What smoke looks like in Super Mario 64
Image: @BlazeHedgehog

An apparent "one-line code fix" for Super Mario 64 has supposedly fixed a visual bug in Mario's first 3D outing. The smoke Mario emits when he makes contact with lava or anything else hot has been replaced with a "much better looking" particle that's reportedly been within the game all along, according to Polygon.

All it took was a single line of code to be swapped. Here's the full rundown from a hacker known as zoinknoise:

it’s now known that this texture is displayed in the wrong format by the game, resulting in black garbage pixels. Since video game smoke of this era was often depicted with black garbage pixels, the mistake went unnoticed for over two decades. This patch corrects the error by displaying the texture correctly as proper transparent smoke. It does not add any new art; the texture has been inside the ROM all along.

And here's how the smoke looks in the final game (on the left), and next to it (on the right) is what it looks after the one-line code fix has been applied.

Could you see Nintendo applying this "fix" in a future release of Super Mario 64? Which effect do you like more? Share your thoughts below.

[source polygon.com]