[System Breach] Oh, we got a problem. What? Someone's sinked a rat into one of my servers
- a remote access tool - we're being hacked. But we've been so careful, how could they
find us? They haven't found us yet, just cracked the
outer layer of our system. I'll start an intrusion inspection and find
out where our rat is. No no no no no! Oh! What just happened? Armageddon, I'm afraid. Hi there, welcome to Thomas Game Docs! So today we’re talking Mario Maker - the
first game that is. You see a while back, a pretty weird discovery was
made in the game’s files. I should first note that it wasn’t me that
made this discovery - I am but a humble researcher, I know not the sacred of game ripping. No, the credit for this discovery goes to
two places - Twitter user NWPlayer123, and also the fine folks at the Cutting Floor Floor. If you’ve never heard of this site before,
it essentially keeps track of all the files buried within game’s code, that never made
it into the final experience, instead remaining hidden from view of the player, Now, Mario Maker actually has a whole bunch
of unused data in its files. Some of it is clearly a remnant of an earlier
version of the game. You see, if you take a look at the trailer
for the game shown at E3 2014, you can see that the game has gone through a whole lotta
changes. The background had a grid pattern, sort of
like a bathroom wall. But...blue. There’s also some kind of gradient placed
over the screen. If you look closely, you can see that the
ground in the middle is much lighter than the ground at the edges. Lastly, all the coins and question mark blocks
had this weird shiny look to them. Now, between this original trailer and the
final game’s release, Nintendo changed the Super Mario Bros theme to look practically
the same as the original game. The only difference I can spot is this shadow
behind everything, perhaps to help viewers tell the difference between official Nintendo
levels and ones made in Mario Maker. Anyway, while this prototype theme ended up
getting the boot, a bunch of files still remain from back then. Namely the shiny coins, the shiny bricks,
the shiny question mark blocks, plus a few other sprites which never made it into the
final game. There’s a whole lotta glitz hanging out
in the game’s files, undiscovered. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg
of what’s hidden inside Mario Maker’s files. There’s some much weirder stuff going on
here. Now, if you owned a 3ds back in the early
days of the system, like 2011 to 2013, you’ll fondly remember the application SwapNote. If not, this was an app which let you send
little hand-drawn notes to your friends online, plus strangers nearby to you. And, featured in this app was the character
Nikki. Nikki would guide you through the SwapNote
process, teaching you the ins and outs of the application. However, less than two years after it was
created, SwapNote was quickly killed off by Nintendo. Their reason? Well, some pretty dark news came out about
people making use of the SwapNote application to send inappropriate messages to kids in
Japan. Needless to say, Nintendo rightly shut down
the SwapNote service as soon as this story was published. However, the character of Nikki remained popular,
including amongst Nintendo’s Wii U development teams. And so, whenever they needed a test image,
they would often use one particular image: this. This image has appeared in the files of all
sorts of Wii U software, including one game in particular: Super Mario Maker. It’s not known exactly what purpose this
image had - probably just as a placeholder image before the actual graphics were drawn
up - but strangely enough, this drawing of Nikki is actually loaded into the game when
you first enter course bot. I mean, it's never actually shown to the player,
but then why is it loaded into the game's memory? Weird huh? But, it gets even weirder. Twitter user NWPlayer123 made a startling
discovery. Inside mario Maker’s files are almost one
hundred different clothing items and weapons from Splatoon. Not the final version, mind you, they’re
actually from an early version of the game. In fact, this finding offers a great opportunity
to see the origins of some of the now classic weapons from the game. The burst bomb, for example, was going to
be green rather than the sludgey purple of the final game. The splat bomb, again, was going to be a neon
green, rather the the off white that the developers eventually decided on. Some of the weapons went through much larger
changes though. The bubbler looked like, well, a bubble. The squid beakon was going to be a flag rather
than a radar dish. And the Disruptor looked like this, as opposed
to its final form. That's not a bowling bowl, like I originally
thought - it’s actually close to what a real tranquiliser bomb looks like. As I mentioned, there’s also an absolute
ton of clothing from the game. This, again, seems to be from an earlier version
of Splatoon. Going by volume alone, there are 19 tops here,
compared to the over 100 in the final release. So, what the heck was all this doing in the
game’s code? Well that’s a good question, and one Nintendo
themselves will almost certainly never reveal. However, we can do some theorizing. First off, let’s look at each game’s release
date. Well, Splatoon was released in May 2015. Mari Maker? That came out September 2015. Interesting. That confirms that the games would have been
in development at the same time. What about the developers behind each of these
games. Well, they were both designed within Nintendo,
but that’s not much help: Splatoon was developed by Nintendo EAD Group 2, headed up by producer
Hisashi Nogami. Super Mario Maker, on the other hand, was
developed by a completely different team - Nintendo EAD Group 4, under the leadership of producer
Hiroyuki Kimura. As much as I wish these two people were the
same for simplicity’s sake, they are most definitely not. So that’s a bust. If the games weren’t made by the same team,
then what possible reason is there for this strange occurrence? Well, at this point it’s really only vague
theories. The most common conclusion I can find is that
perhaps Mario Maker used an early version of Splatoon as a sort of base. That way the developers of Mario Maker wouldn’t
have to rewrite a bunch of simple, non-specific code. However, that still seems a little weird. Firstly, the kind of files found inside Mario
Maker look pretty complete, which suggests they were from a relatively late version of
the game. That doesn’t really line up with the timeline
that we know of for Splatoon’s development. If you’ve my video on the history of Splatoon,
you’ll know that a large part of early development was spent making and revising simple prototypes. These files don’t seem to match that at
all. So maybe Mario maker was based on a later
version of splatoon. Sure, the files would match up more closely,
but why would the developers of Mario Maker even want to base their game on Splatoon at
this point. It’s pretty well known at this point that
Mario Maker, or at least the first game, uses almost entirely sprites. Even in the NSMBU theme, all the blocks, all
the enemies, they’re all 2d flat sprites. The only 3d model used is Mario himself. So why would Mario Maker’s developers want
to base their game on a well developed at this point 3d 3rd person shooter. It just doesn’t make sense. Plus, we should know this. If you’ve seen my video on the history of
Mario Maker, you’ll know that the game was originally developed quite a while before
the Wii U even existed. Perhaps the team rewrote the game’s from
scratch when developing the Wii U version, but that seems a little odd. As I say, this is all just speculation. I don’t know enough to be making concrete
claims about the origins of these files, as I said at the start of the video, I know how
to research, not how to develop games. And so, I hate to leave this video on an unanswered
question, but it seems like that’s what I’ll have to do. I did try to look into it further, but people
keep deleting their tweets which makes my life very hard. If you know more about the topic, please get
in touch. I’d love to hear your thoughts, even concrete
knowledge if you have it - you can reach out in the comments or find me on Twitter. For everyone else, who does not have an answer,
that includes me - all is not over. If you haven’t seen it already, my last
video talks about the origins of this game, minus the potential splatoon bit. Here’s a taster: Mario maker wasn’t originally
even gonna be a game. Ooh interesting, Doesn’t that just make
you wanna watch the video, and support me, and make me happy in life? Haha, I’m just kidding. Oh, but I do have a couple more Mario maker
insights that I’d love to share, but it really depends on the reaction to my ther
Mario Maker videos. Gotta ride the content wave folks. So yeah, I will see you next week, whether
talking about Mario Maker or something completely different. If you don’t wanna miss out, be sure to
subscribe and if you really love me ring the notification bell. Ok, see you next week!
