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 a 2010 interview, Koji Kondo related a story of how when he met Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Paul and his wife immediately sang the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme unprompted, which was a very proud moment of him to be recognized in such a way by such a prominent musician.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: NintendoMemo, info
Unique 3D animated segment from a 2005 Japanese commercial for the GBA version of Donkey Kong Country 3, showing Ellie the Elephant using her water-shooting ability to save Donkey Kong from a lion.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: 83Chrisaaron
A special feature in a 1986 issue of the Japanese Famitsu magazine had a yogi (yoga practitioner) develop yoga poses based on video game characters. A pose he describes as “advanced” is the Super Mario jumping pose, based on his sprite from Super Mario Bros.
According to the yogi, the Super Mario pose strengthens the legs and fists through mental concentration.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: Famitsu (Japan), Issue 3, 1986
In Level 7-1 of New Super Mario Bros., striped swinging poles can be found in a bonus room. If Mario times his swing in such a way that he is blocked by a cloud platform, he will enter a glitched state where he will stay on the platform but move as though he was still holding on to the pole instead.
Note him swinging back and forth and climbing on seemingly nothing. Letting go of the pole will make Mario teleport underneath it, as seen at the end of the footage.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: NSMB (NA, DS)
In Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, the bonus missions in each mansion all play their own arrangement of the same song (the “Gradual Infiltration theme”). The arrangements use the same leitmotif but in a style that reflects the regular music from the respective mansion.
However, interestingly, there is one mansion with two main music tracks, being Old Clockworks. The aboveground part of the mansion has an antique-sounding theme with a harpsichord lead, while the underground part, Clockwork Ruins, is Egyptian-themed.
The bonus mission of Old Clockworks, Outlandish Interruption, plays the Gradual Infiltration theme in the style of the aboveground mansion in-game. However, an unused track exists in the game’s files that is an arrangement of it in the style of the Clockwork Ruins, which is heard in this post.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
Most games that have a dialogue system making use of more than one text style have an internal markup system (similar to e.g. HTML tags) used to determine properties of the text, such as size, color etc. inside the message.
In the Super Mario Galaxy games, some of these tags are not merely redundant but outright self-defeating, so that one tag may change the text properties only to be immediately undone by a different tag changing them to something else.
The image shows a baffling example of a message in Super Mario Galaxy 2 that visually changes color 5 times (starting with black, to red, to black, to blue and finally back to black), which would normally need no more than 5 color change tags.
However, internally, the game instead changes the color 10 times, including multiple times in a row into the same color. This messy implementation is likely a remnant of various rewrites of the original message whereby the tags were never cleaned up between revisions.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: HEYimHeroic
In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the incident that starts off the story is that Peach’s voice has been stolen and replaced with symbols that drop out of her speech bubble and explode on the ground. The symbols are only seen very briefly during the beginning of the game and never are on screen long enough to be examined closely.
Here are all 10 explosive speech symbols, extracted from the files of the Nintendo 3DS version of the game.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
In Paper Mario, the Dry Dry Ruins dungeon is laid out in an extremely curious manner internally. Every room is its own model so no two rooms are loaded into memory at once, but unlike every other area in the game, the rooms are not centered on the coordinate origin. Instead, every room is shifted and rotated from where it would be expected to be.
The solution is to load all the rooms into memory at once. This reveals that they form a cylinder, as seen in the images from various angles. This strongly suggests that at some point in development, it was intended for the rooms to all create a single large room, possibly to make use of the cylindrical structure in some unknown way.
While it would be impractical for the Nintendo 64 hardware to render all of this geometry at the same time, some games such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time do use a similar system whereby a dungeon is all connected and part of the same internal room, but only a part of it (a single visual room) is rendered at any one time. However, this would require the team to program a different way to load rooms from what the rest of the game uses, solely for the purpose of this dungeon, and could have been dropped due to being too much work for a one-time gimmick.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Peardian