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1:48 For the longest time I thought the "3" of coins was a clue to something I was missing. Like maybe I was supposed to find hidden rooms numbered "1" and "2," or I was supposed to do something three times to unlock something. It was only when I read trivia on the Internet years later that I realized it was just a "3" for "Super Mario Bros. 3"
I didn't know the powerup outlines in the sky were randomly generated. It's a really cool detail and I guess it might actually have a practical use of making that area look interesting without having to save mapping data for it to save space on the cartridge for other stuff.
The reason the coin counter flashes 64 before returning to 0 is due to the fact that 100 is 64 in hex and for that single frame. The conversion system isn't programmed to cover. As the system reads the value and sends a return to 0 command instead of the hex conversion subroutine
I actually knew about the random mush/flower/star generation in the sky because I tried hacking smb3 a long time ago. It's an object that gets placed in the top-left corner of a level that generates the decoration.
There's only one trick in this game I know that I don't think I've seen other people talk about, ever: In a two-player game, *either* player can initiate the battle game from the map, *regardless* of whose turn it is. If it's Luigi's turn on the map, but he passes over Mario's current location and stays there for a bit, Mario can press A to initiate the battle while Luigi is stopped on that space. It's kind of like the World 8 hands snagging you as you try to pass by. You can be a real jerk and just keep "stealing turns" by forcing a battle game and winning it, unless the other player has an alternate route on the map to skip you. Also I'm pretty sure this is one of those games where the pause function only works with the player 1 controller, which isn't *that* rare on NES, since the original model Famicom only had a Start button on its P1 controller.
My older cousin would abuse p1 and pause at times to fuck up my momentum and kill me. And yes, he definitely stole turns this way when he forced battle. I stopped playing with him after that.
I use to do that when my cousins would come over and want to play but they weren't good enough to beat levels. Just steal their turn and keep it moving. 🤣😂🤷🏾♂️
It took me a few years to discover this one, but I did force some battles with my friends and brothers later, most people around me don't like it since if a player is good can make it almost imposible for the other to play the game.
Fun fact: That flying under the level one applies to every other level like 1-2, where you have the dark green underside and at least one pit. I think I learned about that from the old SMB3 Nintendo Power guide, but they brought it up in... 6-8, I think? Whichever one's the only grass level in World 6.
I think it’s because they programmed that part of the graphic to be true to its visual. (The darker green is deeper/farther in and thus is essentially a tunnel)
Whenever playing this game as an adult, I still feel a "tad" scared when entering stages that show nothing but sky or a blank screen. There's some sort of creepy vibe in old retro games, and it's likely due to the graphics being outdated.
I remember watching a tv show about some of the secrets in Mario 3. It’s where I learned about the warp whistles. Every kid was talking about it on the playground the next day.
i vaguly remember that same show, thought it was some kind of like 20/20 news story cause it was how i learned how to beat bowser by flying up over the wall in the game
@Boco Corwin The information I could find is scant, but from what I can tell, Prima never made a SMB3 guide - the game was released in Japan in 1988 and the US in 1990, while Prima was still being operated by one person out of a California home in that year and was focused on general anthology style guides like "Secrets of the Games" and "Nintendo Game Secrets" so they didn't have enough clout to land a license to do a full strategy guide from someone as big as Nintendo at the time. Most likely the official guide your uncle had was published by Nintendo Power, as they were responsible for most of the in-house Nintendo game guides until third party printers like Prima or BradyGames became successful.
@Boco Corwin It wasn't prima. It was Nintendo Power - Straight from the Pros! I remember buying that. It notably didn't tell you how to beat Bowser. It did tell you about the behind the scenes thing, which is how it's the only one of these I actually know. They also printed level maps and tips on the insides of specially-marked boxes of cereals (I don't remember what brand).
What you also didn't know: This NES footage is so clear that I couldn't tell it was real hardware until I saw brightness artifacts around the lines Mario is drawn on when he flew in 1-1.
@@sergiomejia7720 Considering those artifacts can be emulated fairly easily with most modern emulators (some of which even include it as an option that can be toggled on or off), not really, no.
