There’s a really weird mystery hidden within
Super Mario Galaxy. Not inside the game itself, but instead, within
its logo. It’s this part here. The word “Galaxy”. Look carefully at the background and you’ll
see this picture of a starfield slowly scrolling by. Where did that image come from? If you search Google for “starfield” or
“space”, you’ll find tens of THOUSANDS of pictures. Tracking down the exact image that Nintendo
used seems impossible, doesn’t it. Well, what if I told you that just last week
the answer was finally uncovered. Let me introduce you to Captain Byte. You might know him from his Twitter username,
CometMedal. He spends hours every week digging through
the files of Mario Galaxy, and tweeting all of the interesting things that he finds. But to me, there’s none more interesting
than this one. Let me tell the story of how Mario Galaxy’s
biggest mystery was solved, 14 years after the game came out. “I’ve always been super interested in
astronomy. From a very, very young age it was one of
my first ever favourite things. I remember at around ages 8 to 11 my mum would
often brag about me having enough astronomy knowledge to ‘throw a teacher under the
bus’. (Laughter) And so with that knowledge and
that love of astronomy and the galaxies and the stars and stuff, I just absolutely fell
in love with Super Mario Galaxy.” Now, every time you turn on your Wii and open
Super Mario Galaxy, the very first thing you see is this logo. And even to a young Captain Byte, this starfield
was pretty intriguing. “For the longest time, like ever since I
was a kid, I knew I recognised that image in the logo. I knew it was of andromeda.” Now for those like me, that aren’t so up
on our astronomy, this is Andromeda galaxy. Even if you didn’t know that’s what it’s
called - again, I did not - you’ll probably still recognise it. It’s one of the most iconic features of
the night sky. And so, young Captain Byte did indeed recognise
the galaxy from the image. And at the time, that answered all of his
questions. But the much harder mystery to solve, is where
this one particular image came from. Did someone at Nintendo get a camera and a
telescope and take a picture of this galaxy, just to put it into the game? Or was this photo taken by someone completely
different? Someone who had nothing to do with Nintendo? That is a VERY difficult question to answer. So, fast forward to 2020, when Captain Byte
was, as he often does, digging up bits and pieces relating to Mario Galaxy. And that’s when he stumbled upon a folder
of images and logos from E3 2007. And inside that folder was a much higher resolution
image of Mario Galaxy’s logo than he’d even seen before. And when he zoomed in to the image, he started
noticing some weird things. “When I got looking at the logo up close,
I started noticing little seams and strange cuts in the background that make up the galaxy
part of the logo. And it kinda reminded me of how some space
telescopes and whatnot will take pictures of areas in the sky and then folks at NASA
and whatnot will piece the parts together to make one big image. And so I started thinking: is there an image
or multiple images that make up this background? It couldn’t be a coincidence based on the
cuts and seams that seem to make up several different images spliced up into one image…” And so, Byte decided to try and track down
the origin of this image, or perhaps images. He took to Google, as one does, and used the
filter tools so that the images that would appear were from before June 29th 2007, which
is when this logo was created. And that is when he stumbled upon one particular
photograph. It was taken by Robert Gendler, an American
astrophysicist, and it looks like this. Straight away, Byte realised just how similar
this image was to the one from Galaxy’s logo. He laid the two images on top of each other,
and compared various features from the two images. All of them seemed to match! After yet more comparisons, Byte was satisfied:
this had to be the image from the logo. He had done it! He’d solved this great mystery. And so, he tweeted it to the world, as usual,
but unlike usual, this tweet reached a much larger audience. Tens of thousands saw the tweet, and it even
made it onto Nintendo Life.com This is also where I come into the story. I saw the tweet, I thought it was cool, and
so I reached to Byte, and we arranged to talk on Discord. Uh, and then I kinda failed at making that
story into a video. Hey, cut me some slack, it’s hard to do
creative work in a pandemic! However, in retrospect, it was kind of lucky
that I dragged my feet for so long. Because since then, new information has come
to light. And, it seems as though this tweet was wrong. Robert Gendler’s photo was NOT the one used
