Mario

RS Links: Miyamoto talks about the removed Mario 64 coop

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Robert Seddon has linked us to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that was published on Wired. In one of his answers, Miyamoto talks about the removed coop mode that was supposed to be included in Mario 64:

Wired.com: You said you had the idea to do a four-player Mario game for a long time. Had you ever actually done any prototypes of such a game on other hardware?

Miyamoto: With each (Mario) project, we do different experiments. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. We’ve done games in the past where we’ve had the idea and worked on it. But with side-scrolling games, the challenge was that the screen continues to scroll forward, and what happens when the other player falls off the screen? With Mario 64, we had an experiment that took advantage of the idea of the screen growing larger and smaller depending on how far apart the characters were. So we had Mario and Luigi running around in that 3-D world, but we ended up not using it. […]

Wired.com: Why did you decide not to use that Nintendo 64 game with Mario and Luigi?

Miyamoto: Ultimately, it’s the idea of processing speed and working within the constraints of the hardware. The DS Mario 64 had a mode with something similar to that, where you were playing with four characters.

I wonder if he really meant the original “Mario 64” when he was talking about Mario & Luigi in the prototype, as he could have got confused with “Mario 64 II”. Infact, his phrase is similar to an old comment about M64II (as we can read on Super Mario 128 Central):

Well, for over a year now at my desk, a prototype program of Luigi and Mario has been running on my monitor. We’ve been thinking about the game, and it may be something that could work on a completely new game system. – Shigeru Miyamoto on Mario 64 II, November 1998

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link! 

Super Mario Strikers [GC – Concept / Beta]

Super Mario Strikers, known as Mario Smash Football in Europe and Australia, is a five-a-side football game developed by Next Level Games for the Nintendo GameCube. In an interview, game director Mike Inglehart and marketing director Grace Kim revealed that Strikers was originally intended to be a more realistic Mario sports game, but the development team opted for an “over-the-top” style after numerous consultations with Nintendo. [Info from Wikipedia]

Robert Seddon has linked us to an interesting article on Press The Buttons, in which we can look at some early concept arts, that show a different character design. The final  Mario Striker’s art-style was one of the most interesting Mario-designs from the last generation and it’s nice to see how the concept evolved.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

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Mario Golf: Advance Tour [GBA – Beta / Unused Rooms]

Mario Golf: Advance Tour is an RPG-styled sport game developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance in 2004. The game is the sequel to the Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf. [Info from Wikipedia]

Robert Seddon has recorded an interesting video about some of the debug rooms and unused areas that can be found in the Mario Golf: Advance Tour game code thanks to the Atrius’s Golden Sun: The Lost Age editor (as both games use the same engine). We can even notice some GBC-alike sprites, probably used as placeholders. The beta” foyer had some different details as you can notice from this comparison:

Beta:

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Final:

mario-golf-advance-tour-marion-club-final

Video:

 

New unused object found in Mario 64: the Beta Trampoline!

Some days ago VL-Tone (creator of the wonderful Toad’s Tool 64 editor) found an unused trampoline object hidden in the Mario 64 code. The yellow question mark texture with a red background was already found some time ago, but now he was able to even find the polygon and the geo layout data, to repare the object into its original (?) form! As VL-Tone wrote in the topic:

This thing looks like some air switch which would work much like the red ground pound switch in Super Mario Galaxy. Or maybe it’s a trampoline. The line pattern on the red/yellow question mark texture indicates that this part would be compressed between the two checkerboard platforms when Mario jumps/pound on it.

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Frauber was even able to recreate some of its functions, as you can see in the video below (from a hacked version of Flatworld with the banks that contain this trampoline loaded).

It’s interesting to notice that “there’s a lot of other polygon data left in the “blanked” ROM, which may or may not be unused stuff in the game” so we it’s possible that we’ll see even more unused M64 objects in the future. Huge props to VL-Tone and Frauber

Peach’s Castle [GameCube – Tech Demo]

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In 2002 Nintendo sent various developers a GameCube interactive tech demo in order to show them the graphical capabilities of their new console. In this tech demo you can move an arrow through Peach’s Casle and in every room you can see a different graphic effect. It was never released to the public and could have been lost forever, but luckily sometime ago the Peach’s Castle Tech Demo was leaked online and it can now be preserved.

Update: it seems that this demo was used  in the 5-22-01 GameCube SDK. The official Nintendo description says: “There are eight rooms (stages) available for introducing various features and effects. In addition, there are two demo modes available for giving effective demos: normal demo mode and auto demo mode. In normal demo mode, users move from room to room using an arrow, and each feature is introduced. In auto demo mode, the camera moves automatically from room to room and each feature of each room is introduced. The total time required for all rooms is 4 minutes 30 seconds.”

Thanks to Jay for the english corrections!

[spoiler /Click here for the tech-demo info/ /Hide the tech-demo info/]Stage Number: 1
Stage Name: ENTRANCE
Total Polygons: 50640
Total texture size: 2260 KB
Total modeling data size: 1027 KB

Stage Number: 2
Stage Name: DOME
Total Polygons: 17571
Total texture size: 5930 KB
Total modeling data size: 324 KB
Feature shown: large textures, mipmaps

Stage Number: 3
Stage Name: SPIRAL STAIRCASE
Total Polygons: 29754
Total texture size: 1120 KB
Total modeling data size: 639 KB
Feature shown: bump maps, specular maps, shadow maps

Stage Number: 4
Stage Name: HANGAR
Total Polygons: 34111
Total texture size: 2157 KB
Total modeling data size: 591 KB
Feature shown: antialiasing

Stage Number: 5
Stage Name: CAVE
Total Polygons: 30051
Total texture size: 1241 KB
Total modeling data size: 478 KB
Feature shown: local lights

Stage Number: 6
Stage Name: CINEMA THEATER
Total Polygons: 15253
Total texture size: 2673 KB
Total modeling data size: 250 KB
Feature shown: texture projection

Stage Number: 7
Stage Name: METAL MARIO!
Total Polygons: 5330
Total texture size: 1859 KB
Total modeling data size: 149 KB
Feature shown: environment map

Stage Number: 8
Stage Name: How Many COINS?
Total Polygons: 92160 (768 objects * 120) + 504
Total texture size: 159 KB
Total modeling data size: 26 KB
Feature shown: maximum polygons[/spoiler]

Thanks a lot to Marco / Grotesque and 50CALBR for the contributions!

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