Promotional Mario display used at select Best Buy stores in the mid-1990s.

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In the Bowser’s Tower mode of Mario Party: Island Tour, the player is challenged by “bubble clones” of other playable characters. These are completely silent in-game.

However, unused sound files for Bubble Mario exist in the game’s files, which are regular Mario’s voice clips with a heavy distortion effect. It is likely that the developers tested bubble clones having voices using Bubble Mario before deciding against the idea.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: NintendoTV64

In the “Bound of Music” minigame in Mario Party 5, if one of the players hits a block on the very last possible frame under specific circumstances, the block will not count for that character’s score despite appearing in the tally at the end of the game.

Top: here, Wario hits the block and the game is declared a draw despite him being shown to have 1 block while Waluigi has 0.

Bottom: here, Waluigi hits the block and the game declares Wario the winner despite showing that they both have 1 block.

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

Captioned image with a type of “bad luck” joke that would be typically posted as an image macro with Impact font, but presented in a more stylized manner instead, posted on Nintendo’s official Australian Facebook account in 2017 to promote Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

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Extremely smooth Goomba model leaked from the internal files of the Super Nintendo World theme park displays.

Based on the extremely high quality of the model, it is possible that this is in fact the base model for official art renders of Goombas (which receive different textures and post-processing effects depending on the game in question).

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

While the vast majority of GameCube and Wii games use generic screens without any particular effort put into their presentation for their “disk read error” messages (due to only very few players ever encountering them), Donkey Konga inserts a humorous reference to the original Donkey Kong arcade into its disk read error.

The bottom of the screen includes Donkey Kong’s defeated sprite from the victory animation of the 100m level of the arcade.

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

WarioWare: D.I.Y. contains some sample comics that were completely replaced in non-Japanese versions of the game, instead of being translated. One of them is this comic about a ghost exchange student, which was replaced with an unrelated comic about a smooth cactus.

Note that the English translation here is created by a dataminer; the original comic is only available in Japanese. It is possible that the comic was not used for Western audiences due to depicting a ghost with a triangle headband and surrounded by hitodama (ghost flames), both specific to Japanese cultural depictions of spirits. However, the substance of the joke itself (a ghost being upset due to receiving a warm welcome instead of people being scared) is still understandable to worldwide audiences.

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Unused enemy found in the data of Super Mario Bros., with the unused ID of 13. Due to being unfinished, its graphics are glitched and appear as a scrambled Buzzy Beetle.

The enemy is immobile and turns into a regular red Koopa Troopa when stomped. Development files for Super Mario All-Stars surfaced later that contained part of the original game’s source code; according to those, this enemy would have been related to Lakitu, as the Lakitu has unused code where it would have thrown these enemies instead of Spinies.

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

Unused “Mario Attractor Area” object found in the files of Super Mario Galaxy. Whenever Mario is shot out of a cannon, this object would have made him uncontrollably attracted to it, making his flight path curve so that he lands in it.

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

1994 Mario supplement booklet for a Japanese magazine, featuring original artwork on the front and back covers.

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