The community finds great curiosity in the code of the Nintendo masterpiece, more than 20 years later.
Mario 64 continues to offer us headlines almost 25 years later. Despite being such a dissected masterpiece, dominated by speedrunners to the last glitch, it is still capable of keeping curiosities inside. The community has recently launched new efforts to decompile the game code in order to better study the magic that revolutionized the field of 3D in its time, and has found a surprise, insignificant but valuable for being the game that is: the texture of the Smoke that appears on Mario's butt when burned is not the "right" one.
Mario is on fire
Basically, when Mario is burned the poor plumber emits a pitiful scream and hits a big jump and runs leaving a trail of smoke in the form of pixelated smoke particles. So far what we all who have played the original or even the DS version know. It was just another effect and it didn't seem out of place – although in a game like Mario 64 in which everything was so new, there wasn't much reference to compare. But now it turns out that the original effect was not that; In the code it was found that there was a texture specially prepared to represent this effect, a little cloud of black smoke with transparency, much more refined than the amalgam of black dots that we now know so well.
On the left the original, on the right with the texture fixed
Apparently, the texture appeared with the wrong format, which caused it not to look as the artist had imagined when he made the texture, an effect that has been restored to have the graphic document of this curiosity. As Nintendo is such a perfectionist company in its developments, it is worth asking the reasons why this could happen, perhaps it was an accident and its managers found that they liked the result more? Technical reasons? we may never know, but the documentary effort led by "zoinknoise" remains for the annals.
