Mistake in Super Mario 64 

I've always thought the smoke looked a little too much like the spray paint tool in MS paint. Nice explanation.

it's called a mistake but sometimes I wonder if someone did that by accident, saw the result, and thought it actually looked better. the "correct" smoke texture kinds just looks like a black blob when bunched together.

I think the “fixed” version looks better in our HD resolution, but the original probably looked much better on our little blurry tv’s in the 90’s. The developers most likely made that “mistake” deliberately.

Marios were burned in the making of this.

Honestly I think the smoke in the original game looks better.

I always thought these are ashes, as a child, instead of smoke.

I can't believe somebody actually would figure this one out.

I feel like this is a mistake anyone would make, and it was probably never fixed during development because nobody looked close enough to realize it was wrong.

Honestly, from these 2 clips, I like the look of the glitched texture a bit more. Something about the way they stack up together looks better to me. But might just be nostalgia, who knows

LITERALLY unplayable! How Nintendo keeps getting away???

It's been mentioned before, but maybe this was a mistake that they intentionally kept. Maybe it wasn't even a mistake, maybe they figured that the original is missing something or looks off (especially on a CRT at the time) and the coder did this simple change in the code and it luckily worked out well for them. The whole "Happy accidents"-thing by Bob Ross is not a meme, it's a common occurrence in the field of design and any designer worth his salt keeps an open mind about this. This thing about the smoke was "easy" to find because it was written in code but I'm sure Mario 64 has a bunch of designs that started out as something else too, and there's no public documentation about that. Speaking from my own experience, it happened to me more than once that I was working on a sprite and as my fingers slipped and put a pixel where it doesn't belong, I realised that this is a cool visual accent and I started building around that.

I wonder if they didn't have time to fix it.

Maybe it was intended when the game was programmed in the first place for CRT TVs with scanlines which has handles the end results differently

OMG THE SMOKE IS DIFFERENT!!!!!

Here I was thinking the issue was Mario’s dead ass eyes.

Very nice, funy how such a small bug existed for so long.

What’s the music in the video called?

Mario also has X's in his eyes even though he's not dead

Absolutely outrageous. I’ll travel back in time and demand my money back

I prefer the mistake. It looks better and looks more like smoke then the fix