Public art installation featuring Mario, exhibited at the Italian town of Pietrasanta in 2025. The statue was made by sculptor Filippo Tincolini as part of a “Human Connections” exhibition, which according to the artist is supposed to “reimagine digital icons as modern myths”.

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A classic physics glitch seen in many 3D game engines occurs when two objects clip into each other, but their collision becomes caught on each other in such a way that simply pushing them in opposite directions is not enough to separate them.

The engine attempts to separate the objects by applying ever greater momentum, but due to their collision being entangled, the momentum ends up dragging both objects in the same direction instead. This results in the objects sliding along the floor, vibrating intensely, and in some severe cases, ascending and flying away.

While the Donkey Kong Bananza engine mostly avoids this, the statues on DK Island are large and solid enough that this can occur to them. The footage shows two statues briefly entangling to fly a short distance.

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Unused model named “IceCube” found in the files of Super Mario Galaxy. It depicts a seemingly evil ice cube made out of a unique substance resembling Dark Matter seen in Bowser’s Dark Matter Plant, except colored black and blue instead of black and purple.

What the ice cube was planned to be used for, and whether it had any connection to Bowser, is unknown. Note that the cube appears either “evil” or transparent depending on parameters, so the evil appearance could also be either a specific subtype of ice cube, or an artifact of it being unfinished.

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Top: the Super Mario 64 box art.

Middle: development files for the game contained a version of the box art without Mario or most of the overlay, though leaving the planet and a glow effect from the logo.

Bottom: the development image was instrumental in finding the original photo used for the sky, which comes from a commercial texture CD. Now, all traces of Mario have truly been removed.

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“Super Donkey” was the name of an unreleased project that was developed between 1991 and 1992 for the SNES, and aspects of which were repurposed for the development of Yoshi’s Island later.

The main character in Super Donkey’s playable builds, found in Nintendo’s internal archives, is a pilot character who resembles either the main character from the 1981 Sky Skipper arcade, or Stanley the Bugman from the 1983 Donkey Kong 3 arcade, drawn in a Rayman-like “floating limbs” style. Most available material for Super Donkey features variations on this character.

However, the development files also include graphics for the main character being Mario himself, suggesting the developers have considered (however briefly) to turn the game into a Mario game. The Mario graphics predate the pilot graphics, so that the game likely started out as Mario-themed. The footage shows the same animation of flying (the main character can fly at will) with both the original pilot and Mario graphics.

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Officially licensed Bowser watch from Japan with a glow-in-the-dark design.

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Cover of “Mario’s Adventure Land”, an officially licensed 1999 Mario adventure book that uniquely includes elements of several different titles instead of being based on a single game. The games referenced include Super Mario 64, Mario Party, Yoshi’s Story, Wario Land 2, and even Diddy Kong Racing.

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In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, it is possible to have followers like Prof. Frankly keep following Mario’s party past the point where they should leave, for essentially the rest of the game.

If Frankly is present in Chapter 7, a minor glitch can occur when entering an elevator whereby Frankly will not enter with Mario and his partner.

While this by itself is not surprising given how no followers should be present at that time and as such no code to ensure this would have been written, the notable effect of this is that instead of following the elevator, the camera will focus on Frankly instead. As such, for the duration of the ride, Frankly is considered to be more important than Mario in order for the camera to prioritize him.

After Mario arrives on the other floor, Frankly will unceremoniously teleport to his position soon after.

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2005 Walmart ad for GameCube games, featuring Donkey Kong, a snowboarding Luigi, three Pink Boos and Samus Aran at a party.

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In video game development, “attract mode” refers to a state a game enters when left without input on the title screen for long enough, whereby it usually shows demo gameplay either in-engine (e.g. Super Mario 64) or as a prerecorded movie (e.g. Super Mario Sunshine). This is a holdover from arcade machines that did this to attract customers that would be walking past.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door does not have an attract mode, instead simply replaying the game’s intro if the game is left on the title screen. However, the game’s files contain an unused attract mode that would have been a combination of movie playback and an in-engine overlay.

The game would have played a video file (deleted in the finished game so the Super Mario Sunshine credits were used in the footage due to being in the same format the game expects), and random characters from the game would occasionally enter the screen, look around, and exit, as seen in the footage.

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