Even though the Trope Namer is Nintendo's other flagship IP, Super Mario Bros. has had plenty of rumors circulate over its decades of history.
Main Series Games
Super Mario Bros.
- The Minus World can be escaped. Supposed methods include going into the end pipe 4 times without losing a life, climbing on top of the level at the end, and ducking and swimming above the pipe. Nothing works on the cart version.
- That you can access a secret World 10-1. That turned out to be false, but thanks to how NES games are programmed, you can use a Game Genie to access a world labeled "10-1", a version of World 1-1 with botched graphics.
- That there is a "no death" trick. Holding down the B button on the second controller supposedly turns Mario invincible. (Most people pulled this off by stepping on the second controller.) That one turned out to be false as well. (This may have been inspired by Mega Man 3, whose original release left in debug features performed by fiddling with the second controller.)
- That something great will happen if you jump over a flagpole. It is possible to do in World 3-3 by using the scale lift at the end, but there's nothing past the flagpole except featureless, infinitely repeating landscape. Then you just have to wait for the timer to kill Mario, because the Ratchet Scrolling won't let you go back. Several levels in Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels do continue past the flagpole, but this often leads to the infamous backward Warp Zones.
- That if you beat the original NES game twice in a row, you can play Super Mario Bros. 2. Chalk this up to a misunderstanding from the mid-1980s; beating the game once unlocks a New Game Plus, which makes the game somewhat harder by replacing all the Goombas with much tougher Buzzy Beetles. Since the "New Game+" concept wasn't as common yet, some players mistook this revised second-run to be the game's actual sequel. They failed to understand that if SMB2 had already been completed, Nintendo would just release it separately. Not to mention that beating the game unlocks a level select as well — if Super Mario Bros. 2 were made already, why would they let you beat it automatically by letting you skip to World 8-4?
- Other players did understand what was going on... but this just led to a similar rumor wherein the game got more and more difficult with each subsequent completion, with Bowsers eventually replacing every Goomba and other equally far-out scenarios. In reality, beating 8-4 in "hard" mode just repeats "hard" mode again.
- One of Jeff Rovin's How to Win at Nintendo Games books mentions a rumor about a hidden "Chocolate Factory" level. None of his later works explains how to supposedly access it. It's been theorized that this was a deliberate fictitious entry
as a form of copyright trap.
Super Mario Bros. 3
- There was a very popular rumor of a ninth world hidden in the game, reached by such arcane methods as finding and using the "Golden Whistle". There is a "World 9" in the game, but it refers to the Warp Zone, which is hidden but hardly a mystery. This was likely fueled by SMB3's box having screenshots of a level that doesn't match any of those appearing in the finished game. Said level, as well as others, do exist as "hidden" levels in the game's code, but they're largely unfinished prototypes only playable via a hack or cheat device.
Super Mario World
- That there is a secret "97th level". Ways to get there range from getting a string of Dragon Coins in the right order in certain levels or collecting all Dragon Coins in every level. No such level exists — there are 96 exits (not levels, since red levels have two exits each) in total, including those from all secret levels. Shigeru Miyamoto even denied the existence of any such level in an early 2000s interview.
- That completing the Special World repeatedly will continue the overworld season change past autumn to winter, then spring. While people have later hacked the game to have such changes, there is no such feature in the official game.
- That there is a "Moon World", which you can supposedly access from the Star World or one of the Vanilla Dome levels. Many confuse it with the Star World itself, or Special World, perpetuating the rumor. It was mentioned in an issue of the Australian Club Nintendo Magazine from the early 1990s, and you can visit the moon in other Mario games, including Super Mario Land 2 and, to a lesser extent, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.
- That you can find a "Laser Suit" (and a congratulatory message from Nintendo™)note through a secret level on the island above the Top Secret Area, accessed through a secret exit. This one was perpetuated by this YouTube video, uploaded in 2007, which looked very legitimate at the time. It's actually a hack by KPhoenix made with the Lunar Magic level editor, but the video still fools the uninitiated.
- Certain levels have extra-large dots on the world map. Many seemingly plausible explanations for what this means have been suggested (extra-long levels, important route splits, etc), but none of them hold up to closer inspection; to this day, nobody has come up with a definitive explanation.
