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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Since the Mario franchise is itself named after the main character and officially is rendered as “Super Mario” in merchandise, it is sometimes possible for some merchandise to appear to be confused between Mario and Luigi by pairing either the name “Luigi” with generic brand imagery of Mario, or the franchise name “Super Mario” with imagery of Luigi.
Left: a tag from a Luigi plush that uses a generic design depicting Mario, and only indicates that the product is Luigi as text, making it look like Mario is wrongly called “Luigi”.
Right: a mug depicting Luigi but not listing his name and instead listing the franchise name, making it look like Luigi is wrongly called “Super Mario”.
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In Yoshi’s Island, the core concept of the game’s plot is that the Yoshis are transporting Baby Mario using a relay system. When passing through a goal gate at the end of any non-boss level, the current Yoshi passes Baby Mario to the next Yoshi, who runs in from off-screen just in time to catch Baby Mario as he is thrown.
Interestingly, despite the catching Yoshi not actually being playable in that level (since he would be the playable character of the next level), he is also coded to be a player character internally instead of an NPC as would be expected, which means that he is able to collect items by touching them.
While normally, there are never any items for him to collect, it is possible to spawn stars in such a way that they hop across the screen and touch the catching Yoshi, as shown in the footage. This then actually causes the stars to count for the level’s totals. Note how the footage starts with the counter reading 28 while the Pink Yoshi is running towards the goal, while the results screen reads 30/30 due to the two stars the Light Blue Yoshi collected during the cutscene.
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Top: the “Face Lift” minigame from Mario Party 2 consists of manipulating the faces of the six player characters in a manner directly inspired by the Super Mario 64 title screen, to match a given face in the middle.
Bottom: the models are only intended to be viewed from the front, and were designed with that in mind. While the models for the heads of the other five characters are relatively normal even from angles they were never supposed to be viewed from, Peach’s head is highly distorted. Note the floating irises, particularly visible in the 45° view.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: lemurboy12
For many Mario games, their internal project names are known through a combination of officially released material by Nintendo, datamining the files, and leaked development material. Most of the names are self-explanatory and those that are not immediately apparent often turn out to be elaborate wordplay instead.
One of the more mysterious project names is “Bastet”, for Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move for the Nintendo 3DS eShop. Bastet is the name for an ancient Egyptian goddess, often depicted as a woman with a cat head.
It is theorized that since one of the roles attested to Bastet was that of a goddess of protection, and the player’s task in this game is to guide the Mini Marios to the goal while protecting them from danger, then the player takes on a role of a deity of protection in this manner.
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Design from an officially licensed 2007 T-shirt. While the presentation is clearly intended to evoke an “evolution” theme, suggesting that each successive Mario is from a more advanced game, the last two Marios are actually both from Super Mario 64, being the in-game model in the second to last place and the promotional render in the last place. This suggests that Promotional Art Mario is somehow “fitter” than his in-game self.
In addition, the Super Mario Bros. sprite in the second place is using an incorrect palette (being the palette from Donkey Kong; though interestingly, concept art for Super Mario Bros. reveals this was initially Mario’s palette in that game before it was changed), and the Super Mario World sprite in the third place is larger than the Super Mario Bros. sprite on the design despite being smaller in reality (Super Mario Bros. is 32 pixels tall while Super Mario World is 28 pixels tall).
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There is an extremely bizarre oversight in Super Mario Kart that causes all Question Panels that point towards the east side of the map to turn around to point south after they reset (Question Panels start resetting after 30 of them have been used up), and vice versa.
Top left: at the beginning of a battle in Battle Course 1, this panel points south, towards the yellow wall.
Top right: after battling enough for this panel to reset, it will now point east, away from the yellow corner.
Bottom: a two-frame animation of the panels changing. Note that panels that point north and west remain unchanged. The reason for this is unknown.
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Custom render of Mario aggressively presenting a Game Boy Advance, used in 2001 for the UK Nintendo Official Magazine.
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In Super Mario Galaxy, the battles against Bowser take place on spherical planetoids where Bowser must be tricked into Ground Pounding the blue spots on the floor, causing him to break the glass and get burned by the lava underneath.
However, if he is lured to Ground Pound on the metallic green platforms, he will destroy them and reveal a coin instead. If he does this from a very specific angle, he will escape the gravity of the planetoid and never come back down. Note Bowser slowly moving away in the footage.
There is no way to continue the battle in this state and the mission must be reset.
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On the Nintendo Today app, one of the selectable themes is the Donkey Kong theme. The theme has an Easter egg whereby on the 30th of each month, the animation actually differs based on whether that is the last day of that month, or whether that month also has a 31st day.
Both animations start off identically, with King K. Rool playing dead on the ground, with the text “The Month is Over?” However…
Left: on a month that does not end on the 30th, King K. Rool wakes up suddenly as the text disappears, signifying that there is still one more day left.
Right: if the month does end on the 30th, the text fades into “The Month is Over” without a question mark as King K. Rool remains dead.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: PortalSMario