in the logo, after all. The plot thickens. So, out of the blue, Captain Byte got a message. “Someone named Dorfdork contacted me being
like, you should check this out, and he linked me to a website called Sozaijiten, which in
English stands for material dictionary.” So this is Sozaijiten. It’s a huge collection of stock images,
split across a series of CD Roms. Each CD has a different selection of photos
stored on it. Volume 1 contains various pictures of stone
and rock. Volume 5 is full of pictures of the sky and
the clouds. There are CDs with flowers, vegetables, spices,
and fossils - the list goes on. “The volume of Sozaijiten that we’re interested
in is volume 21, Space and Planets, which came out October 2nd of 1998, so you know
it was around that time that Nintendo was really heavily relying on third party images
to make up textures in their games. Now since of course I didn’t know this existed
at the time, I thought for sure the Robert Gendler image was the image in the Super Mario
Galaxy logo, but over time I would begin to look more and more into Sozaijiten Volume
21, and I would recognise a lot of images being used in Super Mario Galaxy and Super
Mario Galaxy 2. And it was around that time that I came across
an image in volume 21 called SV185, and it depicted an image of Andromeda which when
matched up with Andromeda in Super Mario Galaxy’s logo - exact match! Like matched even more than the image I had
brought up from Robert Gendler.” The origin had finally been found, this time
for certain, right? Well, not quite. Unfortunately, things still weren’t quite
explained. Because, the thing is, Sozaijiten (or the
company running it) almost never take photos themselves. Instead, they source pre-existing pictures
from all over the world. So, while this picture of the Andromeda Galaxy
from the logo without a doubt came from Sozaijiten, that’s not where the image originated from. Finding out the true origin - that was the
last problem to tackle. At first it seems easy. The description of this one image has a little
note. It says “sourced from NASA”. However, Captain Byte went onto NASA’s website
and scoured it for any sign of this image. With no luck. The image could not be found. So, if it didn’t actually come from NASA,
then where did it come from? “It took a lot of searching, and I found
a lot of “what if”s and “must be”s, but I’m pretty sure I’ve settled on what
I’m almost positive is a conclusive match, and it’s an image called the Great Galaxy
in Andromeda.” So, this image was originally taken in 1959
at the Palomar Observatory in California. And it definitely looks extremely similar
to the picture from the logo, for sure. But of course, that applies to essentially
any image of Andromeda Galaxy. So, I wanted to prove it to myself. I lined up the two images on top of each other,
and spent a good 20 minutes rotating them, and zooming in and out, and adjusting their
positions. And eventually, I ended up with this. Every single star in these two pictures lines
up perfectly. And just to confirm, I pulled up another random
image of Andromeda from google, and nothing matched. But these two images - everything matches! “So, it seems that the origin of the image
comes from 1959, and then was packed into Sozaijiten volume 21: Space and Planets in
late 1998.” “Wow, that’s crazy how far it’s - and
then of course it only turned up in Mario Galaxy in the late 2000s. Wow, it went on a journey. - 2007. That’s - that’s so incredible.” Super Mario Galaxy came out in 2007. Just last week, April 2021, the mystery that
was sitting on its title screen every time you booted up the game, has finally been solved. Now, is there a chance that this might be
another Robert Gendler incident? Yes. I think it is important to be clear about
the fact that there’s no paper trail or direct evidence to prove that the image from
the game is indeed from 1959. Lining up the photos myself, they look identical
to me, other than some basic colour correction. But there is a chance that someone else, somewhere
out there in the world, took a photo that looks almost identical to the picture from
1959. I guess that’s what draws me to this one
mystery so strongly, though. The fact that we can never definitively prove
the origin of this image. But I can tell you that I for one am convinced
that these two images are the same. As for what you think - well, that’s up
to you. Hey, thanks for watching! This video would obviously never exist without
Captain Byte, so if you're interested in more of his Mario discoveries, you can find him
on Twitter, at CometMedal. And I am also on Twitter, at Thomas G Docs,
if you want to see what’s going on with me. Financial support for these videos comes via
Patreon.com, and of course, you can subscribe to see more videos like this. Auf Wiedersehen!
