Two-page spread from an officially licensed 1995 Mario activity book, depicting Mario being interrupted by Toad while he is about to eat a snack of Yoshi’s Cookies.

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1996 Super Mario RPG-themed Nintendo Power subscription form, featuring a summary of the game (please zoom in to read).

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In Mario Kart Wii, Green Shells and Red Shells break when they hit bananas. However, the same is also true for Spiny Shells (known popularly as Blue Shells). Since Spiny Shells are usually in the air and bananas are usually on the ground, this can only be seen extremely rarely in practice.

For this, a racer must throw a banana backward with perfect timing during a descent from a jump to hit the Spiny Shell in mid-air, as shown with Bowser in the footage (note the blue flash signifying that the Spiny Shell has exploded).

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Original illustration featuring a rare back view of Wart from Super Mario Bros. 2, from an officially licensed 1990 mylar balloon.

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Development files for Super Mario World contain graphics for a shark enemy in a remarkably similar style to the finished game’s dolphins, even using the same basic tail fin shape. Other graphics of these sharks are also found within the same graphics files as the dolphins, further suggesting they were related.

While this is purely speculation, the similar nature of these two entities suggests they could have appeared alongside each other with the sharks acting as a dangerous element to add challenge to the act of jumping from dolphin to dolphin.

If some of the dolphins were replaced with sharks, Mario would not only need to time the jumps to land on the next dolphin, but also to avoid any sharks that would have possibly jumped in the same arc.

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Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door contains an unused battle event called “btl_un_ufo”, or “Battle Unit UFO”. Note that the graphics of the UFO did not survive, with only the behavior remaining in the files. As such, the UFO was substituted with a Buzzy Beetle and the object it drops with a star.

The UFO would appear above the enemies and drop an object onto one of the enemies. What the object would have done is unknown, as that code has been expunged as well. The only known factor is that the event would appear randomly and choose a random enemy; it is likely that this would grant that enemy some special powers or abilities, or give Mario an extra reward for defeating it.

It is likely that the UFO was supposed to be a Sentinel from Tubba Blubba’s Castle from the original Paper Mario (bottom image), as indicated by the object’s internal name (キャッチャン) that matches up with the name from the original game.

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Collection of small Yoshi figurines hidden at random within officially licensed Mario bath bombs from Japan.

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Mario Party contains a curious set of textures for a Dice Block that only has six sides. This might appear completely normal to players only familiar with some of the more recent installments of the series, but until Mario Party 9, Dice Blocks did not act like regular six-sided dice.

Instead, they merely had a six-sided shape, but their surface would cycle through the numbers 1 through 10, acting like a 10-sided die in practice. The inclusion of this die implies that during the development of the first Mario Party, it was considered that the Dice Block should only have 6 numbers that it can roll (as it would in reality). The idea was ultimately discarded in favor of the physics-defying six-sided die that can roll 10 numbers, only to be picked back up 14 years later in Mario Party 9.

Interestingly, Super Mario Party would later introduce special Dice Blocks very similar to this one, with six possible numbers that are not sequential from 1 to 6, but rather customized, e.g. 1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6.

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In Super Mario Advance 4, there is a room that causes Koopa Troopas to assume glitched graphics, almost certainly due to the developers assuming that no Koopas will appear in that room, and thus not loading their graphics into memory.

In the World-e level “The ol’ Switcheroo”, if a P-Wing is used to take a Koopa Troopa all the way from the beginning into the room with the third Advance Coin, which requires careful maneuvering and was as such likely never expected by the developers, the Koopa Troopa’s sprites will appear as a jumble of other graphics.

Top: how the Koopa Troopa’s shell appears.
Bottom: how the Koopa Troopa itself appears after being left idle for long enough to emerge from its shell.

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Officially licensed 2011 Bob-omb T-shirt.

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