[Waterluvian]

I love these discoveries but I dislike the guaranteed follow-up by game conspiracy theorists who don’t appreciate how games are built.

For any game, the odds are that it has unused assets or partially completed systems that hit the cutting room floor.

[Kye]

See also: the Star Fox 64 Arwing left over from implementing a boss in Ocarina of Time.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/how-to-get-star-fox-6...

Ocarina of Time started with the Mario 64 engine, so there are probably bits and pieces all over.

[grawprog]

What are these theories? I always thought It was fairly well known Luigi (and a bunch of other things)was cut due to budget and limitations of the n64 carts. Not just in mario 64 but most n64 games.

I'm honestly curious, i've never actually heard any theories about Luigi and mario 64 other than he just cut due to above mentioned reasons. Much like Yoshi.

[bargle0]

There’s a whole mythology of Mario 64 conspiracy theories regarding Luigi, Wario, Wet-Dry World, and other things. Googling “Mario iceberg” will get you started. A lot of it is just bad fakes, so it’s not as entertaining as something built purely out of unused assets.

[canjobear]

Thanks, this was a fun rabbithole.

[madsohm]

Please tell us more. Why are the assets not simply deleted when the developers realize it's not needed, especially on a N64 cartridge to save space?

[sharpneli]

The model is not in the cartridge. It was only in the game assets in the source code dump.

Why delete it? You never know if they might reinstate it (before release that is, and why bother deleting on release day?) or the model could be used in another game, making them costs money, storing them not that much.

[badlucklottery]

> especially on a N64 cartridge to save space?

The space obviously wasn't needed during development (this is leaked source, I don't know if it made it to the gold version) so there's two likely possibilities:

a) They knew about it but didn't have the dev/tester time to vet the change. This is coming from an era when most game testing was done manually and the N64 toolchain had some big issues around launch. Higher priority fixes might have just pushed a cleanup task like this off the list.

b) They just didn't know. This is also from an era where DCVS weren't particularly common in the games industry and CVS was still black magic in some circles so auditing changes or doing code reviews were very rare.

[ClikeX]

I'm going on a limb here and assume the codebase wasn't as easy to manage back then. They missed a lot of fancy tooling to review it.

Also, as a developer (game and webdev), there's tons of leftover stuff. Most of which is assets. For games, the artists would've put them in the codebase at some point. For web, it's usually just forgotten when removing features.

[Smithalicious]

I've always considered these theories to be a genre of speculative fiction, somewhere in between creepypasta and a real theory. I thought it was generally understood that these things are more for the sake of entertainment than real investigation?

[ColeyG]

Right, this is something I've been talking about on other forums as well. I can almost see the thumbnails already circling Luigi's model with a shocked expression....