SECRETS, CODES, & INTEL | Super Mario Bros. Declassified NES | NESComplex

A lot has been said about the Super Mario brothers, but how much do we really know? I wanted to dig deeper, so I hacked into the mainframe and snuck into the vault to photograph secret records. Well, maybe not, but after reviewing books, articles and interviews, testing theories and reproducing. Failures I have compiled my discoveries here in this episode of

declassified

. I'll break down all the secret

codes

and forgotten history of this classic game, detailing things you may have heard, some you've forgotten, and some you never knew, um, it began. With a rough idea of ​​making a game that was the culmination of all the NES games they had released up to that point, the small team of six to eight people included Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tazuka, who had created Devil World and Excitate Bike together. , Kazuwaki Marita, who was Miyamoto's protégé and had worked with him on Ice Cliper, Toshihiko Nakaga, who helped program almost every previous NES game, from 1983's Donkey Kong to 1985's Kung Fu, and composer Koji Kondo , who essentially stumbled upon Nintendo after seeing a recruiting message on a job placement board the team created.

They decided to take everything they had learned and make an amazing game, they wanted to incorporate a large main character like they had in Devil World, side-scrolling obstacle course elements like they had learned when moving Irem's kung fu master to the kung fu and By developing Excitebike and the jumping and brick-breaking mechanics of Ice Climber, everything would be combined into a new project, a completely new type of game that they called athletic game in which players would guide a character through obstacles towards a final level goal, but in the older concept that The character was just a square placeholder.

Tazuka proposed the idea of ​​using Mario, whose popularity among the Mario brothers was undeniable. This decision guided many design choices, but also brought Mario's world with the lifting beams and springs from previous games with that in mind. Super Mario Bros. 1 wasn't really number one at all, it was a sequel that the Mario brothers made very early on, you just played as the big Mario, the team later added that he would shrink when hit the first time and die the second time, but once this was established, I quickly decided that starting with a small Mario who could increase in size later was much more exciting, a change that naturally led to adding

super

s to the title.

Some early ideas, if not scrapped, would have led to a drastically different game in the dev notes, for example pressing. Up on the d-pad made Mario jump while the A button allowed him to fire a rifle and a ray gun. They also seriously considered having Mario ride a rocket and shoot enemies while he flies above a cloud or even riding a bird-like creature. While these ideas didn't appear in the final game, many of them resurfaced in future games. Also, in those early days, the entire game took place on a black background. This may seem like a bad idea, but at the time it was all Mario had known when they made the switch to blue.

The Super Mario brothers took on a new life, they didn't abandon the black sky completely, although levels 3 and 6 retain that look. original on the technical side, the entire game used only 31 kilobytes, which is incredibly only a third of the size. of this image with such a small game they needed to be creative, the walking animation of the goomba, for example, is not two sprites in the code, but a single sprite that alternates between its original image and the reflected one to save even more space, they reused the same sprite design with palette. changes for bricks, rock and, famously, even clouds and bushes, Koji Kondo did something similar with the sound design by making going down a pipe and losing your Super Mario powers have the same sound, but strangely they didn't care use the space to give Mario two different ones. jump sounds, one for normal

mario

and one for when he was

super

, they also didn't mind leaving some unused music in the code, a hastily abbreviated track meant for the transition between the flagpole and the underground pipe and a theme alternative game that sounds a bit.

More fun than the more somber death theme they eventually used in the meantime for Mario's increasingly bigger sound. Kondo said he simply took the flickering image they had already animated and tried to match what he saw with the sound and, speaking of condo, it came to light. In recent years, many of his early compositions, including those of the Super Mario Brothers, were intentionally or unintentionally drawn from the music he was listening to at the time. Hmm, say what you want about the similarities, but keep in mind that he was young at the time and just like anyone else.