4:09 Actually, I assume you used NESMaps for these: It's missing a Flower in 3-7. There is one hidden in a bumpable block downleft from the vine. Funnily, if one would use the map at VGMaps, it's even missing two of these flowers. So a total of 55! =D Then if you count the ones you can get in HB fights, there are additional 8 leaves and 1 flower =)
5:01 It isn't actually that strange from a programming standpoint. Both the levels and the mini-games probably use some flag to indicate to the world map that something should be marked as completed. When entering the world map, a procedure is executed that would then mark both the card game and the level as cleared because Mario is standing on both.
I slightly surprised the anchor item didn't make one of the lists. I'm sure a number of people may know it, but as a kid I only found out well after the SNES days started.
For the longest time I had an inkling something like the 1-2 under-the-stage trick was possible. I remember as a kid, dying in a hole in that level, in a way that I kinda clipped into the darker green bit, and for a few frames I was in a swimming state before I fell off very fast. I always found it strange, but knew something was up with that.
A lady was talking about Super Mario. I told her that Mario's full name is Mario Jump-man Mario, that Luigi is Luigi Mario, and that I don't know Luigi's middle name. She looked at my 8 year old and back at me - then said, you're a nerd. I puffed out my chest and proclaimed "NO, I am an 80's kid" and boys aren't girls. I just added that last part because boys aren't girls.
That's the thing that bugs me about the hammer brothers suit. Such a cool idea in theory, but it's so rare and so easy to lose, that it might as well not exist.
I think a lot of people don't realize that if you don't collect the spades, and let them keep generating throughout your playthrough, you can let them multiply up as much as you want, so once you lose once it just brings you back into the game for another try, so you don't have to memorize where things were because you'll keep playing it back-to-back-to-back. You can rack up like 8 of them
There is a check. You have to do some really specific things to trick the check into thinking it's placing the card in a valid spot. It's complicated and I don't know the details, but essentially it decides on what coordinates to spawn the card before it actually does, and there are specific cases where you can store those coordinates without the game updating them when you transition to the next world, so it puts it on what would be a valid spot in the previous world, but is actually on top of an uncompleted level in the current world.
I thought i knew about the boom boom thing, until i saw it just entirely skip everything. If you hit it with two fireballs in one frame, when he is on his last HP, he wont die. Shoot him a few more time, and he just suddenly explodes, except the orb spawns upside down immediately. Same as star-kill. Strange things happen if you do that to the Koopa kids. I knew more things here than i did in the other video. Including randomized sky.
After seeing the spade card glitch, it took me back to when I was a kid! The spade appeared in world 5 and cleared the level with kuribos shoe in it - I was so mad
I knew pretty much all of the random stuff involving rare power ups because the version I had as a kid was a chinese bootleg that let you equip them at any point in the game, so I got to experiment a lot. But man, has been decades since I last saw some of those, nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
I posted this a couple times in the comments of SMB 3 glitches/secrets videos recently on YT, and I will gladly reiterate it here in case anyone wants to try it. In the near future when I am not busy working on animation, I will attempt to recreate it and take a screen grab. And, it is possible this may only work on specific end-of-world airship boss battles because different boss battles have different floor layouts and I am not sure if this affects it or not, nor am I sure this is a glitch or a deliberate Easter egg... but more than likely a glitch. I set out to find a mention of it on the internet or in RU-vid videos recently with no luck so now I'm just throwing it out there wherever I can so that it's known about. I haven't done this since about 1992 or 1993 when I was a teenager (I'm old! yikes!) but back then it happened by accident once and I was able to replicate it a couple more times. When you beat the boss of an airship stage (one of the Koopalings or whatever they're known as) and the wand drops, repeatedly *run* back and forth while jumping underneath it while narrowly dodging it. IIRC, you run/jump under it from one side and hit the ground directly below it and jump again in the same direction and then change direction and jump under it again, landing, and jumping back to the other side. Rinse and repeat, as long as you don't actually touch the wand while doing so. As the wand bounces or whatever it does before it settles on the ground, keep jumping (with run held down) from side to side beneath it almost like a game of limbo. If done properly, the wand will land diagonally. It isn't super easy to pull off but it is a real thing. I'll try to replicate it soon but anyone wanting to try please give it a shot (or ten-it can take many tries).
