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

so much has been said about 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 okay maybe not but after scouring books articles and interviews testing theories and reproducing glitches i've compiled my discoveries here in this episode of declassified i'll break down all the secrets codes and forgotten lore for this classic game detailing things you may have heard some you've forgotten and some you've never known [Music] um it started with a rough idea to make a game that was a culmination of every nes game they'd released up to that point the small six to eight person team included shigeru miyamoto and takashi tazuka who had made devil world and excite bike together kazuwaki marita who was miyamoto's protege and had worked on ice climber with him toshihiko nakaga who helped program nearly every previous nes game from 1983's donkey kong to 1985's kung fu and composer koji kondo who essentially stumbled into nintendo after seeing a recruitment message on a job placement board the team set out to take everything they'd learned and make one amazing game they wanted to incorporate a large main character like they'd done in devil world side scrolling obstacle course elements like they'd learned from porting irem's kung fu master into kung fu and from developing excitebike and the jumping and brick breaking mechanics from ice climber everything would combine into one new project an entirely new type of game which they termed an athletic game where players would guide a character through obstacles toward an end level goal but in the earliest concept that character was only a square placeholder tazuka put forward the idea of using mario whose popularity in mario brothers was undeniable this decision guided many design choices but it also brought in mario's world with the lifts girders and springs from earlier games with that in mind super mario bros 1 wasn't really number one at all it was a sequel mario brothers made super early on you only played as big mario the team later added that he would shrink when getting hit the first time and die the second but once this was established they quickly decided starting with a small mario who could get power sized later was much more exciting a change which naturally led to adding super to the title some early ideas had they not been discarded would have led to a drastically different game in the development notes for example pressing up on the d-pad caused mario to jump while the a button allowed him to fire a rifle and a beam gun they also seriously considered having mario ride in a rocket shoot enemies while flying a cloud or even saddle up on a bird-like creature while these ideas didn't make the final game many of them resurfaced in future games also in those early days the entire game was set against a black background this may sound like a bad idea but at the time it's all mario had ever known when they made the switch to blue super mario brothers took on new life they didn't abandon the black sky completely though as levels 3 and 6 retain that original look on the technical side the entire game used only 31 kilobytes which is unbelievably only a third the size of this image with a game that small they needed to be creative the goomba's walking animation for example isn't two sprites in the code but a single sprite alternating between its original and mirrored image to further save space they reused the same sprite design with pallet swaps for bricks rock and famously even the clouds and bushes koji kondo did something similar with sound design by making going down a pipe and losing your super mario powers the same sound but strangely enough they didn't mind using the space to give mario two distinct jump sounds one for regular mario and one for when he was super nor did they mind leaving some unused music in the code an abbreviated hurry up track intended for the transition between the flagpole and the underground pipe [Music] and an alternate game over theme which sounds a bit more gamey than the more somber death theme they ultimately used meanwhile for the sound of mario getting bigger kondo said he simply took the flashing visual they'd already animated and tried to match what he saw with sound and speaking of condo it's come to light in recent years that many of his early compositions including those from super mario brothers were drawn intentionally or not from the music he listened to around that time [Music] [Music] hmm say what you will about the similarities but keep in mind he was young at the time and as anyone who's creative knows early work is often derivative of what you enjoy developing a unique personal style often takes years as development came to a close there was a tiny bit of memory left so miyamoto suggested rewarding players with a crown symbol if they got more than 10 lives an image most kids assumed was a glitched out graphic for getting too many 1-ups on september 13 1985 super mario bros launched in japan with low expectations and little fanfare strangely enough it was friday the 13th a fact which should completely debunk any superstitions about that day it was ultimately released in two formats cartridge and disk but was intended to be nintendo's final cartridge with all future games released only for their new famicom disk system however between the game's unprecedented success and subsequent improvements in semiconductor technology nintendo relented with that in mind it's not a stretch to say super mario brothers helped save the cartridge format as for its release in north america you'd think a game as important as super mario brothers would have a clear historical record but it doesn't in spite of several key players at nintendo claiming it came out in 86 early adopters of the nes swear they had it in 85. historian frank zafaldi wrote about this great uncertainty concluding that the most likely dates are either october 18th or november 17 1985. as the best selling game for the nes and the pack pack-in game with millions of systems the box art is unforgettably burned in our minds and as often as we've seen it few people notice that it actually depicts mario's impending death in a pit of lava and in case you're wondering the famicom box art wasn't perfect either as it displays the decidedly grey king koopa and back to mario we're so familiar with his red hat red shirt and blue overalls that we misremember him that way forgetting that he actually wears a brown shirt and red overalls in the game and have you ever actually read the story from the instruction manual because i guarantee it's weirder than you remember the koopa are a tribe of black magic wielding turtles who changed the mushroom people into stones bricks and horse hair plants this means the bricks you break may have once been mushroom people it goes on to say that the only one who can undo this magic is princess toadstool but she is held by what the booklet calls the great koopa turtle king then it concludes with a pessimistic insertion mario the hero of the story maybe maybe maybe like 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't believe i just said that the booklet also explains that goombas are actually mushroom people who betrayed the mushroom kingdom but possibly the strangest part of the booklet is right here since the mushroom people were changed into bricks or made invisible by koopa black magic when you find them they reward you by changing mario into a different more powerful mario a quote which contains some serious teletransportation paradox type metaphysical implications but i digress as for koopa troopas they are the only returning enemy from mario brothers they were originally called shell creepers but were renamed koopa troopas in america but where did the name koopa come from it's hard to ignore the similarities to the mythical japanese creatures called kappa according to folklore