In Yoshi’s Island, the Raphael the Raven boss battle uses the Super FX chip to rotate the battlefield. On an emulator or later official rereleases of the game that support a 1:1 perfect pixel ratio, the game is displayed in an 8:7 aspect ratio, whereby the moon in the middle is perfectly circular.

However, when playing the SNES release on original hardware, the output is stretched to a 4:3 aspect ratio. This causes the moon to become stretched horizontally in relation to the screen, however, as the screen keeps rotating, the moon keeps being stretched along a different axis in relation to the scene.

The above animation stabilizes footage of the battle to get rid of the screen rotation, making the different deformations of the moon readily apparent. Note that every element of the screen is deformed in some way due to the rotation; the moon is merely the most visible.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Masterjun3

Various pieces of concept artwork for the Super Mario Bros. Wonder cover, published on Nintendo’s official Japanese designer job listings site.

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Unique stylized/simplified “pseudo-3D” illustrations of the Donut Plains world from Super Mario World, seen in a 1990 issue of the Japanese Famitsu magazine.

Row 1: Donut Plains 1, Donut Plains 2
Row 2: Donut Ghost House, Donut Secret House
Row 3: Donut Plains 3, Donut Plains 4
Row 4: Donut Secret 1, Donut Secret 2
Row 5: Morton’s Castle

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: Famitsu (Japan), Issue 114, 1990

Under very specific and highly unfortunate circumstances in Super Mario All-Stars, Mario can die during the cutscene of rescuing Peach after defeating Bowser in World 8-4 of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels.

The footage shows hitboxes of objects to visualize what happened. If Mario defeats Bowser while his hammers are being thrown, the hitboxes of the hammers freeze in place while the actual sprites unload. Normally, this would be irrelevant as everything after this is a cutscene and as such should not use hitboxes at all.

However, the game dispenses a Super Mushroom that falls from the top of the screen if Mario defeats Bowser as Small Mario (to allow Mario to be roughly the same size as Peach when she kisses him and prevent her from having to bend down). For this, the game actually turns Mario’s hitbox back on during the cutscene so that he can collect the mushroom. If one of the hammers happened to be in the precise position on screen where Mario stops to wait for the mushroom, he will be killed by its hitbox.

In practice, this scenario is exceedingly rare, but has been reported happening organically to some players over the years.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Kosmicd12

Officially licensed 1999 Donkey Kong 64 T-shirt with illustrations created by slightly modifying official artwork and in-game renders. Note how Lanky is using an in-game render of him standing, but turned sideways, and how Donkey Kong is using official artwork with one arm edited to be turned 180°.

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The way Mario flashes under the influence of the Super Star in Super Mario Bros. 3 is dependent on his current power-up state and the palette of the environment he is in.

Above is a full diagram of every single color he can flash during gameplay (please zoom in to view details).

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: Doc von Schmeltwick

Top: Bowser’s regular winning animation in Mario Kart DS.

Bottom: a rare glitch may occur in Battle Mode whereby Bowser will not correctly perform his animation after winning, and instead only slightly bounce up and down while not moving his arms or head.

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High-quality scan of the various Bee Mario concept art sketches included in the official 2007 Prima guide for Super Mario Galaxy.

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

Donkey Kong 64’s entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for “Most Collectable Items in a Platform Game” states that it has 3,821 unique items to collect, but it has an extremely large oversight. Note that it mentions banana coins under the “infinite-supply” item list, when they are actually also unique collectable items (they do not respawn when collected and the collection status of each of them is saved to the file, though it does not affect the completion percentage).

There are actually 974 Banana Coins in the game, so that Guinness’s estimate of the amount of the collectable items is almost one thousand away from the actual number.

On an unrelated note, the entry also misspells golden bananas as “golden banans”.

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In Super Mario World, using Start+Select to quit out of a level actually adds 1 to a specific memory address every time, which causes it to overflow when it is done 255 times in a row. The next time Mario finishes a stage after doing this, specific overworld events will not activate.

While this is purely deleterious in most instances (no overworld paths spawning and thus further progress being prevented), it has a unique result with Switch Palace levels. These normally self-destruct after being cleared, but will be prevented from doing so in this scenario.

This allows Mario to re-enter a cleared Switch Palace and discover that the switch is actually gone when it has already been pressed. The code that removes the switch when it is already active can never be seen in action under regular circumstances.

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