A Super Mario variety blog.
Screenshots, photos, sprites, gifs, scans and more from all around the world of Super Mario Bros.
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Super Mario 64 contains homing 1-Up Mushrooms in some areas. These relentlessly chase Mario by flying straight towards him at all times, and can pass through walls, making them very difficult to purposefully avoid (which is the basis of many self-imposed challenges in this game, such as collecting all Red Coins in a level while avoiding the mushroom).
However, the 1-Up Mushrooms have one weakness: they cannot pass through out-of-bounds areas. Normally, neither can Mario, making this irrelevant; however, in the castle grounds, there is a famous glitch whereby Mario can clip through the tower and land in a room on the other side of the door, which is in fact divided from the playable area by a thin out-of-bounds strip.
The footage shows the mushroom’s behavior if Mario manages to enter that area while it is chasing him: it will keep flying against the out-of-bounds area, fruitlessly trying to get to Mario.
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Top: in Paper Mario: The Origami King, the moat around Peach’s Castle does actually reflect the castle, but due to the narrow width of the moat and the angle at which it is seen in most scenes, very little of the reflection is actually visible. Note the slightly visible reflection of the towers near the bottom edge of the screenshots.
Bottom: due to so little of the castle being visible in the reflection, the designers did not properly mirror the castle for the reflection model, and instead merely rotated it 180 degrees, which can be seen here in a model viewer.
As such, the reflection has the stained glass Peach looking in the opposite direction (circled on the left), as well as having the turret near the center of the castle on the wrong side (circled on the right). Note that rotation is one of the easiest operations that can be performed on a 3D model so this was likely simply made as quickly as possible to still be good enough for the small part of the reflection seen in-game.
Source: noclip.website
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In Mario Party 2, the “Day at the Races” minigame may seem to have completely random results, but the players can actually influence their chances of winning by looking closely at the racers’ animations and knowing the probabilities of them winning.
Top: before the race, each racer will be in one of three different animations, a slow, medium, or fast one. It is always advantageous to pick a racer in a fast animation if one is present, unless it is Thwomp, who is so objectively bad that not even being in the fast animation would make him better than his competitors.
Bottom: the probabilities of the racers arriving in either first or the first two places. Note how when given the choice between several racers of the same animation speed, Boo is better than Whomp, who is better than Bob-omb, but a faster speed is more important than the specific racer (unless, again, the racer is Thwomp, who should not be chosen under any circumstances).
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In Super Mario Galaxy 2, Fluzzard is only intended to be used as regular Mario, not any of his powered-up forms. Since the Fluzzard object was never intended to be interacted with as Boo Mario, no routine handling it exists; yet surprisingly, instead of the game crashing as would be expected, it fails in a unique way.
Top: as seen during gameplay, Fluzzard’s legs appear to extend far behind the camera when Boo Mario glides with him.
Middle: changing the camera angle reveals that as long as Boo Mario remains attached to Fluzzard, he will keep extending his legs. The talons are not stationary, but do lag very far behind Fluzzard’s body, causing the legs to stretch.
Bottom: Zooming out after flying further (please zoom in to view). The longer Fluzzard flies, the longer his legs will become until it is nearly impossible to see them when zooming out due to them being stretched so thin. Note that this does not affect the functionality; it is still possible to make it to the end and win.
Source: HEYimHeroic
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In Donkey Kong 64, the boss battle against Dogadon in Fungi Forest has two phases. After dealing enough hits to him, he will stomp on the platform, causing it to start sinking. The rest of the battle is timed and revolves around beating him up as Hunky Chunky before the platfom sinks completely.
This phase can be skipped entirely with a bizarre glitch. The TNT barrels in this game are only ever required to be thrown, but they can also be set down like regular barrels. However, since setting them down is never required, the developers never tested that situation, resulting in a major oversight.
If Chunky Kong picks up the TNT barrel, avoids Dogadon’s attacks, and sets it down under him, the game will count that as dealing the final hit to Dogadon, and skip directly to his death cutscene. Note that the sudden skip to Chunky being huge and punching Dogadon is not a cut in the footage, but literally what the game immediately skips to after Dogadon touches the barrel (since the scene assumes Chunky would need to be huge to deal the final hit).
Source: 2dos
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The precision with which Super Mario Bros. calculates its acceleration on every frame is measured in subsubsubpixels, or 1/4096th of a pixel. Here is a series of images visualizing how small subsubsubpixels actually are.
Top: a view of Small Mario’s face, with the grid subdividing the image into subpixels. A subpixel-sized mole was added to his nose.
Middle: zooming into the mole, with the grid subdividing the image into subsubpixels. A red subsubpixel-sized spot was added to the mole.
Bottom: zooming in on the red spot with the grid subdividing the image into subsubsubpixels. The yellow square is the size of a subsubsubpixel.
This is the precision to which the acceleration formulae in the game’s code operate (though not to which Mario’s position is stored; that is merely in subpixels).
Source: Jdaster64
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In the true final boss battle of Donkey Kong Country 3, one of Baron K. Roolenstein’s attacks is creating an electric barrier above the Kongs and then sending an electric pulse along the ground. This would normally not be avoidable, but the steel keg that spawns in the arena absorbs electricity. As such, the intended way to deal with the attack is to pick up the keg and place it down between the electric pulse and the Kongs to block it.
However, there is an oversight in the programming of the electric pulse that makes it not respond to the game being paused. Instead of everything on screen stopping, the electricity simply continues moving even during the pause.
This can be used to more easily avoid the attack. As demonstrated in the footage, the player merely has to press Start, wait for the electricity to pass through the Kongs (which does not harm them due to the game being paused) and then unpause to continue after the attack finishes, which skips needing to place the keg in the way of the electricity.
Source: Ivan.F
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Extremely rare officially licensed 1991 Super Mario Bros. shirt featuring an original illustration of Mario rollerblading.
Source: bgmdboutique
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In Super Mario Bros., swimming Cheep Cheeps that appear in water levels and the flying Cheep Cheeps that appear in the bridge levels on land are internally completely different objects that merely use the same graphic. Since Mario cannot stomp enemies underwater, it is impossible for him to stomp the swimming kind during regular gameplay.
However, if a swimming Cheep Cheep is placed in a land stage and Mario stomps it, it actually turns into a Koopa Troopa, the same way a Koopa Paratroopa would when stomped. This is not actually merely an unintended consequence of the stomping but appears to be a remnant of the Cheep Cheep’s development history.
In internal development files that surfaced in 2020, the Super Mario Bros. source code was included. In it, Cheep Cheeps were called “flying kame” (“kame” being Japanese for “turtle”), suggesting that their code was originally intended for a type of Koopa Paratroopa before being repurposed for an underwater enemy, the flying movement being recontextualized as swimming.
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