Top left: the characters playable in Super Mario Kart.

Top right: the characters playable in Mario Kart 64. Note the replacement of Koopa Troopa and Donkey Kong Jr. with Wario and Donkey Kong, while all other drivers remain the same.

Bottom: a 1996 Nintendo Power Mario Kart 64 trading card provides an explanation for the replacement of Koopa Troopa with Wario, stating that Wario is rumored to have “borrowed” (i.e. suggested to have stolen) his kart from the Koopa Troopa.

Interestingly, no explanation is provided for the replacement of Donkey Kong Jr. with Donkey Kong, suggesting that at least at the time, the intent may have been that the Donkey Kong from Mario Kart 64 is simply an older version of the Donkey Kong Jr. from Super Mario Kart.

Source: donkeykonghistory

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Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem contains anti-piracy measures that activate if the game detects that it is running on non-original hardware (such as a rewritable flash cart).

If the game detects this, it will remove all bottom level girder connectors on all boss stages, rendering them impossible to beat since the Mini Marios will be confined to uselessly walking around the bottom layer.

Left: how the game normally appears during a boss battle. Note the red blocks with screws; these are girder connectors that can be used to make ramps for the Mini Marios to reach the switches to defeat Donkey Kong.

Right: how the game appears when it is pirated. Now none of the bottom level blocks have screws and the Mini Marios can do nothing.

Source: BF10

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In the WarioWare: Get It Together microgame “Splatoon 2”, Judd and Li'l Judd from the eponymous game appear.

Despite looking exactly like their 3D models in the source game, in WarioWare they are actually just looping animated 2D graphics, the equivalent to animated GIFs (extracted from the files here). Due to the fixed camera angle in the microgame, the difference between real 3D models and 2D animations is impossible to discern.

Source: DogToon64

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Mario and Luigi cardboard soccer game included with a 1986 issue of the Japanese Shōgaku Ichinensei magazine. The aim is to use the force of the rubber bands connecting Mario and Luigi’s arms to their legs to kick a soccer ball (actually a cube) into the opponent’s goal.

Source: Shogakukan

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Illustration from a 2006 feature on Shigeru Miyamoto in Time Magazine, featuring him standing in a field surrounded by Mario series and other characters.

Source: SuperGamer18

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In Mario Super Sluggers, Lakitu is the umpire and is only ever seen riding his cloud, so that his legs are not visible. As in many other games where Lakitu never leaves his cloud, his legs are not actually modeled; however, the model actually has control points (commonly known in 3D animation as “bones”) for his legs where they should be.

Above is Lakitu with the cloud removed and the leg bones made visible. It is unknown if this means he was at some point intended to leave his cloud (and potentially be a playable character) or whether his model was merely imported from another game where he did have legs, and the legs were then chopped off, leaving only the bones.

Source: Geno Penguin

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Various officially licensed Taiwan-exclusive Super Mario Galaxy Movie posters.

Source: blacktangent

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Main (top) and audio setup (bottom) menus from the official 2014 “Donkey Kong Country: Triple Feature” DVD containing 12 episodes of the Donkey Kong Country cartoon series.

The menus feature unique promotional renders of Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong that are slightly off-model from their appearance in the show itself.

Source: Kong

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Top: how the explosions look when Bowser is thrown into a bomb during one of his battles in Super Mario 64 in the finished game.

Bottom: the game actually contains unused animation frames for the smoke that are not displayed due to the transparency effect that is applied to the smoke in the finished version only resulting in one frame being shown. By disabling the transparency, the other frames are displayed, resulting in a much more violent-seeming explosion due to the extreme amount of smoke.

It stands to reason that the bottom version is how the explosion was originally intended to look, as using the transparency effect makes the smoke animation redundant. Then, the transparency was presumably added sometime during development, possibly due to the designers believing the original explosion was too intense.

Source: packattack04082, 1upGuy

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Mario Kart Wii has a very bizarre difference between versions whereby in the Italian and Korean versions only, the game seems to have been adjusted for light sensitivity.

Left: Luigi being repeatedly overtaken in the US English version.
Right: Luigi being repeatedly overtaken in the Korean version.

Whenever a racer’s position changes, the position indicator flashes white in nearly all language versions of the game (US English, UK English, Japanese, Canadian French, European French, German, Latin American Spanish and European Spanish). However, in the Italian and Korean versions, the flash is removed, causing the animation to appear more subtle.

While it is relatively common for such adjustments to be made for versions released later (such as the Korean version), the Italian version was released as part of the European disc, so it was finalized at the same time as all other European language versions. This presents an odd potential scenario where it was specifically the Italian localizer who looked at the animation, decided it was too bright, and removed the flash while not telling any other Nintendo of Europe colleagues, or telling them and them deciding against it. Then, the Korean localizer could have examined them all, decided the Italian localizer’s idea was worth repeating, and done the same in that version.

Alternatively, this could have been some inexplicable glitch that only appeared in those two versions somehow, which would be even more notable.

Source: B_squo

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