User:Ultra64Detective2401/Iceberg Analysis

Here is where you can find my analysis on the Super Mario 64 Iceberg. More information on specific entries will be found in my sequences.

This page is currently still under construction.

Backwards Long Jump
The Backwards Long Jump is a glitch that can be found in Super Mario 64. There is a cap on positive speed, but not on negative speed, and long jumping multiplies your speed by a specific value. Therefore, long-jumping backwards will multiply your negative speed exponentially without bound, which is why it can be used to clip through walls and reach the top of the endless stairs without 70 stars.

Impossible Coin
This refers to two different coins-A coin that was thought to be impossible in Tiny-Huge Island, being underneath the ground, which was collected by clipping out of bounds and jumping out of the water. There is also a second “impossible coin” that is truly impossible to collect. Pannen has a great video about this coin here, but here’s my way of explaining it.

Coins either spawn individually, in groups of 5, or in groups of 8. The truly impossible coin is a part of a group of 5. Groups of coins are all spawned by a special “coin spawner”. Coins can be be floating or set to the ground, depending on the group type. However, coins that spawn from the same coin spawner always load at the same Y-axis.

To keep every coin in the group on the ground in the case of slopes, the “ground type” is programmed to set each coin to spawn on the floor below where its location is, by scanning slightly above itself, and going downwards until it hits a floor.

However, in the case of the Impossible Coin, one coin is just below the ground, and is close enough to the floor that it detects the floor above it as where to spawn. The game has a failsafe for this situation:If a coin is set to spawn aboveitself, it ends up unloading itself immediately.

The one coin that unloads itself immediately is the truly impossible coin.

Mystery Goomba
Pannenkoek2012 has three great videos about the subject (one, two, three), but here’s my explanation.

Similar to how coins can spawn in groups, goombas can also spawn in groups-Specifically, in groups of 3 that form equilateral triangles. In Bowser of the Sky, one such triangle of goombas has one of them off the platform, and directly over the death barrier, which is a floor within the game that kills Mario if he gets too close to.

Just like grounded coins, goombas are set to spawn on the floor directly below them, meaning this third goomba spawns on the death barrier.

Enemies are only loaded when they are a specific radius away from Mario, and in the case of enemy groups, when Mario is in a specific radius away from the group spawner. Since the death barrier is so far below where the platform is, the goomba spawns too far away from Mario, and thus only stays loaded for a single frame before unloading.

This third goomba is what is known as the Mystery Goomba.

Bob-omb Bridge Hanging
It’s possible to hang on the bridge in Bob-omb Battlefield. Other strange hangable ceilings exist as well, and are very well documented. (These things are normal. They are not signs of anything wrong with your cartridge.) Look here for more info.

Half A-Press
Check out this, and this says a bit more. (Look under 17: “What are half-A presses?”)

Or you can watch me try to explain the concept.

There is a challenge that fans of Super Mario 64 have created, known as the A button challenge, the goal of which is to collect specific stars, finish specific Bowser stages, or complete the game in the fewest number of A presses.

Depending on the context, it is possible for a mission to have two separate scores, based on whether it was a single star challenge, or a part of a full run. If you start a mission with the A button held, it counts for the individual stage, but wouldn’t count in a full-game run, since that A press would have simply been continuing the final A press from the previous mission.

Pannenkoek2012 needed a notation to capture this phenomenon, and chose to refer to them as half A presses, since adding a “half press” is better than adding a full A press, but not as good as not needing to hold A at all. This is also a good notation because you would just round up if looking at a star-to-star basis, and round down to see how many A presses it added to the full game.

Parallel Universes
The same video from earlier goes into PUs, but essentially, they work like this.

Mario’s position is a floating point number, while level collision uses “shorts” when determining whether Mario is standing on a floor. As a resuly, the floating-point number is truncated, or converted into a short, when dealing with collision.

Shorts can only have the values from -32768 to 32767, meaning values outside this range get rolled over. 32768 becomes -32768, 32769 becomes -32767, 65536 becomes 0, and so on. If Mario’s X and Z position after being truncated correspond to where a floor is, Mario will be able to stand on it. This means in practice, it is as if there were an invisible copy of the level geometry every 65536 units, in both the X and Z direction, which form a grid.

Mario and travel to PUs with high enough speeds, but Mario’s speed is cut into quarter-steps every frame, and Mario will have to not be out of bounds on any of the quarter-steps, or Mario will stop at the last quarter-step he was in bounds. Thus, the easiest way to travel between PUs is four at a time... or a QPU.

Peter Fedak was able to create a hack to make said PUs visible as well, which allows you to see what’s going on more yourself. A video demonstrating this can be found here.

