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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In 1986, Super Mario Bros. Special, a licensed version of Super Mario Bros. for the Japanese NEC PC-8801 and Sharp X1 home computers, was released by Hudson Soft. As was usual for new releases at the time, video game magazines ran print ads for the game for a few months after its release.
However, unlike the vast majority of print ads, this one was not merely reprinted every month, but kept continuously being updated to make Peach and Bowser more accurate to their artwork in other Mario games until they looked the most on-model in the final version of the ad.
Top left: initial version, with reversed dress colors for Peach and a unique lavender color scheme for Bowser.
Top right: first revision, Peach’s dress fixed, Bowser now mostly orange with his head being green on top, but parts of his arms and his eye area still being lavender.
Bottom left: second revision, Bowser almost entirely fixed, though his eye area is still lavender.
Bottom right: final revision, lavender color completely removed from Bowser, though his eye area and forehead are different shades of green.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: mp83
Animation playing during the game transfer process on a Famicom Disk Writer kiosk, a service offered by Nintendo in Japan allowing players to copy exclusive versions of Famicom games to rewritable disks.
The animation features Luigi showing what not to do with the disks, which is to not keep them near magnets or touch the exposed part of the disk.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: LocalH, via goobbue
It’s the return of the Supper Mario Broth livestreams, with an unexpected twist!
Join me on the Supper Mario Broth Twitch channel as I analyze the classic 1997 point-and-click adventure The Curse of Monkey Island in detail, including a showcase of Easter eggs, glitches, concept art and more!
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