In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the Pit of 100 Trials does not actually consist of 100 separate rooms. Instead, it is only a few rooms (one for each visually distinct type) and the game uses a lookup table to put different enemies in the room based on the floor number, making the entire Pit much more memory-efficient.

Even though the game never lets Mario progress past floor 100, if cheats or glitches are used to do so, it becomes apparent that the game uses an unsigned 8-bit integer (a variable with a maximum value of 255) for the floor number, but only has table entries up to 100. If any greater floor number is accessed, the table draws from data not intended to be part of the Pit, leading to bizarre results.

One very notable scenario occurs when floor 114 is accessed. After defeating a Goomba (who appears in-battle as nothing, making it an instant victory), the Goomba drops the Boat Mode ability, as an item. Every ability Mario gets actually exists as an item in the game, but Mario never obtains them in that manner. After picking it up, it is correctly added to Mario’s status screen and he is able to use it.

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After the release of Super Mario Odyssey, there have been many reported, and multiple documented, cases of Mario suddenly being able to swim in mid-air as seen in the footage.

Unfortunately, despite extensive attempts to reverse-engineer and reproduce the glitch, none have been successful and the mechanism behind it remains a mystery to this day.

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Trade magazine showcase for a line of cancelled 1999 “Mario’s World” Nintendo action figures.

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In Donkey Kong 64, the Kremling Krusha is an unlockable character in multiplayer mode, but cannot be used in single-player mode. If the code is modified to change to him in the regular adventure, it is revealed that he has a number of unique animations that are never seen in multiplayer mode, and which may suggest he could have been intended to be playable in single-player mode as well.

The footage shows Krusha’s unique unseen idle animation, whereby he struggles to not fall asleep.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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