A Super Mario variety blog.
Screenshots, photos, sprites, gifs, scans and more from all around the world of Super Mario Bros.
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A 1991 Toys “R” Us commercial featured live-action footage with video games superimposed over it, to illustrate lines such as “You couldn’t get enough of it, you ate Nintendo, drank Nintendo, slept Nintendo” and “so now you can breathe Nintendo, love Nintendo, be Nintendo”.
The Mario-related segments of the commercial feature surreal footage of boys eating a plate of Super Mario Bros. 2, drinking a glass of Super Mario Bros. 3, and physically turning into Super Mario World, respectively.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: cckirby
Article in an Italian gaming magazine about a 1983 US trade magazine ad notifying makers of unauthorized Donkey Kong arcade knock-offs of Nintendo’s legal countermeasures.
Note Nintendo listing names of the knock-offs such as “Crazy Kong”, “Congorilla”, “Donkey King” and “Big Kong”. Interestingly, Crazy Kong was actually licensed, but only for sale in Japan; the manufacturer breached their agreement with Nintendo by illegally selling Crazy Kong in the US.
Please note that this is merely a reprint of the ad in an article about it, hence the low quality; the original ad has not yet been found.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: image, via
The Donkey Kong Country series games rely on never having too many different objects on screen at once due to only supporting 8 different graphical palettes for sprites simultaneously. However, by carefully arranging a situation to cause more objects than usual to remain on screen, the shortcomings of this become apparent, which results in sprites appearing with wrong palettes due to needing to share one with something already on screen.
In the footage, the ending segment of the Squeals on Wheels level of Donkey Kong Country 3 is shown, where Parry the Parallel Bird is activated while the Kongs have thrown two different barrels and carefully keep them both on screen, resulting in many more objects than the game expects at that time.
This results in three palette glitches that can be seen in the footage: the Sneek rat enemy appears red, the blue balloon is briefly yellow and white instead, and the blue flag at the end of the level has the same yellow and white palette.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: TheStaticCling
Set of promotional 1983 Donkey Kong Jr. perfumed erasers from Japan. What they originally smelled like is unknown, as the scent has evaporated over time and no contemporary reports describing the smell are known to exist.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: CoolBoxArt
The North American box art for Super Mario Bros. features pixel art of Fire Mario, which is for an unknown reason different from the actual sprite used in the game, using more colors than should be possible on a NES (without overlaying multiple sprites) and being distorted.
A comparison between the box art sprite and the game sprite is provided.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: lumahoneyy
Animations for TicoJii, an unused character found in the files of Super Mario Galaxy. He appears to be an early version of an elderly Luma, possibly an early design for Polari from the finished game (as Polari is said to be elderly, although he looks identical to other Lumas outside of his color scheme). He also resembles the Millennium Star from Mario Party 3, though that may be simply a coincidence.
In addition to these three animations for idling, waving and talking, TicoJii also has code for becoming yellow. It is notable that in the finished game, blue and yellow are colors used for Star Chips/the two colors of stars that transport Mario (Launch Stars and Pull Stars), so it may have been related to those.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: LooygiBros
Top: Super Mario 64 is the first game that lists Princess Peach’s name as “Peach Toadstool”, being known almost exclusively as “Princess Toadstool” in Western material and “Princess Peach” in Japanese material prior to this. (She was referred to as “Princess Peach” in Yoshi’s Safari in 1993 in English once before.)
Bottom: in a 2025 interview with Time Extension, Leslie Swan, localization manager on various Nintendo games and voice of Peach in Super Mario 64, revealed that she was the one who suggested this compromise of using both names to Miyamoto herself.
As such, very fittingly, the person who is heard saying “Princess Toadstool, Peach” at the beginning of Super Mario 64 for the first time also happens to be the person who invented the name in the first place.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Time Extension
Donkey Kong’s model in Super Smash Bros. is notable among other 3D Donkey Kong models due to standing upright in his default pose, which never happens in-game.
It is possible that he was originally designed by using a default humanoid model as a base, as opposed to being modeled completely from scratch; though it could also be that the designers believed that it would be easier to have every fighter have the same default pose instead of making custom ones.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Jay6T4
Extremely rare 2005 Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix store display.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: cakehoarder