A 28-year-old Japanese TV show that was recently uploaded to YouTube has seemingly given us our first glimpse of Super Mario 64's cut multiplayer mode, complete with a playable Luigi, but the sudden upload and debate over what we're actually seeing has me feeling like I'm looking at a Bigfoot sighting.
Three weeks ago, a small Japanese YouTube channel called Now In Game, which appears to specialize in archiving '90s TV shows about video games, uploaded a 1995 special featuring footage from an early public Nintendo 64 showcase. The event being displayed here is likely Shoshinkai 1995, a precursor to the Nintendo Space World conventions that would run until 2001.
The show features a lot of footage of a playable prototype for Super Mario 64, but what's most interesting is at the 13:22 mark, where a sizzle reel of various N64 games is on display in the background of one shot. That reel briefly cuts to an unfamiliar room in Super Mario 64, where both Mario and Luigi appear to act as playable characters simultaneously.
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This detail was pointed out by a Twitter user who goes by Yakumono. There's been no shortage of debate over what this footage actually showcases, and some people seem to believe that the "Luigi" here is actually just Mario, with the green of his suit the result of the ill effects of recording a CRT television from off screen. Personally, that seems unlikely to me, given how much red is already in the image and the degree to which the second character in the background looks like Mario.
We know for a fact that Super Mario 64 was originally going to include a multiplayer mode, and this footage appears to match up exactly with what we know about it. A Luigi model which looks very much like this one appeared as part of the infamous 2020 Nintendo "gigaleak," and was tied to evidence of a multiplayer mode in the classic 3D platform.
Nintendo has even acknowledged this multiplayer mode officially. In an old Iwata Asks, the late Nintendo president noted that Mario 64 "started with Mario and Luigi running around together." Director Shigeru Miyamoto explained that "[t]he screen was split and they went into the castle separately. When they meet in the corridor, I was incredibly happy! Then there was also the mode where the camera is fixed and we see Mario running away, steadily getting smaller and smaller. That was a remnant of an experiment we did where Mario and Luigi would run away from each other but you could still see them both. But we were unable to pull it off…"
That fixed camera mode appears to be exactly what's in the newly resurfaced footage. It remains unclear just how far into development the multiplayer mode was scrapped, but this 'what might have been' is fascinating. Super Mario 64 DS would eventually make all those schoolyard rumors of a playable Luigi come true, but it looks like there was some distant truth to them even back in the '90s.
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