L is Real 2401
One of the most popular rumors to exist. The text “L is real 2401” is believed to be on the Star statue (“Eternal Star” is the most common reading), and this is believed to hint towards Luigi. Coincidentally, 24 years and 1 month later, Luigi’s beta model was found in the Gigaleak.

Spaceworld ‘95 Beta
The most well-known beta of the game. There is an ongoing attempt to recreate this beta, known as The Preservation Project.

Whomp’s Fortress 1-up
On the tower that appears on every star aside from Chip Off Whomp's Block, a 1-up can be found hidden within the tower by breaking the bottom of the back wall. How this knowledge first came to be found is a mystery... that will force us to dive deeper into the iceberg...

The Big Dud
This refers to Big Bob-omb becoming a big dud after being defeated. Interestingly, a third rolling ball is added-Could this be Big Bob-omb?

Volcano Blocks
As you know, Lethal Lava Land has a volcano, that two stars can be found within. Very close to one of these stars, the one for “Hot-Foot-It Into The Volcano”, two strange piles of metallic blocks can be found-Some of these blocks form a stack, and the rest appear to have once formed a second stack, which appears to have fallen over. These blocks have a unique texture that appear nowhere else in the game, and it is unknown why they are there.

Yoshi’s Saddle
Yoshi’s saddle is rather strange in this game. The saddle is entirely red, and lacks the white outer rim that can be found in other Mario games. A closer look will show the rim is indeed modeled, but is bizarrely colored red instead of white. This means not adding the white color was not to save polygons, since the rim was fully modeled.

Please walk quietly in the hallway
This refers to a sign in the second floor of the castle. It is unknown why the sign is even there, as nothing happens if you do or do not stay quiet. Perhaps it was left over from an earlier iteration of the castle? There are rumors of a floor that had Boos roaming the halls... so perhaps at one point enemies were meant to be in the castle, and enemies in the second floor would attack if you weren’t quiet. (Perhaps Piranha Plants?)

ET in Pyramid
Do you see it? (hint:bottom right of hieroglyphics)

That’s literally all there is about it. The letters “ET” show up.

Bugged fire texture
The smoke from when Mario gets burned is actually a glitch.

Mirror Room
I’m actually not sure what this is doing on the iceberg. Perhaps it’s trying to refer to what’s on the other side?

Secret Aquarium
I’m also not sure what this is doing here, for that matter. The Secret Aquarium isn’t really much of a secret anymore.

Don’t become his lunch
This is referring to a sign introducing the player to Dorrie. It’s unknown why this line was in the game, as Dorrie cannot eat Mario. Perhaps he could in an earlier build?

Ghoul Medal
“If you walk out of here, you deserve... a Ghoul Medal.”-Big Boo

Yet this medal appears nowhere in the game. Sometimes, the medal is reported in the game anyway, though... Eh, must just be urban legends like Mew under the truck.

This also seems to imply it’s possible to leave the area without collecting a star or exiting the course. This very well could have been the case in an earlier build. I wonder where you’d have ended up if you somehow did it. Perhaps the answer is further down the iceberg?

Broken paintings
Some paintings just don’t work. These were likely decorative paintings.

JRB Box
This box is strange. Sometimes touching it does nothing, sometimes it damages you by a large amount. We still don’t know what determines which one it does, but this is a glitch rather than a supposed anomaly, as the same thing happens in emulated versions of the game. So no, this isn’t your game acting up. It wouldn’t be called an anomaly.

HMC Alcove
It is unknown what this refers to.

JRB vanishing fog
When you first enter Jolly Roger Bay, there is fog. The fog goes away if you collect the 1st star. This is permanent, going back to the first star doesn’t bring the fog back. Only deleting your save or using a different file can bring the fog back.

Whomp King turns into the castle
Whomp King states the Whomps are used to build things. A castle is made after he is defeated. So it’s plausible he was used to build the castle.

MIPS throwing
It’s actually possible to throw MIPS underwater. It was once supposed to be possible to throw MIPS normally, but this was cut. Underwater throwing MIPS is therefore a remnant from that time.

Big Boo unused text
“Eh he he... You're mine, now, hee hee! I'll pass right through this wall. Can you do that? Heh, heh, heh!”-Big Boo

That is the text. We’re not sure when it would have been used.

Blargg
Blarggs are enemies that were originally in Super Mario World. Unused files of this enemy appear in Super Mario 64, implying they were once meant to appear.

By looking into the game’s files, we see evidence of it being meant to appear in Lethal Lava Land, Bowser in the Fire Sea, and oddly, Wing Mario Over the Rainbow. This may imply that there was once going to be a third lava level, either a course or bonus area, before being scrapped and replaced with Wing Mario Over the Rainbow.