these shelled creatures were mischievous and menacing they usually live near rivers and were accused of drowning children assaulting women and removing people's souls via suction from their nether regions such creatures would be a fitting enemy for the children of japan as even today kappa are used to warn children about playing too close to water that said if there's a connection it's likely subconscious as in japan the koopa troopas weren't even called koopa but no konoko and only bowser took the moniker so where does the name come from then miyamoto and tuzuka have stated that it derives from the spicy korean dish which is pronounced koopa in japanese on a different note did you know there was an animated mario movie released in theaters all the way back in 1986 on july 20th 1986 the great mission to rescue princess peach was released in feeders across japan and unlike another mario film it was fairly faithful to the game's characters and tropes fairly another interesting bit out of japan is that the overworld theme actually has lyrics a japanese radio station asked fans to send words for the song and one submission impressed nintendo so much that they made it official and even had a recording made [Music] the english translation has lines like today full of energy mario is still running running and get a mushroom it's super mario and mario is always full of energy and strong and go and beat the koopa tribe go if that sounds off consider that we grew up with the lines swing your arms from side to side come on it's time to go 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 button combination codes planned for super mario brothers there's only one of note if you hold a on the game over screen then press start at the title screen you'll continue in the first level of the world where you died even in the earliest days of nintendo's fun club news the one-up trick at the end of level 3-1 was almost universally known but what many people don't know is that this was planned tested and refined on purpose to give players that chance at extra lives the multi-coin block on the other hand wasn't supposed to happen but one time it did the original intent was to hide an individual coin in a regular looking brick but a bug resulted in mario being able to hit it repeatedly and gather lots of coins developers thought this was fun especially when the block was low so they made it a fixture and added multi-coin blocks throughout the game another secret revealed in those early fun club days was the firework secret alluded to in the booklet of course it's not much of a secret these days but in case you didn't know if you managed to end the level with a one three or six as the timer's final digit you'll get that many explosions in the sky [Music] it's easy to dismiss the idea of warp zones these days 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 beanstalk also in 4-2 but did you know the idea came from excitebike in the arcade excitebike had three levels of difficulty and players could choose which one to play the team liked the idea of letting better players jump to more challenging levels right away so they added the warp zone so good players could quickly jump ahead and boy have they the best players use much more than warp zones they have refined their play to single frame button presses pixel perfect landings and have turned playing the game into an art form routinely beating it in less than five minutes and competing to shave mere frames from their runs as a kid we all thought if you somehow pushed the jump button hard enough you could possibly jump the flagpole it turns out you can the easiest way is in world 3-3 and is achieved by getting the lifts in the optimal position if you succeed you'll be rewarded with an eternal monotony of an infinitely repeating wall the next secret is something most players would never wait around long enough to do but if you're facing the hammer brothers and you wait for about a hundred seconds on the timer they'll charge you everyone knows the boss at the end of each level is bowser but everyone is wrong only the final bowser is the true koopa turtle king the other boss has our regular enemies disguised as bowser a fact only revealed by dispatching them with fireballs finally did you know there's a hidden one up in the first level of every world but it's not always there even nintendo's how to win at super mario brothers couldn't seem to explain their inconsistent appearance wrongly assuming it had to do with mario losing his power before getting the one up the truth is it will only be there on one of three conditions either you warped to that world continued there by using the a plus start trick or perhaps the most unbelievable if you've collected every coin in level three of the previous world there are about 35 known glitches in the game some of them like the flagpole glitch wrong warp and wall jump are difficult to execute but helpful time saving shortcuts but most are just quirky novelties that are fun to pull off one of the best glitches was popularized as early as the summer of the small fire mario glitch to pull it off you have to get to a boss battle as fire mario but finish the fight by hitting the boss and the axe at the same time mario will lose his flower power but still be big that alone is interesting but it continues in the following level if you grab a mushroom you'll become small and when you get a fire flower you'll stay small but have fire mario suit and abilities possibly the most famous glitch is the minus world by jumping backward toward the wall at the end of world one two you can pass through it to find a warp pipe leading to the so-called minus world the level itself doesn't lead anywhere and is basically just 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 glitch takes you to a different minus world one this one takes place in a dreamscape version of world one three that uses the underwater color palette in this crazy level you can swim through the air past bowser and the princess and in this version you can beat it and go on to minus world 2 and even minus world 3 but even if you don't have the disc version of the game there are a lot of other secret levels on the cartridge too a writer at 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 this revealed an astounding 256 additional levels miyamoto rightly dismissed them as unintentional random garbage data but in so doing he confirmed their existence if there was a way to alter these ram values without a computer gamers were sure to find it eventually someone noted that unlike the nes which resets its ram if a game is removed while the power's on the famicom and top loaders don't by starting a game of super mario brothers and hot swapping the cartridge with tennis for a bit then swapping back to mario again the ram values can be manipulated and these alternate levels can be accessed it's crazy but it's true i hope you found this video entertaining informative nostalgic and fun what did you learn what did i leave out if you like what i'm doing and want to see it grow turning on notifications is a game changer and if you know someone who'd find it interesting please share it with them special thanks to all the retro club patrons of the channel you make this possible

Channel: NESComplex

Views: 121,149

Rating: 4.9414978 out of 5

Keywords: NESComplex, NES, Complex, NES games, NES Review, Nintendo games, Nintendo Review, Is it fun?, Super Mario Bros., NES Secrets, NES Codes, Nintendo Secrets, Nintendo Codes, Shigeru Miyamoto, Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros Secrets, Super Mario Bros Glitches, NES Glitches, Nintendo Glitches, Takashi tezuka, Declassified, Development, secrets revealed, hidden truths, intel, Mario secrets, mario codes, mario development, mario glitches, mario stories

Id: 0iHtcvPm0nQ

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021