Footage from an extremely early point during the development of Super Mario 3D Land, shown by the game’s director, Koichi Hayashida, during a Game Developers’ Conference 2012 presentation.

At this point, Mario had no animations and was represented by a static model sliding around, while the environment was a Whomp’s Fortress model imported from Super Mario 64.

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The Dragon Coins from Super Mario World went through a large number of revisions in the design process, as the developers evidently kept changing what the coins did and what they should depict, as seen by ordering development files by their creation date.

The coin originally started out as a large version of a normal coin, before being worth 10 coins, then 5, and then likely being changed to a special coin type of which several would need to be collected to receive an extra life. These first had Mario’s head on them before it was changed to Yoshi’s head in the final version.

As such, it can be assumed that the developers wanted to have “big coins” from the beginning of development, whereas the exact function of them was to be determined later.

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In Super Mario Galaxy 2, there is a black hole that will not activate the usual “sucked into a black hole” animation, instead making the player characters simply float in midair until they disappear.

It can be found at the end of one of the moving platform paths in the Bowser Jr.’s Fearsome Fleet galaxy.

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Whenever Mario obtains accessories in Super Mario RPG, these simply get added to his inventory. A commonly known exception is the Ghost Medal, which is forcibly equipped upon him when he completes the Three Musty Fears quest.

However, a much more obscure second exception exists that very few players would ever see organically during gameplay. If Mario obtains the Troopa Pin from Sergeant Flutter by scaling the wall in Land’s End quickly enough, and he is not currently wearing an accessory, Sergeant Flutter will actually equip it onto Mario himself.

As it is highly unlikely that a player would have played all the way through 5 out of the game’s 7 sections without equipping an accessory on Mario (unless doing some manner of self-imposed challenge), most players would not see this and the pin would simply be added to Mario’s inventory as usual.

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Concept art for various logo designs for the Crazy Cap stores in Super Mario Odyssey, seen in the Art of Super Mario Odyssey book.

Note that “since 1994” and the monkey’s appearance are likely a reference to Diddy Kong, who debuted in Donkey Kong Country in 1994. Since Crazy Cap is said to originate in the Donkey Kong-themed New Donk City in-universe, it would have been appropriate to theme it after a specific Donkey Kong character in this manner.

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Original illustration of Toad taking off his mushroom cap and using it as a parachute from an officially licensed 1991 German book accompanying the Super Mario Bros. Super Show cartoon series, based on a similar scene seen in the cartoon.

Note that in recent years, Nintendo has repeatedly and explicitly stated that this interpretation is no longer correct and that Toad’s mushroom cap is part of his head, and thus non-removable.

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All unique animated segments from the commercial for the Super Comboy, a version of the Super Famicom/SNES marketed for the South Korean market. Note the variety of characters from other franchises except Nintendo ones, such as Dragon Ball, Looney Tunes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

While it has been long assumed that the choppy quality of the commercial was due to faults in the recording equipment on part of the person who archived the earliest known version of it, this high-quality version revealed that this is simply how it was animated, and the low framerate was likely a time or budget issue. Compare the choppy framerate on the singing characters with the smooth framerate of Mario peeking out from the curtain at the end.

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Rare officially licensed 1989 Mario vs. Luigi ladder race game. The aim is to tilt the ladders in such a way as to cause the Mario and Luigi pieces to latch on consecutive rungs of the ladder on the way down, with the first player to reach the bottom being the winner.

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Artwork of Geno wearing the clothes of the protagonist of Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, drawn by Super Mario RPG character design supervisor Kazuyuki Kurashima, who was also the character designer for Moon.

More references to Mario and particularly Geno that can be found in that game can be seen in these posts.

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In Super Mario Galaxy, whenever Mario enters the galaxy selection screen from an observatory dome, the screen appears to zoom out extremely far to show the surrounding galaxies.

However, internally, it is not only the screen zooming out, but the area Mario is in also shrinking. In its regular state, both the dome and the galaxies are loaded in at the same time, but the galaxies are set to be invisible as long as Mario is not on the selection screen.

The above animation shows the default state of the Garden dome with the galaxies visible, whereby they rotate slightly outside the playable area.

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