Original painting used for the 1991 “We Just Signed The Biggest Names In Entertainment” trade magazine ad for the Philips CD-i, wherein the company boasted having licensed rights for these major Nintendo franchises for their system.

Note that only Mario, Link, and Zelda’s planned games ended up being released (Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, respectively); the planned game featuring Donkey Kong was cancelled.

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Super Mario Galaxy 2 contains a number of leftover files from development, alongside test for an area used as a dialogue test zone. That area contains a variety of bizarre dialogue for NPCs, such as Toads saying things like “crab crab mochi crab crab crab” and “3”, as seen in this earlier post.

One of the NPCs encountered would have been the Honey Queen, who would have said four text boxes in sequence, reading
Queen? Queen?
I am the queen
Uhuhu
Ohohoho

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In Super Mario Bros. 3, whenever Mario collects the 100th coin and his coin counter resets, there is a single frame in which the counter displays “64”.

This is because internally, the number of coins is stored in the hexadecimal system, and on every frame, a function is performed to convert that number into decimal for the purposes of displaying it to the player. As such, the “true” representation of the number of coins may be e.g. 2F while displaying it to the user as 47.

100 in decimal is 64 in hexadecimal. The reason it flashes 64 for a single frame is that due to an oversight in the code, on the frame where the counter resets, only the “reset counter” code is run while the “convert to decimal” code isn’t. As such, the player gets a single-frame glimpse at the “true” number before it starts being converted again on the next frame.

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Officially licensed 2019 Lakitu-themed travel hanger pouch from Japan with a whimsical design.

In its completely folded state, it appears as a Lakitu’s Cloud (top left). Opening it shows it is made out of two compartments, and a Lakitu-themed hanger that folds out (top right).

It is also possible to fold out only the hanger while closing the pouch itself, whereupon it will appear as Lakitu riding his cloud (bottom).

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In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, enemies can hold badges in battle. While only a fraction of the game’s badges is actually ever held by enemies during normal gameplay, all of them have code for being held, including correct effects as applied to the enemies (for example, Happy Flower restores FP to the only enemy in the entire game that uses FP, the Flower Fuzzy).

When Mario wears the All or Nothing badge, the effect is the following: if the player correctly executes an Action Command, the damage of Mario’s attack is increased by 1; if the Action Command is failed, the attacks instead do no damage.

Interestingly, if enemies are made to wear that badge, their attacks always do no damage (note the little “does no damage” star in the right screenshot). This means that internally, enemies are considered to always fail their Action Commands, which from an in-universe standpoint implies that there could theoretically be more powerful, “successful” versions of their attacks that we simply never get to see.

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In multiplayer mode in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, all players are able to enter a bubble by pressing a specific button. If only one player who is not in a bubble is left, and that player enters a bubble on the same frame as touching a Goal Pole, that player’s character will be erased from existence.

Note how Mario disappears in the footage and Player 1 is left controlling a seemingly empty bubble. Since there is now nothing left that can pop either of the bubbles, and the game does not proceed with the end-of-level sequence, the game becomes unplayable and needs to be reset to continue.

Humorously, the bubbles even float offscreen, which they normally cannot do since they are supposed to bounce off the edges of the screen, and leave the field of view completely empty.

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Promotional photo for Super Mario Sunshine shoes from a 2020 Super Mario Bros. 35th Anniversary Puma/Nintendo collaboration.

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In Super Mario 64, objects in levels are divided into 20 groups, whereby objects in a group are always loaded together into memory. It is impossible to use an object without loading the entire group. For example, Group 10 (The Castle Grounds Group) contains Peach, Yoshi, and decorative birds. As such, the game cannot put a decorative bird into a scene without also loading the models and code of Peach and Yoshi.

Interestingly, the Wing Mario Over The Rainbow secret course loads the Lava Group, consisting of Bully and the unused Blargg enemy, and the Cave/Lava Group, consisting of Dorrie, Mr. I, Scuttlebug, Snufit and Swoop, into memory despite not using a single entity from either group. This is the only area in the game that loads groups of entities it does not use.

Together with development data that reveals that Rainbow Ride was supposed to be “Lethal Lava Land 2”, this suggests that at some point during development, the final part of the game (Rainbow Ride, this course, and potentially Bowser in the Sky) was supposed to have a lava theme, as used traditionally for final areas in Mario games, before being reworked to be sky-themed instead.

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Behind-the-scenes footage of Charles Martinet during his first ever public performance as Mario using the “Mario In Real Time” motion capture setup at the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show.

Here, he is testing how well the facial motion capture rig conveys extreme expressions for Mario by switching between exaggerated smiling and exaggerated sadness.

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Donkey Kong decoration used at E3 1998.

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