I EXIST

The battle system in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is designed in a modular manner so that every entity, whether it's Mario, his partner, or an enemy, can theoretically use any move simply by calling its script. Of course, most moves are only supposed to be used by specific entities, causing many unintended effects if they are given to others.

A humorous effect occurs if an enemy is made to use the Earth Tremor special move. The enemy correctly hops onto the giant Crystal Star, and the move correctly deals damage to Mario and his partner (as those are that entity's enemies, and thus the targets).

However, the script for that move calls for Mario's partner specifically to jump onto the Crystal Star alongside the move user, even if the user is not Mario. This can be seen in the footage with Goombella joining the Goomba that is using the move on the star.

The visual result is that Goombella looks like she is "betraying" Mario by joining the Goomba in performing the move against him.

Source: SilverGames136

Super Mario World concept art only ever shown once, extremely briefly, during a montage in the September 2025 Nintendo Direct, while the camera was panning across it. Here is the artwork stitched together from all frames showing it, at the highest resolution available from the video.

Source: LadySophie17

Players of Super Mario Advance may recall that one of the major changes in that game compared to the Super Mario All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 2 (on which it is mostly based) is the inclusion of two new boss intros for Fryguy and Clawgrip, respectively.

In both cases, the action stops and a cutscene shows four bubbles (identical to Wart's bubble attack) float up from the bottom of the screen and surround an entity before transforming it into the boss (a mask for Fryguy and a small Sidestepper crab for Clawgrip).

The game actually contains two unused scenes for the same intro happening with two more bosses: Mouser and Tryclyde, shown restored in the footage. Mouser is created from a unique small mouse sprite, while Tryclyde is created from a Cobrat.

This implies that during the game's development the idea of Wart's magic being responsible for most of the game's bosses was more prevalent, before these scenes were scrapped for an unknown reason.

Source: AkiraTheGamer

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

Complete 10-page coverage of the Donkey Kong Country cartoon series from “Computer Animation - A Whole New World”, a 1998 book on rendering techniques in 3D animation, featuring unique behind-the-scenes artwork. Please zoom in to read the pages.

Source: dkvine.com user "tylerfunf555"

Illustration from an article in a 1993 issue of the Japanese Famitsu magazine, serving as a mock-up of a speculation about the future of video game presentation.

The article posits that if games using photorealistic imagery like Mortal Kombat are popular, but so are games with highly cartoony characters like the Mario series, then surely something combining the two styles into one (with cartoon bodies and live-action heads) would eventually emerge as well.

Source: Famitsu (Japan), Issue 222, 1993

Top: the snowy ground texture in Cool, Cool Mountain in Super Mario 64 is blurry and yellowish, not recognizable as anything specific.

Bottom: it turns out that it is actually a stock proto of a blanket from a commercial texture CD, made more blurry and recolored. Interestingly, the original blanket's color would also have fit for the purpose of making snowy ground, but the color was likely introduced to give some visual variety to the environment and to keep all ground in the course from being some shade of light blue.

Source: Render96, Leonard85026417

In Paper Mario, the Master has an unused, unfinished attack found in his code whereby he flies at Mario and then appears to be stuck in mid-air, doing nothing. This would at first seem to be simply completely broken and require the game to be restarted, but waiting 5 and a half minutes will actually make him complete the attack and do damage (most of the waiting time cut out in the footage). He will also remain in mid-air next to Mario on the next turn after this.

This is due to the fact that the attack takes 10,000 frames to complete, which is around 5 and a half minutes at the game's 30 frames per second framerate. While broken and unfinished moves are nothing out of the ordinary for RPGs, it is rare to find a move that appears to freeze the game but actually manages to complete in an unreasonably long amount of time.

Source: elDexterr

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