 10-sided die in practice. The inclusion of this die implies that during the development of the first Mario Party, it was considered that the Dice Block should only have 6 numbers that it can roll (as it would in reality). The idea was ultimately discarded in favor of the physics-defying six-sided die that can roll 10 numbers, only to be picked back up 14 years later in Mario Party 9.

Interestingly, Super Mario Party would later introduce special Dice Blocks very similar to this one, with six possible numbers that are not sequential from 1 to 6, but rather customized, e.g. 1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6.

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In Super Mario Advance 4, there is a room that causes Koopa Troopas to assume glitched graphics, almost certainly due to the developers assuming that no Koopas will appear in that room, and thus not loading their graphics into memory.

In the World-e level “The ol’ Switcheroo”, if a P-Wing is used to take a Koopa Troopa all the way from the beginning into the room with the third Advance Coin, which requires careful maneuvering and was as such likely never expected by the developers, the Koopa Troopa’s sprites will appear as a jumble of other graphics.

Top: how the Koopa Troopa’s shell appears.
Bottom: how the Koopa Troopa itself appears after being left idle for long enough to emerge from its shell.

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Officially licensed 2011 Bob-omb T-shirt.

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The 1990 Dr. Mario commercial for Dr. Mario had different variations. One variation that ended with a brief mention of the Game Boy version (airing a few months after the original NES commercial) ended with this original animation of pill bottles dancing.

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Yoshi-themed sample of the 2001 Mario Awards, commemorative glass statues given out by Nintendo of America to merchandisers who were able to sell the most Nintendo merchandise in 2001.

This particular sample is particularly rare as it comes from a point during the manufacturing process before its outside was engraved with the name of the award and honoree, allowing an unobscured look at the 3D Yoshi inside.

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In Paper Mario: Color Splash, the Fire Extinguisher is a Thing that must be used in the boss battle against Morton to progress. The side of it contains a warning/instruction label common for such extinguishers, and it is too far away during gameplay to be able to read the text.

Extracting the texture for the label from the game’s files, however, reveals that the label is written in what is clearly Lorem Ipsum-style gibberish.

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