Nintendo Power brochure with unique illustrations referencing the first encounter with a Bomber Bill (known as Banzai Bills at the time of the game’s release) in the Yoshi’s Island 1 level, whereby Mario can avoid it by ducking in a 1-tile deep indention in the ground.
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Top: in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, shown here in the Nintendo Switch version, the character Tarin is magically transformed into a raccoon (English text) or tanuki* (Japanese text).
Bottom: concept art for the Switch version of the game reveals that one concept for that form had a red version of Mario’s nose, and a mustache identical to Mario’s, clearly intended to be a reference to Tanooki Mario. While Tarin himself also has a mustache, it is different from Mario’s, so it would have become more Mario-like in that form.
*Note that the real-life animal (Japanese raccoon dog) is spelled “tanuki” while Mario’s power-up has always been spelled “Tanooki” as a stylistic choice.
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Australian Super Mario 64 poster.
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In Mario & Luigi: Brothership, a glitch can occur with the Shy Guys fought in Bowser’s Castle whereby counterattacking them on a specific frame will cause them to vibrate eternally.
This will prevent the Shy Guy from ever finishing his attack, resulting in his turn and thus the battle never ending. The game must be reset to continue regular gameplay.
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In Super Mario Maker 2, the New Super Mario Bros. U-style Angry Sun with its distinctive inscrutable expression is not actually present as a model in the game’s files; instead, it is a series of prerendered sprites. However, the sprites very slightly tilt the model between frames, allowing the 3D shape of it to be determined through careful analysis.
Here is a recreation of the model by dataminer Lumpy Spirit that results in a complete 1:1 match to the in-game sprite when animated, and as such can be considered to be the closest to an accurate model of the Angry Sun that is possible to obtain using currently available information. With it, it is finally possible to see the Angry Sun from the side.
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Top: in Mario Kart DS, the Pipe Plaza battle course looks very similar to its original appearance in Mario Kart: Double Dash, featuring the same type of grassy hills in the background.
Bottom: for an unknown reason, in the kiosk demo version of the game, Pipe Plaza had a unique red background that could have either been intended as a sunset (even though no sun is present and during a typical sunset, the brighter colors would be on the bottom instead of at the top), or as a deliberately ominous red sky.
This is also a rare example of unique new content being created for a game and then discarded in favor of reusing old content during development.
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In Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels and its Super Mario All-Stars version, there is a “brother byte” in the game’s memory that determines which brother the current playable character is. It has two valid possible values, one for Mario (Brother 0) and one for Luigi (Brother 1), and 254 invalid ones, resulting in various unintended brothers (as seen in this previous post).
Most invalid brothers cause the game’s ending to simply glitch in typical ways, however, Brother 12 has a particularly amusing way in which his presence is handled. Upon seeing Peach in her cage, Brother 12 continuously runs to the left against the edge of the screen, and continues his running animation even after Peach teleports him to her cage after noticing him.
This results in the impression that Brother 12 is not interested in being kissed by Peach and is desperately trying to get away from her.
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In the Japanese version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (both original GameCube and Switch releases), the Red Bones miniboss is implies to be red due to being covered in blood.
Its Japanese name is “ブラッディホネノコ”, (“Bloody Dull Bones”), a combination of a transliteration of the English word “bloody” and the Japanese name for the Dull Bones enemy.
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