Top: “Shine Runners” is a battle mode found in Mario Kart DS, whereby drivers must collect Shine Sprites and then try to hang on to as many of them as possible, avoiding being hit and having their Shine Sprites stolen.

Bottom: it is possible that this name is actually a reference to the Prohibition era in the United States, where production, transport, and sale of alcohol was forbidden from 1920 to 1933. Cars specifically modified to be fast to be able to escape law enforcement while transporting moonshine were colloquially called “moonshine runners” or “shine runners” for short.

Whether this is an intentional reference to smuggling alcohol is unknown, but is notable even if it is a coincidence.

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The StreetPass Mii Plaza Puzzle Swap puzzle “Mario and Bowser” features a rotating platform displaying Mario, Bowser and Luigi with their arms folded.

Here is a view of the models in a model viewer, which allows them to be seen more closely than the low-resolution Nintendo 3DS screen.

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It is well known that in Super Mario 64, the mirror room in Peach’s Castle is not an actual mirror (since the Nintendo 64 would be incapable of creating real-time reflections in this manner) and is instead merely a copy of the room behind a pane of glass.

The mirror side of the room contains Mirror Mario, who is a separately coded object from Mario and as such is subject to several discrepancies that make him perform different actions from the real Mario under specific circumstances.

The biggest discrepancy is what happens when Mario actually enters the Snowman’s Land wall/painting. Since the real Mario unloads at that point, and Mirror Mario is programmed to copy whatever real Mario is doing (but cannot himself unload), he assumes a standard pose (what would be a T-pose in most games, but is an A-pose in this one) instead.

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Super Mario Odyssey contains unused code for a “CeilingKeep” state for Mario that does not resemble anything found in the finished game, or in Mario games in general, which can only be described as “ceiling with ice floor puzzle mechanics”.

A typical ice floor puzzle in a video game will take away the player’s control upon stepping on a slippery surface and make characters keep moving in a straight line until they either leave the ice floor or hit an obstacle.

This state confers the same ability, bafflingly, to a ceiling instead. The ceiling would “grab hold” of Mario, make him move without player input in the direction he was facing when he touched it, and only let go when he reached the end of the ceiling.

What this could have been used for, and what such a ceiling could have looked like, is unknown.

Top: a diagram of the state.
Bottom: an example of an ice puzzle, the Ice Path in the Generation II Pokémon series games.

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Extremely rare 1995 Nintendo of America employee jacket with an embroidered Diddy Kong and Dixie Kong design.

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In Super Mario Odyssey, one of the compliments Mario receives from Cappy after performing impressive feats is “Amazing! I’d take my hat off to you, but…”

This is referencing the fact that Cappy’s species, the Bonneters, have two forms: a “ghost form” in which they appear as a small ghost with nub arms (similar to a Boo) wearing a hat, and a “hat form” in which they are only the hat itself. Since their eyes are on the hat in both forms, it is logical to assume that the hat is the main/essential part of their being and the ghost body is an auxiliary construct. As such, the possibility of them being able to remove the hat seems very unlikely.

However, if we assume that such a thing is possible, i.e. that a Bonneter can remove the hat while remaining embodied in just the ghost part, then Cappy’s model is not actually fully modeled enough to see what that would look like. As the top of his ghost body is always covered by the hat, it is missing from the model.

Still, Cappy’s sister Tiara does have a fully modeled ghost body underneath her veil. This allows us to view at least her in this hypothetical “hat off” form, and if Cappy were to have one, it would likely look very similar to this.

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In the kiosk demo version of Mario Kart DS, some of the paintings on the Luigi’s Mansion track actually moved, shaking and bulging out as though trying to escape in case of the Boo paintings, and simply shaking in case of the Chauncey paintings, as seen in the footage.

This was removed completely in the finished version of the game for an unknown reason.

However, the functionality was restored when the track was brought back for Mario Kart 7, though with the alteration that all paintings in that version are Boo paintings and as such all of them move, instead of only specific ones like in the Mario Kart DS demo.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: davidevgen, bro3256

In Super Mario Bros. 3 (shown here in the Super Mario All-Stars version, but equally applicable to the NES and GBA versions), Boomerang Bros. are coded to have a 50% chance to jump every 256 frames (4.26 seconds).

However, the timer used to count these frames is not tied to whether the game is actually running, and continues counting even when the game is paused. As such, if the game is paused while the Boomerang Bro is in the middle of a jump, and unpaused when it is time for him to jump again, the Boomerang Bro will do a mid-air jump.

This is shown in the footage, where three lengthy pauses are used to force the Boomerang Bro to make a quadruple jump. With enough patience and either luck or tool-assisted luck manipulation, it is possible to make the Boomerang Bro ascend up to an arbitrary height, including completely off the top of the level.

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In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, there is a unique and extremely obscure attack that a Snifit can perform whereby it will knock away one of Mario’s attack slots.

For this to occur, Mario must get a jackpot at the Battle Spinner to get 3 attack slots, then attack the Snifit, and not kill it. While a number of players must have certainly experienced this attack on their playthroughs, its existence did not receive dedicated documentation online until 2024, 12 years after the game’s release.

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In the prototype version of Yoshi’s Island, the entire concept of Kamek creating the bosses by enlarging regular enemies has not yet been implemented, so the bosses are simply already large creatures to begin with.

This allows the game to do something that was impossible to do in the final version, which is to have the already large forms of the bosses appear before the battle starts. The footage shows the approach to the Naval Piranha boss battle in the prototype, where tendrils emerge from the water and lure Yoshi in before the actual boss appears. While not shown in the footage, the tendrils also hurt Yoshi if he touches them.

While it is unfortunate that this had to be removed as it would no longer fit the concept in the finished game, it was replaced with the equally memorable Easter egg whereby Yoshi can defeat Naval Piranha before Kamek can enlarge it, skipping the entire battle.

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