Dancing Flowers
Unused assets for dancing flowers can be found within the game. These are linked to an unused environmental effect which would spawn the flowers in parts of the ground within a certain radius of Mario. Bizarrely, the place these graphics are found is alongside Lethal Lava Land, which means it was likely either placed there randomly, or Lethal Lava Land’s level slot was once used for a completely different, scrapped level.

Yellow Cap Switch
An unused switch found in the game’s files. What kind of block it was meant to activate is unknown, as the game’s coding defaulted to it already being pressed, and it being linked to Koopa shells, which is not a cap.

Unagi’s Tunnel
We never get to see what’s within the tunnel Unagi the eel comes out of. There are reports of it being possible to access said tunnel, though. Why is that? We also still haven’t solved the mystery I gave about the 1-up.. So we have to go even deeper.

WDW Skybox
The skybox is an image of Shiban, Yemen.

Mario enters WDW early in the Got Milk Commercial
No he doesn’t. You only need 31 stars. However... it typically is a bad idea to go to the 2nd floor this early-There’s barely enough stars in the 2nd and 3rd floors to beat the game.

Something that actually is off in the commercial is the WDW skybox in this commercial. The clouds that can be seen do not appear anywhere in the final skybox.

Haunted Dirt Texture
Some rumors speak of one of the dirt textures having a face within one of them. This is a supposed image of said face, but looking at it, it’s kind of a stretch.

LLL painting fireball
The fireball never appears anywhere else in the game besides the painting. The in-game fireballls have no face. So why does this one have a face?

Island in the Distance
The Bob-omb Battlefield skybox has an island in the distance. What is this island?

Big Boo’s secret laugh
Here is a video of this exact laugh happening. Note that it predates the creation of the iceberg.

This is a result of a glitch where the game doesn’t properly increase the pitch of the generic laugh. You see, both Bowser’s laugh and Boo’s laugh are the same sound file-One is made by slowing the laugh down and pitching it down, the other by speeding it up and pitching it up. For some reason, this didn’t happen correctly, so we end up with a laugh somewhere in the middle.

Tower of the Wing Cap true location
As you can see, the Tower of the Wing Cap exists high in the clouds, with the towers extending downwards presumably all the way to the ground, but Mario gets kicked out before he gets anywhere close to the ground. So... where exactly is it? Where could we find the bottom of the towers?

How Bowser got into the castle with his sub
Dire Dire Docks has a drain that leads straight to the Castle Grounds. This is how Bowser could have reached the castle without being noticed. As for how he entered the castle... That’s for the next layer.

Skyboxes are photographs
We know for a fact at least one of the skyboxes (WDW) come from a real photograph. The others are very similar in style, making it likely they come from photographs as well.

True locations of painting worlds
While it was originally theorized that the painting worlds were simply worlds inside of a painting, similar to Night at The Museum, later games such as Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Super Mario Odyssey confirmed that these are real worlds that the paintings transport Mario to. However, we only know the locations of a one of these stages:Whomp’s Fortress. Dire Dire Docks is near the castle moat, Wing Mario Over the Rainbow is in the sky, and Cavern of the Metal Cap is behind the waterfall, but those are not painting worlds. The rest of the stages are a mystery...

THE END screen
Stangely, the ending screen looks entirely different from any location within the game, including the graphic style. The back wall can look disturbing due to being dark, and weird geometry can be found, partially covered up by a star. It is suspected that what is seen there is a Yoshi head, and it is very likely that this mystery is what the iceberg was talking about.

Removed courses
32 courses were planned to be in the game. We only got 15. This means the other 17 were at one point removed. We know what some of them were but not all of them.. (Unused Level 2 doesn’t count-Test levels don’t count towards the number of courses meant to be in a game)

Debug menu names
Some levels in Super Mario 64’s level select screen strangely have names completely different than what they are called in the final.

Here are the levels that are different than their final names, translated into English, with some commentary on most of them.