I'm pretty sure that the Memory Match mini-game glitch is fixed in later ports of the game. I think it won't spawn on top of any incomplete level tile in Mario Advance 4.
The random pictures at the top of the level could be part of the whole "stage play" theme, people just draw weird things up there above the scene. However the theme would be much more overt if they had stage lights up there.
The N-Spade Card clearing a level once you clear the minigame reminds me a glitch from my Mario 3 fangame... Also I've seen the Boom Boom insta-clear level glitch in a couple TAS runs of Mario 3.
The only ones I knew, where the spade card thing, and the one with going into the pipe after going behind the scenes. Because I've had both of them happen, and was legit confused both times.
The flying inder the level reminds me that in Super Mario World, there is a gap between the lowest point for blocks and the death plane. You can just swim under large portions of the levels
If get a super leaf and a star then wait til the star is almost done then glide it will do a similar animation as the hammer suit spin thing. Also does anyone agree that the 64 on the coin counter between 99 and back to 0 is an easter egg to mario 64?
Computer programmer here. It would have saved space on the ROM and time for the developers to have the star/mushroom/flower sprites in the sky randomly generated by algorithm as opposed to pre-mapping where each sprite is supposed to be each time and hard-coding it to the game. Had I developed this game, I would have done the same thing.
I know that 0x64 hexadecimal equals 100 decimal, and at that moment you have just gotten 100 coins. That doesn't explain _why_ the game does what it does there, but maybe it's a piece of the puzzle.
The second question might have to do with how the game assembles numbers together after you exceed a value of 99. Similar to how in Super Mario Bros. 2 USA when you exceed 9 lives, the game will show "A, B, C, D, E" and "F", which are hexadecimals
@@DouglasZwick I'm relatively certain this isn't true, and is a common misconception. While it is coincidental that 0x64 = 100 decimal, I believe it shows the value 64 for a frame because that's the index number of the one up sound that plays when you get the 100th coin and that sound index value is briefly displayed as the coin value. Furthermore, it's interesting that the 64 which is displayed is actually the decimal representation of the the 1up sound's hexadecimal value of 0x40
It really only happens if you completed the level, have a spade card spawn on that level, then get a game over and continue the game. When you continue, the game reverts to undone all the regular stages level in the current world.
(0:03) That's hilarious. Mario's trying to be like Sonic now. :P (0:21) Huh, I don't think I knew that about flying Boom Booms. (0:46) I don't think I ever noticed that before. Maybe it does that because 64 in hex is 100 in decimal. (1:32) LOL, I didn't know about that one. (1:48) Oh, really? There's a pipe with a "3" made out of coins in 1-1? ...Heh, yeah, of course I knew that. Also, I have indeed noticed that the power up icons in the sky were randomized each time you enter a level. (And it's not just 1-1. Any level that uses those power up icons in the sky is like this, like world 8-1.) (2:34) Yeah, I knew that "behind the water" trick in 3-9. Nintendo Power guide FTW. (3:13) Yep, and this is also true in other levels that have this type of ground, such as 6-8. (3:43) I've done that before in a hack long ago (I think it was Chaos Control). After that happened, I was disappointed that the level that auto-cleared on me, so I used a Game Genie code to force me to enter the level anyway just so I could play it. (4:07) Interesting random statistics. I did know that there are only 2 Hammer Suits, in worlds 6-10 and 7-8. I didn't know the exact counts of the other items though. (4:33) I actually did know that one, as I mentioned in my 1:48 paragraph above. (4:57) Yeah, I did know about that one, because of what happened in a hack I played, which I mentioned in my 3:43 paragraph above. (5:07) Fun fact: It takes 35 fireballs to kill Bowser that way in SMB3, but you probably knew that.
