A cut Super Mario 64 stage has resurfaced from an old Nintendo report
Spooky.
Nintendo preservation site Forest of Illusion, in collaboration with Render Archive and NintendoWarden, have uncovered what appears to be a cut stage from Super Mario 64.
The screenshot reel from a pre-release build of the game was found in the long-sought after 1996 Nintendo Company Report.
The report, which has been carefully scanned and uploaded here, includes the standard yearly company round-up, plus some accompanying images of Nintendo's star roster and various consoles including the Nintendo 64 and the destined for failure Virtual Boy.
But the most interesting part of the report is the page that shows various screenshots of B-roll Nintendo 64 footage from 1995. It's here that we see still frames from a never-before-seen look ghost stage.
Forest of Illusion combined these stills into a GIF so we can get a better impression of what the gameplay would have looked like.
Now for the insane part...One of the pages shows various screenshots from the currently missing "extended" 1995 Nintendo 64 B-roll. Why is this a big deal? It shows a never-before-seen look at Super Mario 64's mysterious ghost stage! Below is a gif to view each frame in action. pic.twitter.com/KsifRUaSg2
— Forest of Illusion (@forestillusion) September 21, 2022
Most of the text in the report is, however, in Japanese and not in a machine-readable format which doesn't make it easy to stick in a machine translator.
Still, it's pretty cool to see some new tidbits from a game that was supposedly thoroughly broken down and examined.