I love it when gamers dig around in old games to try and find secrets or bits of code that might allude to lost pieces of gaming treasure. They’re like the deep-sea divers of the gaming world, and more often than not, they come back with neat bits of information that show either the evolution of a title or where the inspiration for another game came from.
I was looking through Twitter this morning when I came across one such piece of lost information on Supper Mario Broth, a video taken from lunarsvideodump620 on YouTube that shows an unused cutscene from the original Mario Vs Donkey Kong game on the GBA. Watching it feels a little bit like being caught in a fever dream, with characters saying the wrong things and sounding completely different.
For starters, Donkey Kong sounds like Bowser and Mario sounds like he’s talking in fast-forward. Mario sounds this way because the audio from the opening cutscene Nintendo eventually chose to use for the game, the noise from the adverts DK is watching on the TV, is just played over images of game characters in strange graphics with muted tones in this early clip.
It’s the way that they have Mario saying ‘Mmm Bananas’ when the words on the screen say ‘I will get them back’ that gets me every time, however. I can definitely see why they didn’t use this cutscene; I bet Miyamoto found it more abrasive than those Donkey Kong Country graphics he disliked so much!
Check out the original cutscene below for context; I think Nintendo made the right decision changing it up and going for the cutscene we all know and love!
