The Nintendo Gigaleak has delivered once again. A prototype map from Super Mario World (that was found in the Gigaleak) has been fixed, and we can see what could've been for the first time ever.
MrTalida shared the world of Super Mario World hacker and researcher codfish1002, who has fixed up the corrupted graphics and data of Map-B from the SNES title. This map was originally developed in 1989, back when Nintendo was working on the game.
Now, we're all familiar with the map of Super Mario World and the individual sections for Yoshi's Island, Donut Plains, Vanilla Dome, and so on. But Map-B was much closer in style to Super Mario Bros. 3's layout, with numbers representing the levels rather than the big glowing dots we associate with the SNES game.
Map-B is, amusingly, shaped like a mushroom, and there are a few little things that we can spot on the island that made it into Super Mario World. The trees surrounding the castle look a little bit like the trees in Forest of Illusion, and the mounds with eyes that are on Yoshi's Island surround level 1.
The map itself doesn't reveal anything other than what it looks like. MrTalida clarifies on Twitter that (to his understanding) the map is "purely a graphics layout file", and there's no level data inside it.
It's an incredible discovery and a hugely important recreation. Huge thanks to codfish1002 for fixing up this piece of history, and to MrTalida for sharing it online for the world to see.
What do you think of the prototype? Grab Yoshi and ride on down to the comments to let us know.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 22
Love stuff like this. Glad it changed into what we eventually got but this is still interesting to see.
Reminds me of the beta N64 Kakariko Village that looked like the world's most generic RPG village.
They start with a baseline "something" just to get some kind of game structure going, and then they build upon, reiterate, improve, and overhaul every element in order to make it more appealing, more engaging, more interesting. At least that's how it seems like their methodology was like.
Well I'm glad they didn't settle, and kept working on it.
Average Mario Maker 2 super world
@Uncle_Franklin
Of course they didn't settle to that. That's just a prototype layout. Even if they had used this mushroom-shaped map, it wouldn't have looked like this when completed.
Clearly just a prototype but it’s cool seeing things like this. I’m glad they didn’t give the castle icons those silly faces. Looks like they belonged more on ghost house icons, though I still prefer the final ones with the Boo circling above them.
That's pretty neat, it's crazy how the huge leak is still producing stuff we didn't know about
This is amazing! I find these sort of discoveries fascinating
Very cool! Who wouldn't want to see an early prototype of one of the best games of all time? Anything to provide context to the history of Super Mario World is greatly needed, and it always seems like new pieces of history get revealed all the time. Who knows what additional information or pictures we will find on other video games a year from now? I am truly looking forward to seeing more pieces of history.
Why yes, I'll take some morning retro goodness related to my favorite 2D Mario game thanks.
An incredible discovery and a hugely important recreation?? I would be interested to know why this is so??
weirdly those graphics looks very 8bit for a 16 bit game...
@bluemage1989 well, mostly because many people are interested in gaming history.
Its like digital archelogy!
I always wonder what Nintendo's opinion on this is...
Mario 3 was both a hugely important game, but also a massive development undertaking. It's not a surprise that for Mario 4 they would pick up from there and the prototype maps would resemble the prior game at an early stage of development. It was a good starting point and probably would have worked fine. It's interesting to see how they started, but also how the game evolved. It may have been covered somewhere, but there was probably a conscious decision during development to try to make the maps look different from SMB3 to avoid some criticism.
@sdelfin According to the Gaming Historian on YouTube, you are correct. SMB3 was essentially the base for SMW, during development, some of the team remarked how similar it looked to the NES titles.
@EarthboundBenjy can still find that beta town in Mario 64 down on the ground level of wet/dry world
This looks different.
That's pretty neat. It almost looks like SMB3 graphics. Donuts, vanilla, cheese, cookies and mushrooms oh my! I think the team must have been very hungry.
@Captain-N Thanks. That's where I would have guessed that I heard that before. He sure did a particularly fantastic job on those videos about Mario 3 and 4.
@sdelfin Yeah, I like his channel.
I love learning more about videogames in general and obviously even more so my favorite ones, absolutely including Super Mario World!
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