Two-page spreads from an officially licensed 1990 Super Mario Bros. 3 coloring book, using a combination of existing artwork for the characters and original artwork for the backgrounds.

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Top: the prototype version of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga featured much more exaggerated and stylized designs for the Virus enemies in Woohoo Hooniversity.

Bottom: in the finished game, the quirkiness of the designs has been severely dialed back, so that the enemies are now on-model with the depiction of the Viruses in the Dr. Mario series.

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The Hippo level (the level leading to the Space Zone) in Super Mario Land 2 is notable for being beatable with only two button presses.

In the footage, Right on the D-Pad is pressed in the beginning of the level and held throughout. Then, A is pressed when Mario approaches the hippo statue and held for the remainder of the level. While B is also held to speed up Mario’s movement, it is not necessary and the level can be beaten without using it. No other inputs are made.

This results in Mario automatically jumping into the bubble and floating as high as possible while moving right, which takes him past all obstacles directly to the goal. (Note that the middle of the level has been sped up by a factor of 10 to skip the lengthy floating.)

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Concept art of Toad designs based on other Illumination movies (Despicable Me and The Lorax), for the 2023 Super Mario Bros. movie.

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Recreation of early sprites for Peach, Toad and a Podoboo/Lava Bubble seen in concept art documents for Super Mario Bros.

In this concept, Peach and Toad would have used more than the regular 3 solid colors and 1 transparent color that the NES supports for sprites, which would have been achieved by layering sprites (such as e.g. used for Mario’s eyes in Super Mario Bros. 2, which also break the limit).

In the finished game, this idea was abandoned and all sprites use only the regular palette limit without any layering tricks.

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In Super Mario 64, if Mario is forced out of bounds in any way, he will die instantly. Mario cannot enter out of bounds areas by most legitimate means, but he can be put there with a variety of glitches. Still, there is one place in the game where it is possible to die in this manner during regular gameplay without any sort of complex glitch setup.

In one of the upper corners of the main area of Wet-Dry World, there is a Chuckya enemy. The vertical wall next to it has an out of bounds area on the other side. If Mario lures it into the corner, it will grab Mario while already clipping partially out of bounds. After it rotates, if it happens to be facing towards that wall when it throws Mario, he will be immediately slain in the manner depicted.

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Officially licensed 2017 Bowser onesie.

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Mario Kart: Super Circuit was the first game in the Mario Kart series to use ranks to grade the player’s performance after a Grand Prix, with the ranks introduced in this game (3 stars, 2 stars, 1 star, and A through E) becoming standard for the series going forward.

However, the game also contains early unused graphics for the ranks (top row; finished ranks on bottom row for comparison). From this, two interesting observations can be made:
1. If these ranks were used, it would have been possible for the other games to base their ranks on them instead, so that the entire Mario Kart series would have used the industry-standard SSS, SS and S ranks instead of the stars in that scenario.
2. The black smiley face is actually the letter C graphic but with a different palette. While it is most likely that this palette was never intended, it is notable how it coincidentally results in the letter appearing as a smiley face.

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Live-action segments from the Japanese 2013 commercial for Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, showcasing Luigi’s various Dream World abilities.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: vini64

Extremely rare bronze Mario statue given by Nintendo of America to employees in recognition of longtime service. The statues were manufactured by R. S. Owens & Company, who also manufactured the Oscar statues for the Academy Awards.

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