Thanks to an old videotape, we can see Mario playing in the revolutionary opening title for the Nintendo 64, which was left out of the final release due to memory issues.
1995. Space World Exhibition. At that time, the Japanese company was holding an event on its soil, which it used to hold every year, and many of its games, which were still in development at the time, were showing here. This was also the case 28 years ago, because the Nintendo 64 also appeared in Space World, for the first time. At that time, the name of the console was no longer Ultra 64, and among the games we could find Super Mario 64. The quality of the camera recording is not the best, but what we can find in the video embedded below at the point where the video starts (if it starts at 00: 00, it is 13:21), certainly not nothing. ..
We can see two screens. Mario is on the left and Luigi is on the right! The last time we saw him was in Nintendo’s big leak in 2020, because he remained there as a model in Super Mario 64. Originally, he was supposed to be the second playable character, as Miyamoto Shigeru, the Big N’s legendary game designer, said, In a 1996 interview. Mario and Luigi can run around a simple room similar to LEGO bricks, but climbing and jumping wouldn’t be ruled out either. This description is similar to what we see in the video…
“We were going to include it in a Mario Bros-style minigame, but since most users will probably only have one controller when they first buy a Nintendo 64, we decided not to include it (and for other reasons).” I think it would have been great if we could have done it in two player mode with both Mario and Luigi. “But if we did it wrong, it would have become a fighting game or something (laughs), so we’ll leave that challenge for next time,” Miyamoto said. In an interview with Iwata Asks in 2009, he said that the canceled multiplayer mode was split-screen and the two characters entered the castle separately, and he was happy when the two brothers met. There was another mode with a fixed camera position, and as Mario ran away from it, it got smaller and smaller.
It’s unfortunate that Luigi was left out.
source: VGC
Here’s the only official footage of Super Mario 64 multiplayer from Spaceworld 95 video booth with the camera clearly focusing on both charactershttps://t.co/cLCdSIl5B9 pic.twitter.com/RdtTGb8LpJ
– Yakumono (@LuigiBlood) December 15, 2023
We finally have a glimpse of what Super Mario 64’s early multiplayer mode looked like! This is also the first time we’ve seen a Luigi SM64 model outside of Nintendo Leaks! take a look! pic.twitter.com/Ev3R7NDBtp
-Marionova (@Marionova64) December 15, 2023