In the finished version of Super Mario Kart, the award ceremony is only displayed when the player has achieved first place in a Grand Prix. However, the game’s prototype version has alternate versions of the award ceremony for placing second and third.

Interestingly, these do not feature the flying Cheep Cheep from the regular ceremony. Above, the second place variation is seen, which actually features a Super Koopa from Super Mario World. The first place winner (which in this case in not the player character) then shoots the Super Koopa with a champagne cork, causing it to spin out.

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Yoshi’s New Island is one of the many games that contains the hidden Totaka’s Song Easter egg, due to Kazumi Totaka being the sound director for the game.

Here, the way to hear it is to wait at the World 6 screen for five minutes. The sound file in this post starts about 13 seconds before the Easter egg and includes one last loop of the map music before it activates.

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Development files for Yoshi’s Island contain this bizarre text that appears to be someone’s personal account of buying a TV (translated from Japanese in the image).

What this is doing inside the files, and whether it was ever meant to be used as part of development itself (such as e.g. as a test message) or whether it was completely unrelated and simply ended up there as a mistake, is unknown.

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In World 2-1 of Super Mario 3D Land, there is an extremely difficult to see Easter egg that requires the player to go to the Binoculars near the start of the level immediately upon gaining control of Mario and then look up, since at about 4 seconds after the level starts, a small animation of what looks like a rocket launch happens in the sky. If the player waits or slows down at any point, the launch will not be visible.

Extracting the event from the files reveals that there is unfortunately no actual rocket; the only files involved are a circular texture of smoke and a white triangle that blasts off, since the player is never supposed to see the event up-close.

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Top: a well-known exploit that is used at the start of nearly every speedrun of Super Mario 64 is the Lakitu Skip. In the beginning of Super Mario 64, one of the Lakitu Bros. stops Mario when he walks up to the bridge in front of Peach’s Castle to explain the camera system. The activation radius for this cutscene covers almost the entirety of the bridge, but there is a very thin strip of ground on the railings where Mario can stand without activating it.

Bottom: this visualization of the hitbox shows that the trick is much more precise than it may appear. Note the extremely narrow width of the ground that Mario can land on compared to most of the railing being covered by the red hitbox and activating Lakitu if Mario’s center of gravity is inside it when touching the ground. While many speedrunners are able to execute this trick flawlessly repeatedly, this is the result of months or years of practice.

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In Donkey Kong 64, there is a cabin in Crystal Caves that has a rotating interior that can be activated with Simian Slam switches.

The collision of the walls while rotating is not terribly robust and can result in Donkey Kong simply phasing through the wall as it is rotating, ending up in the void outside the room. From there, the only way to continue playing is by exiting the level through the menu, as the room itself is no longer reachable.

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In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, there is a platform in Gloomy Woods that appears as a completely ordinary ramp, but has a glitchy property whereby Mario and Luigi will get stuck on specific frames of their jump animations as long as Paper Mario is not on the ramp.

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In Super Mario 64 DS, Wario’s “Psyche Out!” minigame consists of trying to guess a card while it is turned away from the viewer. The ostensible conceit of the minigame is that the card is very slightly translucent and allows the front to be seen through the back, however…

Every few rounds, the front is simply not visible through the back at all, and the card is actually not determined until the player chooses what the card is supposed to be, at which point it will be randomly either correct or incorrect. This can be verified by using savestates to attempt a single such round many times, with the card turning out to be different based on the player’s choice. As such, the game is about 2/3 skill-based (actually seeing through the translucent cards) and 1/3 luck-based in the random rounds.

If the player gets a high score of 15, the message “PSYCHIC!” appears, referencing the fact that it is unlikely to get that far without either extreme luck, cheating, or actual psychic abilities.

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During the “Tall Trunk’s Purple Coin Slide” mission of Super Mario Galaxy 2, Mario must make his way down the slide and collect 100 out of 140 Purple Coins on it.

Since the track is curved inward and many of the coins are in the middle of the track so that Mario collects them without any active input, it is actually quite difficult to purposefully avoid every single coin.

If Mario makes it to the end with 0 coins, the Gearmo will question whether the player did this on purpose (which is exceedingly likely), admit that this is impressive, and then kill Mario anyway.

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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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