A Super Mario variety blog.
Screenshots, photos, sprites, gifs, scans and more from all around the world of Super Mario Bros.
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Top: in 1991, a jazz arrangement album for Super Mario World was released in Japan. The arrangements were composed by Koji Kondo, but the sound producer and player of the alto and sopranino saxophones on the tracks was established jazz musician Sadao Watanabe.
Bottom: in a 1990 interview with Koji Kondo, he talked about how he was a big fan of Sadao Watanabe growing up, making it heartwarming that his own music reached a level of renown where one of his favorite musicians would later perform it for an official album.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: shmuplations
Donkey Kong 64 contains a unique built-in wireframe mode used for debugging. This is distinct from generic wireframe views used in modern games, which are a function of the game engine and look mostly the same across all games written in a specific engine. Note how the wireframes in Donkey Kong 64 are thicker than they are usually drawn.
The footage demonstrates the mode using the DK Rap.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: lookatthewindow3599
Unique officially licensed 2007 Mario Party 8 deck of cards from Japan. Each card except the jokers displays part of an official render of the game, with the actual value of the card only being visible when the light hits it from a certain angle, due to being printed in a glossier material (note how only specific cards have their values visible in the photos).
However, the corners of each card do have the abbreviations printed in regular ink so that they can still be used without needing to constantly shift the cards during play to see the values.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
In Super Mario 64, the texture for the flowerbeds is actually taken from a very small cropped segment of a photo of a flower field from a Japanese texture library CD, with additional flowers drawn on top of it.
Due to the extremely small part of the source image that was used, making it very hard to identify, this was only discovered in 2025, 29 years after the game’s release.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: Render96VGTP, Leonard85026417
In Luigi’s Mansion, the Tea Room contains gravity-swapping panels that are used to first get Luigi onto the ceiling and then down from the ceiling onto a table, to bypass his inability to jump in that game.
However, an extremely rare glitch may occur when using the tile to get down onto the table, whereby Luigi will go up instead of down, clipping through the ceiling of the room onto the Balcony, where the area’s boss, Boolossus, is fought.
If Luigi has the Ice Element Medal at the time the glitch occurs, Boolossus can be beaten and this can be used to skip part of Area 3. If he does not, the battle is unbeatable.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: McGama, callumbuddy
Mario Tennis for Game Boy Color contains a debug room in its files with characters that each perform a test function upon interacted with, such as sending the player to a specific point in the game, starting a tennis match, etc.
However, there is one character that is a green cat that merely says “You two are good. I’ll admit that… But remember this.” when talked to, and does not have any other function. It is unknown if this is merely included to test dialogue, or whether the cat had some function at an earlier point in development that was removed.
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Bizarre unauthorized T-shirt depicting a Mario birthday scene with Mario, Toad and a Dark Blue Yoshi, which for an unknown reason has Taz the Tasmanian Devil and Duchess from 1970 animated film The Aristocats (recolored to be yellow) inserted into it.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
Super Mario 64 contains a mysterious “WALL” counter with an unknown purpose. On every frame the game is running, a function sets “WALL” to be equal to 0. There is no other code that either changes the value to anything other than 0, or reads it for the purposes of doing anything with the information.
As such, this variable is continuously updated to be the same value, 30 times a second, forever, while affecting literally nothing.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source