In Mario Kart: Double Dash, the place where the drivers emerge from after going inside the Warp Pipe on the Peach Beach track is supposed to be an open window above the pipe (the only open window on the track, making it clear this was the design intent), but this is nearly impossible to see in-game.

Top: the closest this can be seen is in two-player mode if one player turns around to look at the building, but the game’s camera does not move up high enough to show the window unless the second player is very far away. As such, this is basically not visible (note Mario and Luigi being barely larger than a pixel on Wario and Waluigi’s screen). Also note that this game does not have a rear view button so Mario and Luigi cannot look behind them as they would be able to in later games.

Bottom: only with external tools can the camera be shifted in such a way as to actually show what is happening. Note that the window is aligned with the Item Boxes but not with the exit point of the drivers; this is possibly a remnant from earlier in development where the arc was different so that the drivers could emerge directly from the window and grab the Item Boxes.

Source: Peardian

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Top: artwork used on a rare officially licensed 1986 Famicom game case, depicting the cast of Super Mario Bros. riding a car.

Bottom left: this artwork would later be used for the album cover of a 1986 Super Mario Bros. Japan-only vinyl record.

Bottom right: the place this artwork was most famously used was the cover of All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros., a limited-edition retool of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels for the Famicom Disk System that replaced some characters with caricatures of Japanese radio personalities.

With the bottom two in mind, looking at the top image reveals that due to their format, they have been cropping out details of the original drawing all along. In particular, the smiling sun on the left, the full fortress on the right, and most notably the Spiny riding a Lakitu’s Cloud in the top right can not be seen in any of the later versions.

Spinies have never actually been able to ride Lakitu’s Clouds until Super Mario Maker in 2015, 29 years after this image was drawn.

Source: bigafrodogg

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A preview article in a 2002 issue of the Brazilian Nintendo World magazine featured a bizarre edit of the Super Mario 64 official artwork of Mario displaying a victory sign where he was made to extend four fingers instead.

A comparison between the original artwork and the edit is provided.

Source: vitorio.neocities.org

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Unused goalkeeper model, named simply “Goalie” internally, found in the files of Super Mario Strikers. In the finished game, the goalkeepers for all teams are Kritters (the one for the robotic Super Team is a robotic Kritter).

Whether this design was at one point actually seriously considered to be a new original character to appear in the finished game, or was simply a placeholder, is unknown.

Source: El_Taco_Rojo

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World’s first photograph of both of the extremely rare Big Ol’ Mario and Big Ol’ Donkey Kong plushes in the same place at the same time.

The two 3-foot-tall Big Ol’ plushies were featured in a 1997 Nintendo Power catalog and retailed for $100 (ca. $200 adjusted for inflation); however, so few units were produced that for decades it was assumed that none of them actually existed. Over time, the few of them that were purchased began surfacing from private collections, so that it was finally possible for a collector to obtain both of them at the same time in 2026.

Source: cake_hoarder

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In Super Mario World, whenever Mario completes a level, the path to the next level is revealed in a rather slow tile-by-tile manner. It is easy to assume that the effect is deliberate, to lend cinematic weight to the achievement of having beaten the level.

However, it turns out that the game is actually trying to perform the animation as fast as possible but is legitimately encountering slowdown due to the console not being able to process that many operations on each frame. The footage compares the speed of the original game’s animation on the left and the speed after letting the game make use of a co-processor chip (not included in the original release) to achieve the speed the game is trying to display the animation at on the right.

Please note that this post is merely making a statement about the game from a programming perspective (the code is trying to execute faster than the game displays it) rather than an artistic perspective. We do not know if the slowdown was merely tolerated by the designers who would wish for the animation to be faster, or whether they actually wanted it to be this speed and the slowdown came in handy in that regard.

Source: kaptajnen, luansoliveira

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Unique illustration of the Super Mario Bros. cast reimagined as a Zelda-like action game, used for a 1987 calendar in the Japanese Wanpakku magazine.

Source: its.a.me.scanio, historyofhyrule

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Collection of officially licensed 2026 Mario, Peach, Yoshi and Bowser Crocs.

Source: reinodocogumelo

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Here are the two most powerful attacks capable to be inflicted by enemies in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, both in terms of most damage in a single attack (top) and most total damage in a multi-hit attack (bottom)*.

Top: the highest single-hit damage can be dealt by Marilyn in the Chapter 8 battle, where she can deal 48 damage after being made Huge by Beldam, applying two Charges, and Mario wearing the P-Up D-Down and Double Pain badges.

Bottom: the highest damage in a multi-hit attack is 80, after 10 hits from Magnus von Grapple 2.0’s Audience Cannon with Mario wearing the P-Up D-Down and Double Pain badges.

* Note that this does not include audience manipulation since with extensive enough manipulation it is possible to make Macho Grubba do arbitrarily high damage, though that would be nearly impossible without external tools.

Source: Koopatrol

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Extremely rare officially licensed 1993 Super Mario World ball-throwing ticket redemption arcade game. The cabinet features many pieces of artwork from various sources, with some being edited, some recolored, and a few completely original drawings (please zoom in to view details).

Source: Rykitu, jus

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