The creative knows that first works often derive from what you enjoy. Developing a unique personal style often takes years. When development came to an end, there was a little bit of memory left, so Miyamoto suggested rewarding players with a crown symbol if they earned more than 10 lives per year. The image most kids assumed was a bad graphic from getting too many 1-ups on September 13, 1985. Super Mario Bros was released in Japan to low expectations and little fanfare. Interestingly, it was Friday the 13th, a fact that should completely debunk any superstitions about that day. It was eventually released in two formats, cartridge and disc, but was intended to be Nintendo's final cartridge and all future games would be released only for their new famicom disc system;

However, between the game's unprecedented success and subsequent improvements in semiconductor technology, Nintendo relented with that in mind, it is no exaggeration to say that the Super Mario brothers helped save the cartridge format, as for its release In North America you would think that a game as important as the Super Mario brothers would have a clear historical record, but that is not the case despite several key players at Nintendo. claiming that it came out in 86, early NES users swear they had it in 85. Historian Frank Zafaldi wrote about this great uncertainty and concluded that the most likely dates are October 18 or November 17, 1985. as the best-selling game For NES and the game pack with millions of systems, the box art is unforgettably etched in our minds and as often as we've seen it, few people notice that it actually depicts Mario's imminent death in a pit of lava and , in case you were wondering.

The famicom box art wasn't perfect either as it shows King Koopa decidedly gray and back to Mario, we're so familiar with his red hat, red shirt and blue jumpsuit that we remember him wrong that way, forgetting that he actually wears a brown shirt and red overalls in the game and have you ever read the story in the instruction manual because I guarantee it's stranger than you remember? The Koopa are a tribe of turtles with black magic who transformed mushrooms into stones, bricks and horse hair plants. This means that the bricks you break may have once been mushroom people.

He goes on to say that the only one who can undo this magic is Princess Toadstool, but she is being held back by what the pamphlet calls the big koopa turtle king and then concludes with a pessimistic insert from Mario the hero. From the story maybe maybe maybe maybe he can't do it or maybe he's not the hero anyway, he sets out to free the mushroom princess so she can save the mushroom people. I can not believe it. I just said that the brochure also explains that. The Goombas are actually Mushroom People who betrayed the Mushroom Kingdom, but possibly the strangest part of the booklet is here, as the Mushroom People were transformed into bricks or turned invisible thanks to Koopa's black magic. .

When you find them, they reward you by transforming Mario into a different character. mighty

mario

a quote that contains some serious metaphysical implications of the teleportation paradox type, but i digress as for koopa troopas, they are the only returning enemy of the mario brothers, they were originally called shell creepers, but were renamed koopa troopas in United States, but where did the name koopa come from? It is difficult to ignore the similarities with the Japanese mythical creatures called kappa. According to folklore, these shelled creatures were mischievous and threatening, they usually lived near rivers and were accused of drowning children, assaulting women and extracting people's souls through suction of their nether regions. an appropriate enemy for the children of Japan, as even today kappa are used to warn children not to play too close to water, and he said that if there is a connection it is probably subconscious, since in Japan the koopa troopas neither They weren't even called Koopa, but not Konoko and just Bowser. took the nickname, so where does the name come from?

So Miyamoto and Tuzuka have stated that it is derived from the spicy Korean dish which is pronounced koopa in Japanese on a different note. Did you know that an animated Mario movie was released in theaters a long time ago? In 1986, on July 20, 1986, The Big Quest to Rescue Princess Peach was released across Japan, and unlike other Mario movies, it was fairly faithful to the game's characters and tropes. Another interesting part about Japan is that the world theme actually has lyrics. The Japanese radio station asked fans to submit lyrics to the song and one performance impressed Nintendo so much that they made it official and even made a recording of it.

The English translation has lines like Today full of energy. Mario keeps running, running and gets a mushroom. It's super. mario and mario are always full of energy and strong and go and beat the koopa tribe, see if that sounds bad, consider that we grew up with the lines, wave your arms from side to side, come on, it's time to do the mario Of course, player 1. can pause player 2's game, which is a fun annoyance for friends and siblings, but as for the button combo

codes

planned for the Super Mario siblings, there's only one worth mentioning: If you hold a button on the game over screen and then press start on the title screen, you will continue. in the first level of the world where you died, even in the early days of nintendo's fun club news, one's trick at the end of level 3-1 was almost universally known, but what many people don't know is that this was planned. purposely tested and refined to give players a chance to get extra lives, the multi-coin block, on the other hand, was not supposed to happen, but once it did, the original intention was to hide a single coin in a brick of normal appearance, but there was an error.