 * 4-Boo Apparition (Big Boo's Haunt-That basically comes down to basically “Boo ghosts”.)
 * 5-Snow Mountain 1 & Snow Slide 1 (Cool, Cool Mountain. This implies there was to be a second snow slide at some point.)
 * 6-Select Room (Peach's Castle interior. This is why it was made early on, it was used to select which level to enter.)
 * 7-Horror Dungeon (Hazy Maze Cave:This implies Hazy Maze Cave used to be completely different!)
 * 8-Desert & Pyramid (Shifting Sand Land:Seems the pyramid was there from the start. Levels would be given generic names basically stating what is there.)
 * 9-Battlefield (Maybe there weren’t always meant to be Bob-ombs)
 * 10-Snow Mountain 2 (Snowman's Land-Seems it being a mountain was scrapped sometime.)
 * 11-Pool Stage (Wet-Dry World used to be much different, it seems.
 * 12-Water Dungeon & Submersion (Jolly Roger Bay-Used to be a dungeon.)
 * 13-Big World (Tiny-Huge Island was likely inspired by World 4 of SMB3)
 * 14-Clock Tower (Looks like Tick Tock Clock was meant to be placed elsewhere...)
 * 15-Rainbow Cruise (Rainbow Ride-Interestingly, this name was reused for Melee.)
 * 16-Main Map (Castle Grounds)
 * 17-Extra 1 - Side-Scroller (Bonus and Bowser levels were marked with “Extra”. This is Bowser in the Dark World, which seems to have originally been meant to be a classic side-scroller level.)
 * 18-Extra 7 - Moat (Mini) (The numbers actually separate Extras into groups. Bowser courses get earlier numbers, the secret areas. Caps are lumped together in the middle. Also this is the Vanish Cap Course)
 * 19-Extra 2 - Basement Lava (Bowser in the Fire Sea. Basement was always meant to be second.)
 * 20-Extra 9 - Fish Tank (The Secret Aquarium used to have fish?)
 * 21-Extra 3 - Heaven (Before you go looking for religious connotations, note that “heaven” can also just mean the Sky. Bowser in the Sky.)
 * 22-Fire Bubble & In the Volcano (Were Podoboos meant to be in Lethal Lava Land?)
 * 23-Water Land (Dire, Dire Docks)
 * 24-Mountain (Yep. This was Whomp’s Fortress.)
 * 25-Ending (The "The End" image is actually considered a level. I wonder if you could hack the game to make Mario show up and die here. Not sure what would happen then.)
 * 26-Back Garden (Castle Courtyard. Here it’s quite accurate.)
 * 27-Extra 4 - Mini Slider (The Princess's Secret Slide.)
 * 28-In the Fall (Cavern of the Metal Cap. I guess where it is was decided before what it is.)
 * 29-Extra 6 - Mario Fly (Wing Cap course. “I’m going to fly for you.”-Mario)
 * 30-Bowser 1 (The first bowser boss. Bosses get their own course sepeate from the Bowser stage leading up to it.)
 * 31-Extra 8 - Blue Sky (What. This was seriously the first name for Wing Mario Over the Rainbow?)
 * 33-Bowser 2 (What do you know, the second Bowser fight.)
 * 34-Bowser 3 (Take a wild guess.)
 * 36-Monkey & Slide 2 (Tall Tall Mountain. MONKEY)

Extra 5 is missing. This presumably would be the missing Yellow Cap Course discussed earlier in this analysis.

Zelda 64 beta assets in Wet-Dry World
Wet Dry World’s city area had Zelda 64 assets used within it, and at the time, Zelda 64 was in beta. This means Wet Dry World’s city area has assets matching beta assets from Zelda 64. It was confirmed Nintendo did this on purpose in the Gigaleak, where we saw the area’s file name:11ZLDCITY

”ZLD” stood for “Zelda”.

Yoshi commits suicide
No he doesn’t, he jumps off somewhere. Yoshi, like any other main character in any main Mario game after 1982, can survive high jumps like this.

Rainbow Ride’s village
For some reason, a village was added to Super Smash Bros. Melee’s rendition of Rainbow Ride. Was it always meant to be there, out in the distance? What is this village?

Mario 64 is Freemason initiation
...It refers to this horrible theory.

...After seeing that nonsense, I’m not touching another spiritual theory again. Not even with a twenty-foot pole.

Big Boo’s haunt Forest
The skybox of Big Boo’s haunt shows a forest, rather than the Castle Courtyard. Perhaps if you could leave Big Boo’s Haunt, you’d end up in Big Boo's Forest? And get your Ghoul Medal? Yep, that seems right. Now we know where you would go if you COULD just walk out of Big Boo’s Haunt. Not that it matters, since you can’t... right?

Secret Slide Dimensional Rift
The entire slide is in a void of nothingness, both above and below. Fall off, and you end up falling through the ceiling of the first floor of the castle.

Original resolution textures
All the textures of the game once had higher resolution, before being compressed to work with the Nintendo 64. We found some of the original textures, but others are yet to be found.

Whomp’s Fortress Interior
What is a fortress with no interior? There must be an interior to Whomp’s Fortress... but we can never access it. Such a shame... wait, what’s that sound coming from the great abyss below...?

Oh! It must be from the Cold Cold Crevasse! That’s an abyss! So let’s do that next!

Cold, Cold, Crevasse
In Cool Cool Mountain, there is a sign that says:“Warning! Cold, Cold Crevasse below!"

Strangely, there is only a slope and bottomless pit below, and no apparent way to enter this supposed “Cold Cold Crevasse”. Strange.. if only there were some way to enter the actual Cold, Cold, Crevasse...