I know that there are levels where you collect an exact number of coins and get an item after that. It was once in nintendo power or something like that, my neighbour kept a booklet with all the coin requirements.
My favorite secret to an unrelated game is *black ops 3 zombies jet gun.* People hate it because it explodes really fast and you have to go around the entire tranzit map to collect parts and build it again. However what people never figured out was that gun is a TEAM weapon. That gun needs TWO people to operate it. When you do, it becomes UNBREAKABLE.
I sure didn't know all 10 of them, but I definitely knew about ZERO of them. This was a really interesting video! I have a couple questions, though. 1- I didn't really understand how the Boom-boom glitch 2- Can a Card game spawn in any tile of the map, then? Even Hammer Bros, castles, or floating Koopa ships?
I don't know exactly how the boom boom glitch works, but drawing on my knowledge of similar types of glitches from other games, it likely has something to do with boomboom's HP going into a negative number that causes some weird stack overflow or something that affects how the orb spawns. It could be that the orb also has a hidden lifebar for some reason that's tied to boomboom's that falls immediately to zero due to the excessive negative HP on boomboom's lifebar which causes the game to incorrectly register that Mario touched the orb. There's a check in the code that prevents the card game from spawning on hammer bros, which I would imagine extends to other independently moving map entities like the airships. Castle tiles most likely have a toggle that just straight blocks the tile game from spawning on them. Why there isn't a check to prevent the card game from spawning on an uncleared level is ... well, unclear but it might be something the devs didn't think about at all or, if they did, thought it to be such an unlikely occurrence that they didn't bother to put a check in the game to prevent it.
1. Technically I might not have "known" it, but considering I HAVE jumped onto a vine while spinning with OTHER outfits, it's not that unexpected. 2. Didn't know 3. Didn't know 4. I seem to remember this being a thing, but I totally forgot about it for decades. Kinda makes sense because otherwise using a p wing in a water stage is useless. 5. Didn't know, but considering all the other wrong-warp jank, I'm not surprised. 6. I knew that one. 7. Knew that. Did it myself too. 8. Didn't know that, but I think mario world has a similar trick? 9. Didn't know that, but I assume it doesn't really come up often. 10. Of course I wouldn't know that, but it's a pretty silly statistic to memorize. You might as well say "there are x coins in the game" or "there are x pipes in world 6"
I'm gonna take a semi-random guess; I think the one frame of 64 coins happens because 64 is 100 in hexadecimal. It's sort of a weird explanation, but it's the *least* weird explanation I've got.
I noticed the images in the sky of 1-1 as a kid, but I’m autistic! You got me on the other 9 things though! I love your content, Mitch! SMB3 was my favorite game as a kid and I love seeing you find every secret!
I have my doubts for one reason: I've played Mario 3 since 1990. I've had the card game appear over a level. I've completed the minigame, the level has never auto-cleared once
This was actually a HUGE debate that happened among SMB3 runners last summer. Mitch labbed out a way to use that glitch to skip the autoscrolling 6-7 and save about a minute in a 100% run (regular warpless runs don't play that level) on stream over a couple of days. The debate was whether this counted as 100%, because even though the game says you have completed the level, you haven't actually entered and played the level, you entered the spade game. A community vote took place, and the results were in favour of banning that specific glitch in 100%, and it's not useful in warpless.
1:57 it might have been my 8 year old brain imagining things, but if I remember correctly the last symbol you touch when flying always resulting in you getting the card of the same symbol no matter what at the end of the stage .
I definitely highly enjoyed this video as yeah I mean there's a lot of facts I know about Super Mario Bros 3 including that invisible underwater Mario thing that was in this video, but yeah pretty much almost all the rest I wasn't aware of. I primarily have played this game on the SNES via Super Mario All-Stars and I do believe I have seen that card game appear on an incomplete stage before but I swear on the SNES version when you complete the card game you still have to play the stage. I guess maybe they just fixed that issue in the SNES version.
Something in retro games that can't be matched by modern games is the amount of obscure secrets and glitches and shit, intentional or not, that you can find.
