In Super Mario 64, the “Blast Away the Wall” star is notorious for being difficult to find for some players, particularly without guides and who do not immediately infer that this relates to shooting Mario at a wall from a cannon.

There is an alternate way a player could discover where the star is, though due to its situational nature, it is impossible to say whether any players have actually discovered the star this way in practice. If the player reaches the top of the fortress and then looks down from the top, paying close attention, it becomes apparent that the breakable walls are missing, and the star can actually be seen inside one of them (directly to the left of Mario’s head in the footage).

Of course, this is simply due to the fact that the regular walls are course geometry, which is rendered at all times, while the breakable parts of the wall are separate objects and have a finite rendering radius to conserve resources. The top of the fortress is far enough away to cause the breakable walls to stop rendering.

If a player notices this and tries to jump down to get the star, the walls will reappear and the star will once again not be visible, which may be taken as a hint that the walls can be destroyed.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: SM64 (NA, N64)

It was recently discovered that the Spin Dash move from Paper Mario has actually been there, unused, in the files of Super Paper Mario all along. The move is functional (as a move activated by Dashell, merely deactivated in-game) and requires rewriting only one line of code to insert back into the game.

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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

Frenetic advertising video that was played on screens nonstop in the Nintendo New York store (known as the Nintendo World store at the time) in 2005.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Foulowe59

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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