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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In the first half of the 1990′s, Nintendo’s tech support service has used special cartridges to test SNES systems’ various functions to determine if the console was fully operational. One such cartridge, the 1992 SNES Burn-in Test Cartridge, contains a unique sprite of the Mario enemy known as Podoboo or Lava Bubble (top image). Although the sprite’s lines are identical to the Super Mario World Lava Bubble, the coloring is completely different. While this is almost certainly a coincidence, this coloring has shown up in Paper Mario: Color Splash in 2016, 24 years later (bottom image).
1990 promotional poster for Club Nintendo France featuring a wide variety of video game and cartoon characters interacting, including many copies of Mario.
In Game & Watch Gallery 2, the “Ball” minigame has four playable characters that can be selected: Mario, Yoshi, Wario and Bowser. A mode with a fifth playable character, Peach, exists in the game’s code but is not normally accessible. Using cheats, Peach can be selected and played as, however due to being scrapped, the minigame’s graphics are not rendered correctly, resulting in Peach being displayed with two heads.
Margin illustrations from a Japanese guide for Super Mario Kart. (Source: Super Mario Kart Shogakukan Guide (Japan), APE, 1992)
Top: In his video “Walls, Floors, & Ceilings Part 3“, youtube.com user “UncommentatedPannen“ presents the discovery of a small invisible wall in a tunnel in the Tall, Tall Mountain slide in Super Mario 64. He then posits that this wall could have been a sign with a left-pointing arrow during the game’s development.
Bottom: After extensive research, I have found video evidence that confirms this theory. A video recorded of a beta version of Super Mario 64 shows this exact tunnel, and it has a left arrow sign in the precise spot where the invisible wall is in the finished game. (Source)
Comparison between the complexities of Mario’s first in-game 3D model from Super Mario 64 and his most complex model to date, from Super Mario Odyssey. With 14,375 triangles, the Super Mario Odyssey model is over 17 times more complex than the Super Mario 64 model with 838 triangles. In fact, there are roughly half as many triangles in the mustache of Super Mario Odyssey’s model as there are in the entire Super Mario 64 model.
Illustration from Super Mario Bros.: Trapped in the Perilous Pit, a children’s book based on Super Mario Bros.
Yoshi’s Island illustrations from a guide segment in EGM2 magazine. (Source: EGM2 (US), Issue 16, 1995)
Unlicensed clothing depicting a crossover between Mario and Street Fighter.
The data for Super Mario Odyssey contains this unused animation of Pauline walking while wearing her concert dress. In the finished game, she does not move around during the New Donk City festival. Please note that the wrong coloration and missing parts of the model are a limitation of the rendering engine used to access the files, and are not indicative of how the model would have appeared in-game. (Source)
