Unused sound samples of Mario, Luigi, Peach and Toad singing, humming and whistling the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme, found in the files of Super Mario Advance.
As the only place during gameplay where this theme appears is in the strictly-timed Subspace sections, it is possible that an early concept for them was that the player characters would sing along to the first part of the song during the few seconds they are within Subspace.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: FireStarw
In Level 6-8 of Yoshi’s Island, it is possible to cause the game to become unplayable simply by touching the transformation bubble at the beginning of the level on the same frame as touching Kamek.
Kamek and Yoshi will become frozen in mid-air and the game will not respond to any inputs, forcing it to be reset to continue playing.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: TheRoundCube
Top: the three Super Mario cartoon series contain a wide variety of errors and oversights, but a particularly notable one happens in the Super Mario World episode “The Night Before Cave Christmas” in the scene where Mario shows off his Santa costume.
Between Mario saying “So, what do you think?” and Luigi replying “Don’t try wearing it in Brooklyn!”, the episode’s production information card is visible for a single frame. This is the animated equivalent of a clapperboard from the beginning of a scene being visible in the finished cut of a movie.
Bottom: the frame in isolation.
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Letter from Nintendo to the Donkey Kong 64 development team at Rare, regarding the planned, but ultimately unused Stop'n'Swap functionality in the game.
The original plan was to be able to let data be transferred between Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 via very quickly removing one cartridge from the Nintendo 64 and inserting another, with a peculiarity of the system allowing the RAM to persist for a short time, allowing some information to be retained between games.
However, as pointed out in the letter, Nintendo had concerns about this functionality not being possible on later revisions of the hardware, as well as about the safety of the procedure, causing them to ask Rare to cut the feature. The game contains various unused content related to it, such as a Banjo-Kazooie-themed fridge in Donkey Kong’s treehouse.
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Near the beginning of Mario & Luigi: Brothership (after completing the first island), Arc explains the Ocean Map and currents to Mario and Luigi. For this, he uses a unique screen showing several islands in a hand-drawn style. The screen is only seen in full for a few frames before Arc’s speech bubble appears and covers the bottom 1/3 of the image for the rest of the segment. Here is the unobscured image.
Note also that the borders around the map are hand-drawn versions of the more detailed borders seen when using the actual Ocean Map.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: M&L:B (Switch)
Image used for an officially licensed 1999 Yoshi’s Story jigsaw puzzle from Japan, containing edited versions of official renders for the game. In particular, the angry Blue Yoshi’s expression is completely original and does not appear in this form in any official artwork.
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The skin texture used for King K. Rool in the SNES Donkey Kong Country trilogy was recently found, being a procedural leather texture called “leather1” from a commercial 3D asset collection, with the color simply being changed from brown to green.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Render96VGTP