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Meet Kinoko. Does it look like a normal mushroom booster in a Super Mario game? Well, it isn’t. This little guy right here once determined whether or not Super Mario Galaxy 1 and two it could exist properly and be played.
As The Cutting Room Floor documents, Kinoko is a mushroom that exists in the files of both Wii-era platformers, and though never see the mushroom in the game, the two titles need it. “If the file is not present, the game crashes,” states the TCRF wiki entry.
According to Nintendo hacker ecumber05, Kinoko’s model data is still alive and present in Super Mario 3D All-Stars, the new Switch collection containing three classic games. In an email, ecumber05 noted that this was surprising, because behind the hood, it appears that some unused models were removed in the most recent version of the game.
At Polygon’s urging, ecumber05 teamed up with firubiii mud to play with the Kinoko Switch files and based on these two manipulators the fungus appears to be neutralized. Firubiii removed the model data from the game and Galaxy still started successfully.
“I also looked for references in the code to the fungus, but found nothing,” ecumber05 said in an email. “I think it is safe to conclude that all links to the fungus were removed in this version.”
Why was it so reliant on a mushroom in the first place? The main hypothesis is that at one point during development, the fungus could have been reproducible in an early prototype of Super mario galaxy. Polygon couldn’t find references to this online, but whatever caused it in the first game likely migrated to the second game because Nintendo repurposed some of its resources for the sequel.
This has all been turned into conversation thanks to a viral Twitter post from Boundary Break YouTuber Shesez, who recently posted a fun Tumblr exchange about game development. In it, fans marvel at finding something random in a game, while one developer explains that removing this random thing will cause the game to crash.
The fungus, while a recent example, is far from the only killer “tomato” that allows games to function properly.
“When I worked at EA they told me that the nascar team had to leave a field goal post under the world because it would crash the game if it was removed due to crazy old code in the game,” developer Chris wingard he said on Twitter. Many other game workers sympathized in responses for their own cargo-bearing tomatoes or mushrooms that they had heard of in other games.
A former developer of a large FPS franchise once told me this:
There is an image file in your engine which, if removed, will instantly and completely break the game.
Nobody knows how or why.
After a month trying to fix it they just saved it with an 8x8px image with the same name https://t.co/BdUyKFVnM7
– hexavier (@ xavierck3d) September 22, 2020
If you know anything about game development, the existence of things like Kinoko should come as no surprise – after all, almost every title is held together by a proverbial duct tape.
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