Behind-the-scenes photo from the production of the 2014 Japanese Mercedes-Benz GLA-Class/Mario Kart 8 cross-promotion commercials, showing the Luigi actor, Vinny Balbo, in costume.

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In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Merlee can be paid to provide random beneficial effects during and after battles to Mario for a period of time, one of them being her increasing the amount of coins received after a battle.

However, despite this effect being able to be activated after some event battles, it does not actually work with them due to an oversight, providing 0 coins as they are hardcoded to not provide any coins.

In the footage, the Embers that attack Bobbery on Keelhaul Key (an event encounter) are defeated and the effect activates. Instead of providing some coins, after the effect animation concludes, the enemies simply disappear.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: YouTube user “parallelskawo”

Officially licensed extremely small (ca. 1 inch) 2002 Peach figurine from Japan.

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In Super Smash Bros. Melee, some of the debug functions in the game’s code provide the player with a bizarre version of the game’s roster that is almost fully unlocked but contains two differences:
-it is always in Japanese even if the game itself is another version
-Luigi is absent.

Such a version of the roster is not normally possible during regular gameplay as the only way to unlock Mr. Game & Watch is to unlock every other character first, including Luigi. This is likely related to the fact that when a save file is first started, Pikachu is in the place Luigi eventually occupies, and is then moved down when Luigi is unlocked. Some part of this process may have been not yet implemented, or have been broken, when this debug menu was programmed.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: SSBM (NA, GC)

Footage of an early prototype of Super Mario Kart recovered from Nintendo internal files. At this point, no CPU driver behaviors were implemented, and only Mario, Luigi and Bowser were available racers.

Single-player mode would then consist of the player “competing” against a random assortment of Marios, Luigis and Bowsers that would stand still at the starting line.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: YouTube user “tailslaboratorychannel4444”

Unique stylized/simplified “pseudo-3D” illustration of the Yoshi’s Island 1 level from Super Mario World, seen in a 1990 issue of the Japanese Famitsu magazine.

The actual map of the level is provided on the bottom, for comparison (please zoom in to view). Note that only the largest landscape features are represented in the simplified version, and that the proportions of the terrain are heavily altered.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: 1: Famitsu (Japan), Issue 114, 1990; 2

Officially licensed finger puppet of the Rip Van Fish enemy from Super Mario World, from Japan.

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Officially licensed Mario Kart T-shirt.

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In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the Wonder Effect in Rolling-Ball Hall tilts the screen while spiked balls roll after the player characters. Internally, the effect has a freely adjustable angle parameter that allow for the screen to be tilted to much higher degrees than done in the finished game, as seen in the footage.

While it can be used to tilt the screen even more than 90 degrees, the game cannot properly handle the scenario where a character moving by pressing Right would move them to the left on the screen and vice versa, and prevents the character from moving entirely.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: twitter.com user “NicoWaddleDee”

In Super Mario World, various glitches exist that write values to unintended parts of memory, allowing extreme degrees of manipulation of the game.

While chaining many of them together can expand this ability even further and allow full control of the game so that it can be rewritten on the fly (called Arbitrary Code Manipulation, or ACE), even a single such glitch is enough to warp Mario directly to the credits and as such skip the entire game, as seen in the footage.

In the footage, Yoshi spits out an item while in a glitched state on a spinning platform, which has the effect of immediately loading the credits. As a humorous side effect, some parts of the credits, such as Mario’s walking animation, are loaded incorrectly, causing him to spin onto the scene instead of walking.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: YouTube user “oddboo”