Officially licensed 1990 Mario pajamas featuring an original illustration of Mario playing beach volleyball against Iggy using a Koopa shell that has never been used on any other product.

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The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros. is extremely well-known. By clipping into the Warp Zone room in World 1-2 via a precise jump and entering the leftmost pipe without scrolling far enough to cause the “Welcome to Warp Zone!” text to appear, Mario will be transported to World -1, a glitched underwater level with no escape.

The footage shows a relatively lesser-known variant of that glitch. If, instead of entering the leftmost pipe, the middle pipe is entered (which is more difficult to reach without causing the Warp Zone text to appear), Mario will be taken to World 5-1 instead. This can be used as a faster method to warp to World 5 than the regular warp from the end of World 4-2 (though this is useless when trying to beat the game as fast as possible since World 4 is the one that contains the warp to World 8, and warping to World 5 renders that shortcut inaccessible).

Technical explanation in the rest of the post:

This works because the Warp Zone text is what causes the pipes to be initialized to their proper destinations. Without it, their values are, from left to right, Level 36-1, 5-1 and 36-1 again*. The “36” value, due to going past 10, stops using number tiles and rolls over into the graphical tiles situated after them in memory, where that specific tile is completely transparent, causing the level to appear to read “[nothing]-1”, or World -1. The level itself is glitched due to being past the end of the level lookup table, causing the game to read unintended data.

*This is due to those values being used for the World 4-2 warp zone with a single pipe leading to World 5. The left and right pipe locations are marked with a transparent tile since there are no pipes there. Without the proper Warp Zone text initialization, it accesses the blank/5/blank configuration, but can now actually access the blank (World 36/Minus World) destination due to the pipes being present.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Olivias-Glitches

Top: in the first mission of Deep Dark Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy, using the cannon to aim above the miniature version of the Gateway planet and missing on purpose reveals a curious cubical object in the sky that only becomes visible once the sunset sky effect dissipates and the stars can be seen, shortly before Mario dies.

Middle: this is actually the inside of a bonus room in this galaxy (accessed via a pipe on the top of the cliffs surrounding the deep dive area), which is a cube-shaped room. Such bonus rooms are always situated somewhere in the galaxy, but usually placed so far away that they cannot actually be seen. Here, the developers evidently believed that the sunset clouds will hide the room and did not consider players missing their cannon shot on purpose.

Bottom: a view showing the room (top edge of the image) in a model viewer without the sunset sky effect, for reference. Note that when the room is entered (and in this viewer) it appears as a cube with an additional sphere of darkness around it, while it appears only as a simple cube when seen from outside during regular gameplay.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: SMG (NA, Wii)

At the end of Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck’s and Tippi’s human forms (Lord Blumiere and Lady Timpani) are seen as a distant silhouette from behind before disappearing over the hill. Only a single low-resolution graphic is used for them that shows nearly no detail.

The second Super Paper Mario issue (Volume 38 overall) of the Super Mario-kun official manga series shows Lady Timpani and Lord Blumiere in more detail and from more different angles, though still only as silhouettes to retain some of the mystery. Here are the pages showing them in these forms.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: SMK (Japan), Vol. 38, 2008

Top left: a slowed-down animation of a regular Dice Block prior to being hit in Mario Party 3. The Dice Block cycles through all possible numbers from 1 to 10 in a manner that appears random but is actually fixed.

Top right: a slowed-down animation of a Poison Mushroom Dice Block. This Dice Block can only roll numbers from 1 to 3 and has a special animation of the numbers mophing into each other instead of simply showing 1, 2 and 3 in the same quick manner the regular Dice Block would.

Bottom: this is actually a result of the developers deciding not to write new code for a Dice Block that would display only three numbers, and deciding to instead make it work within the confines of the preexisting ten-number code.

Every Dice Block has ten textures for the numbers it can display, and is coded to display them in a specific order. The “morphing” frames are simply the textures for the numbers 4 through 10 on the Poison Mushroom Dice Block, so that it can reuse the exact same code (display all ten textures in a specific order, here with only 3 of them being numbers) but appear to have a morphing animation instead.

This way, instead of needing to write code for a Dice Block with only three textures, the developers were able to implement a fancy animation by thinking creatively about the issue.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: 1, 2

Officially licensed Game & Watch Gallery 3 paper bag from Japan. Interestingly, it provides the artwork used on the Japanese box for the game in slightly better quality and less obscured than the box itself.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: blacktangent

In Star World 4 in Super Mario World, if Yoshi puts the key in his mouth, then Cape Mario uses his flight ability to hit the nearby row of green ! Blocks from below, spawning seven Cape Feathers in quick succession, the key in Yoshi’s mouth will become glitched.

When Yoshi spits out the key, it will appear as a shell-less yellow Koopa Troopa, except it will not move or harm Mario. Eating it again will produce the same result as eating a Cape Feather.

This glitch is notable for being able to actually be activated by accident during regular gameplay as it needs no special elaborate setup or particularly skillful play.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Olivias-Glitches

Super Mario 64 DS contains a glitch known as “hyperspeed holding”. If the player character is holding an object in his hands and continuously runs on a slope of a certain incline against a wall, the character will build up speed indefinitely (or at least until he clips through the wall due to the speed being too high).

In the footage, this is used to obtain a Red Coin from within an ice block without using Yoshi’s fire breathing ability which would normally be required to access it. Wario is holding the baby penguin and running against a fence on the slide. After a minute of this he reaches such speed that he can run all the way up to the ice block and clip inside it, collecting the coin.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: bobbybobsm64ds

Demonstration of the officially licensed 1993 Super Mario World version of the Pop-up Pirate game, featuring Mario popping out of a barrel and various items from the game replacing the swords.

This was manufactured by Tomy, the creators of the original Pop-up Pirate, and is in fact the first variation of that game ever made using a license from another company.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: kikaim