Illustration depicting a potential epilogue to Super Mario Land 2, from a 1993 issue of the Japanese Shogaku Ichinensei magazine.
Mario is using the giant Mario Zone robot to force the defeated Wario and his minions (seen with one of the Three Little Pigheads bosses) to plant flowers for him as punishment.
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Top: in the Kreepy Krow boss battle in Donkey Kong Country 2, being in team-up mode when a barrel hits the boss will cause the Kong currently being carried (Dixie in the footage) to assume a glitched state. The Kong will perform an infinite mid-air somersault when thrown.
Bottom: whenever a new barrel hits the boss, the glitched Kong will also move to that location, as seen with Dixie somersaulting in mid-air.
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Top: in the Wii U and Nintendo Switch versions of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (though oddly not in the Nintendo 3DS version), waiting near the front of the train in the Fright Train Flight level for 5 minutes will cause a ghostly face to appear underneath the tracks.
Bottom: extracting the texture from the files reveals that it is the “dead Boo” texture, used for when Boos are defeated by shining a light at them, only stretched to a large size. As such, it appears that the train is haunted by what is technically a dead ghost, or a ghost of a ghost.
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In Super Mario Maker, Yoshi enters a glitched state in the New Super Mario Bros. U game style if he touches spikes underwater while swallowing an enemy.
Left: Yoshi’s orientation will be locked. In the footage, he is always facing left no matter what direction he is moving in.
Right: in addition to this, only Yoshi’s legs and eyes will be animated, while his torso and the rest of his head will remain static. Note the extremely stilted running animation due to only the legs moving, and the bizarre idle animation whereby Yoshi appears to do a little dance.
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Super Mario Sunshine contains an unused object that is a sandbox with terrain that is not pre-modeled, but rather generated by the engine with variable parameters, and could technically be made into an infinite variety of shapes (using a technique similar to e.g. the puzzle game Wetrix for the Nintendo 64).
For an unknown reason, despite this being a powerful tool to create terrain and which could potentially have been used to make Mario change the terrain dynamically, it goes unused in the final game.
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In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, during the post-Chapter 5 Bowser intermission in Twilight Town, there is an extremely difficult to activate dialogue from within the locked inn.
The exclamation point indicator that shows the dialogue can be activated only appears when Bowser is standing in an extremely precise location near the door, so that the majority of the players would simply approach the door, see that it is seemingly not interactive, and leave.
For many years, the “National Not-Get-Eaten-By-Monsters Day” dialogue was known about due to datamining, but presumed unused due to how bizarrely precise the positioning is.
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Original artwork for the 1996 Nintendo 64 launch announcement print ad, from the personal archives of the ad’s artist, Stephen Peringer (please zoom in to view details).
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Top: in a 1995 developer interview for Yoshi’s Island, Shigeru Miyamoto mentioned that during development, Baby Mario would transform into a full-grown Mario when collecting the Super Star. In the finished version, he transforms into “Powerful Mario”, a form of Baby Mario with a cape, instead.
Bottom: internal files which surfaced in 2020 revealed the actual unused graphics of the full-grown Mario form that Miyamoto was talking about in the interview.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Source: shmuplations, sprites