It resulted in Mario being able to hit him repeatedly and collect many coins. The developers thought this was fun, especially when the block was low, so they made it a fixture and added multi-currency blocks throughout the game. Another secret revealed in those early days of the fun club was The Fireworks Secret alluded to in the brochure, of course not much of a secret nowadays, but in case you didn't know if you managed to finish the level with one, three or six as the final digit of the stopwatch, you will get that amount. Explosions in the sky It's easy to dismiss the idea of ​​warp zones today, but at the time they were revolutionary and the hot topic on every playground.

As for their locations, I'm sure everyone knows they're at the end of levels 1, 2, and 4 2 and up, the hidden beanstalks also in 4-2, but did you know the idea came from excitebike in the excitebike arcade It had three difficulty levels and players could choose which one to play? The team liked the idea of ​​allowing better players to jump to more challenging levels right away, so they added the warp zone so good players could advance quickly and, boy, the best players use a lot more than just warp zones. , they've refined their gameplay to single-frame button presses, pixel-perfect landings, and turned the game into an art form by routinely beating it in under five minutes and racing to shave mere frames off their races.

When we were kids, we all thought that if you somehow pressed the jump button hard enough you could jump over the flagpole, it turns out the easiest way is in world 3-3 and is achieved by placing the elevators in the optimal position, if you manage it you will be rewarded with the eternal monotony of a wall that repeats itself infinitely. The next secret is something that most players would never wait long enough to do, but if you take on the Hammer Brothers and wait a hundred seconds or so on the timer, they will charge you. Everyone knows that the boss at the end of each level is Bowser, but everyone is wrong, only the last Bowser is the real king of the Koopa turtles.

Another boss has our usual enemies disguised as Bowser, a fact only revealed by sending them with fireballs. Finally, did you know that there is one hidden in the first level of every world, but not alwaysis there, not even Nintendo can win at Super Mario Brothers? It does not seem to explain his inconsistent appearance, mistakenly assuming that he had to do with Mario losing his power before raising him. The truth is that it will only be there in one of three conditions, or you transported yourself to that world and continued there using the positive start. trick or perhaps the most amazing one if you have collected all the coins in level three of the previous world.

There are around 35 known glitches in the game, some of them, such as the flagpole glitch, incorrect warp, and wall jump, are difficult to execute but are useful shortcuts to save time. but most are just quirky novelties that are fun to pull off. One of the best glitches was popularized back in the summer with the little Fire Mario glitch. To achieve this, you have to reach a boss battle as Fire Mario, but finish the fight early. By hitting the boss and the ax at the same time, Mario will lose his flower power, but he will still be big.

That alone is interesting, but it continues to the next level. If you grab a mushroom, you will become small and when you get a fire flower, you will still be small but you will have the Fire Mario suit and skills. Possibly the most famous error is the negative world. Jumping back towards the wall at the end of world one, two, you can go through it to find a warp tube that leads to the so-called negative world. The level itself goes nowhere and is basically an endless loop of world seven two, but it's still a fun trick to pull off, but did you know that in the Famicom disc version of the game this same bug leads you to a different negative point?

World One East takes place in a dreamlike version of World One Three that uses the underwater color palette. In this crazy level you can swim in the air past Bowser and the princess and in this version you can beat him and go to negative world 2 and even negative world. 3, but even if you don't have the disc version of the game, there are plenty of other secret levels on the cartridge as well. A writer for Family Computer magazine who was working on a Super Mario brothers strategy guide used a computer to change values ​​in the game's RAM while it was running revealed an astonishing 256 additional levels.

Miyamoto correctly dismissed them as unintentional random junk data, but in doing so confirmed their existence, if there was a way to alter these RAM values ​​without a computer, gamers were sure to find it. finally someone noticed that unlike the NES which resets its RAM if a game is deleted while the Famicom and top loaders don't, they start a game of Super Mario Brothers and swap the cartridge with sneakers for a moment and then turn it back on to change. Mario again, RAM values ​​can be manipulated and these alternative levels can be accessed. It's crazy, but it's true.

I hope you found this video entertaining, informative, nostalgic and fun. You learned? What did I leave out if you like what I'm doing and want? To see it grow, activating notifications changes the rules of the game and, if you know someone who finds it interesting, share it with them. A special thank you to all the channel's retro club sponsors who make this possible.