The kiosk demo version of Donkey Kong 64 contains early dialogue for rescuing Diddy Kong whereby he uncharacteristically taunts Donkey Kong by saying “HA, FOOL, YOU’VE LET ME GO!”
This was likely a joke by the developers, as the main area of Jungle Japes, where Diddy Kong would be rescued, is inaccessible in the demo and only the development team was intended to see this message.
The footage above shows the dialogue in action by modifying the demo’s version of the area to be playable.
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Screenshots of “Goombario and the Adventure of the Hot Lava Rocks”, a promotional Flash game found in 2000 on Nintendo of America’s official site for Paper Mario.
The object of the game is to make Goombario cross the lava within a time limit by jumping across rocks, while avoiding the rocks sinking into the lava and Kammy Koopa flying around. The experience is reminiscent of the arcade game Frogger.
Top: introduction screen.
Bottom left: gameplay.
Bottom right: “nice job” screen shown between levels.
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The character select screen in Mario Kart: Super Circuit contains an undocumented, easily missed functionality whereby pressing R will make the currently selected racer jump, while pressing L will shoot a Green Shell.
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Unused sound samples of Mario, Luigi, Peach and Toad singing, humming and whistling the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme, found in the files of Super Mario Advance.
As the only place during gameplay where this theme appears is in the strictly-timed Subspace sections, it is possible that an early concept for them was that the player characters would sing along to the first part of the song during the few seconds they are within Subspace.
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In Level 6-8 of Yoshi’s Island, it is possible to cause the game to become unplayable simply by touching the transformation bubble at the beginning of the level on the same frame as touching Kamek.
Kamek and Yoshi will become frozen in mid-air and the game will not respond to any inputs, forcing it to be reset to continue playing.
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Top: the three Super Mario cartoon series contain a wide variety of errors and oversights, but a particularly notable one happens in the Super Mario World episode “The Night Before Cave Christmas” in the scene where Mario shows off his Santa costume.
Between Mario saying “So, what do you think?” and Luigi replying “Don’t try wearing it in Brooklyn!”, the episode’s production information card is visible for a single frame. This is the animated equivalent of a clapperboard from the beginning of a scene being visible in the finished cut of a movie.
Bottom: the frame in isolation.
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Letter from Nintendo to the Donkey Kong 64 development team at Rare, regarding the planned, but ultimately unused Stop'n'Swap functionality in the game.
The original plan was to be able to let data be transferred between Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 via very quickly removing one cartridge from the Nintendo 64 and inserting another, with a peculiarity of the system allowing the RAM to persist for a short time, allowing some information to be retained between games.
However, as pointed out in the letter, Nintendo had concerns about this functionality not being possible on later revisions of the hardware, as well as about the safety of the procedure, causing them to ask Rare to cut the feature. The game contains various unused content related to it, such as a Banjo-Kazooie-themed fridge in Donkey Kong’s treehouse.
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