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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Officially licensed Super Mario World cards for the Barcode Battler II, a game device that would scan both licensed cards and ordinary barcodes and create stats for them to play in an RPG-like experience.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: twitter.com user “nonadski”
Page from a 1989 Super Mario Bros. 3 book showing the game’s assistant director, Hideki Konno, at work during the game’s development. Note him playing through the fortress of World 1 in the bottom right.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source
The prototype version of Donkey Kong 64 started with an extremely lengthy (for logo splash screen standards) unskippable opening scene of the Nintendo 64 logo performing a dance. It is unclear if this was used to mask some loading process or was a tribute to the studio’s previous game, Banjo-Kazooie, which had a similarly long, but skippable, intro. In the finished game, this scene was cut to a fraction of its length.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: DK64 (Proto, N64)
Illustration from the British NGC magazine that purports to be a humorous depiction of the creative process inside the mind of Shigeru Miyamoto. The illustration contains various Mario characters, such as Goombella (middle right). Zoom in on the image to read the explanation text in the corner.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: NGC (UK), Issue 100, 2004
Officially licensed 1998 German “Don’t Worry” board game featuring Mario, Toad, Yoshi and Donkey Kong as the playing pieces. The game is a variation of the classic German board game “Mensch ärgere Dich nicht”, which in English-speaking territories has been released as “Sorry” and “Don’t Torment Me”.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source
Top: the art director for Hotel Mario was Jeffrey Zoern, who worked at Philips Fantasy Factory in 1994.
Bottom: 25 years later, now working at Next Level Games, Jeffrey Zoern was the lead technical character artist for Luigi’s Mansion 3, which - like Hotel Mario - revolves around a hotel.
While this is most likely a coincidence, it is notable how the same person was in a high-ranking artist position on both of the Mario franchise games that are hotel-themed - although it cannot be entirely ruled out that he could have had an influence on the choice of theming for both games.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: twitter.com user “WhaddupNico”
Pre-release press packet for Super Mario 64, containing early screenshots and descriptions by Nintendo of America’s marketing team. Of interest is some of the phrasing, such as describing the title screen as “the beautiful 3-D face of Mario” (top left), or the mention of the early name for Whomp’s Fortress, being “The WORLD OF ROCKY MOUNTAIN” (bottom right).
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Source: twitter.com user “TheRealAndyMc”
A rarely-seen interaction in the Super Mario Maker games is that if a vine is currently growing out of a block, and the block is destroyed, the vine will stop growing. One way of seeing this is to quickly put on a Spiny shell helmet after hitting such a block and then destroying it; the reason this would rarely happen is that if the helmet is worn before hitting the block, the vine would never grow in the first place.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: SMM2 (Switch)
Extremely rare special edition Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch in a yellow case shaped like Diskun, the mascot for the Japan-only Famicom Disk System. This was a prize for winning a tournament for Famicom Grand Prix: F-1 Race, a Famicom Disk System game, and fewer than 100 units of this edition were produced, making it the rarest Game & Watch in existence.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source
