Recreation of an extremely rare promotional Hanafuda card from the 2016 “Mario Pikachu” Japan-only cross-promotion event. As high-quality scans of the card are currently not available, this recreation was made using photos of the card instead.

It depicts Mario Pikachu emerging from what is most likely intended to be the Slowpoke Well from the 2nd generation of Pokémon games, as that well is also depicted as having a similar short ladder leaning against it in some artwork.

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Screenshots of the official Super Mario Sunshine Windows XP theme available for download from Nintendo’s official site in 2004.

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In Paper Mario: The Origami King, an elaborate series of glitches allows Bob-omb/Bobby to be duplicated up to 4 times for a party of up to 5 Bobbies following Mario around.

A humorous side effect of this is that whenever Mario takes the Eddy River minigame challenge, only one Bobby will be on the boat with him. The other Bobbies will be floating in mid-air along the river, and will be ignored by all characters (although the boat is still able to push them out of the way).

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Holiday-themed 1998 Japanese print ad for Yoshi’s Story.

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Unique illustration of Bunny Mario being shocked, from the official Japanese guide for Super Mario Land 2.

The artwork was drawn by Benimaru Itoh, known for being a comic artist for Nintendo Power, character designer/art director for the Mother series and illustrator/modeler for various Pokémon games.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: gameartarchive

In Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, Bowser meets the Koopa Corps, who are trapped in a cage, during the course of the game’s plot.

If the player chooses to not free them (which is highly encouraged but not actually mandatory) and ignores them instead, and then later returns to that area as Mario and Luigi, there will be obscure Easter egg dialogue from the Koopa Corps where they will first praise Bowser but then suddenly remember that he didn’t save them when he had the chance.

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Top: the empty Banana Hoard room near DK’s treehouse in Donkey Kong 64 is an area that exists purely for lore reasons (to show that his bananas were stolen) and is out of the way compared to all of the gameplay-relevant locations in that area, meaning that it is completely optional to ever see and some players would never visit it at all.

Bottom: despite this, the developers were so dedicated to providing an enjoyable experience visiting the area that they implemented a special “Funny Banana Floor” collision type (highlighted in blue) just for this room, whereby Donkey Kong would slip slightly whenever he touches a banana peel, accompanied by a funny noise.

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In Wario World, Wario sings a deliberately annoying chant on the pause screen. However, should the player stay on the pause screen for 50 minutes without closing it, Wario will say “Sorry” and stop chanting (on that instance of the pause screen; he will start again if it is closed and reopened).

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In Super Mario 3D World, the level Shadow-Play Alley features a segment where the player characters enters a door and after emerging from the other end, only the character’s shadow is visible.

By modifying the game to move the view, we can see where the actual character is during this: directly behind the camera, with the shadows simply being programmed to be cast horizontally onto the wall in front of the camera, past the camera itself.

While this may seem like the most logical way of implementing this effect, many games in similar scenarios program the characters to be invisible, or the shadows to be cast from within the wall, so that this solution becomes remarkable in its simplicity by comparison.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: guinxu

Collection of concept art of various headgear for Mario, labeled “Trial and Error”, found in the 2008 Nintendo company brochure. Interestingly, many of these foreshadow similar hats actually being available for Mario to wear in Super Mario Odyssey, 9 years later.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: gamescanner