Super Mario 64
- That you can ride and control Yoshi. Yoshi himself appears in the game as an Easter Egg upon collecting all 120 Power Stars, and a Yoshi egg texture exists in the game (complete with animation), but the feature was never actually included in the final version. Yoshi would first be rideable in a 3D Mario title starting Super Mario Sunshine, and would later appear in Super Mario 64's DS remake as a fully playable standalone character — in fact, he's the first character you play as, with Mario needing to be unlocked.
- That "L is real 2401" means something. This refers to an illegible inscription on a fountain in the Big Boo courtyard.note This particular rumor was perpetuated by NoA translator Dan Owsen on the company's website, though he didn't actually claim it was real; he instead gave suspiciously vague denials to troll the people who just wanted a serious answer that he couldn't be bothered to give. He did eventually clarify that it was meaningless, but even then, the answer was buried in his FAQ, which didn't help.
- Some think it foreshadows the North American release of Paper Mario 64, however that game wasn't even in development when Super Mario 64 released, and the game was actually released one day later, on February 5, 2001 (it was originally intended for a December 26, 2000 release before being delayed).
- Others though that it hinted towards Luigi being an unlockable character. While he was intended as playable, with a leak of some early source codenote revealing that he even had a model, he was completely scrapped from the final game. Luigi would become a playable character in Super Mario 64 DS, along with Yoshi and Wario.
- That you can get a Hammer Bro Mario. This was actually a joke referencing the Hammer Suit from Super Mario Bros. 3, which was a secret at the time.
- That there are other types of powerups, resulting in such features as Ninja Mario, Fire Mario, and Naked Mario.
- In the DS remake, a 2005 article claimed that you could unlock Waluigi by getting all the stars and being the fastest at all the races. A key to his room will appear. After beating the Rabbit King, Waluigi will be unlocked. This article, including the screenshots, was originally an April Fools joke. Similar rumors also existed thanks to the extra door in the character select room (which really just houses a hidden star) and the manual showing a purple rabbit which doesn't appear in the game.
- That you can find Bowser's submarine from Dire, Dire Docks after it vanishes upon getting the first star.
- A rumor the 1995 beta build of Super Mario 64 back when the Nintendo 64 was still called the ULTRA 64, is in fact classified or haunted due to the mysterious nature of its development. This includes the rumor that Nintendo was in fact not involved in its development, and therefore there is an ulterior purpose behind it.
- The idea that the disparate memories and claims about Super Mario 64 were due to a primitive AI customizing each game to the player. Rather then vivid childhood imagination and school yard lying for attention.
Super Mario Sunshine
- It was rumored that if you collect all the Shine Sprites, Mario can fight Waluigi, who is holding Luigi captive in a cage, and winning the battle makes Luigi a playable character. Obviously, this is false. However, in Super Mario 3D Land's post-game, Luigi gets trapped in a cage in Dry Bowser's castle in Special-Castle, and rescuing him unlocks him as a playable character.
- There is a book hidden in Noki Bay. Many rumors have existed on how to retrieve it and what it does. In reality, it doesn't do anything, and Mario can't interact with it. The book is most likely an unused asset that was left in the game. It was meant to be used in a mission to get a Shine Sprite, but the way of retrieving the Sprite was ultimately changed to getting eight red coins instead. A rumor also exists that in the Japanese version of the game the book was used in a level that was removed internationally. Another one claims that the book has a message reading "You have no life - Signed, Shigeru Miyamoto". Both of these are false.
- There have been rumors on how to get a green Yoshi, due to official artwork and early videos showing it. Green Yoshi does exist in the game, but only as a warning that your Yoshi is about to vanish: when they run out of juice they turn green and will spray regular water, giving the player about 20 seconds or so to find a piece of fruit to fill them back up.
Other Mario Games
- Yoshi's Story has "Purple Yoshi", a ninth Yoshi color. Allegedly, you unlock it by collecting every single coin from every single level, from those buried in the ground to those that require the use of a Super Happy Fruit. Some unofficial hint manuals even printed the rumor. The only hidden Yoshi colors are white and black, but the game did have a purple and brown Yoshi in the beta phase; they never made it into the final product.
- Paper Mario:
- One of the companions from Paper Mario 64, Bow, can be interacted with in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, while another, Parakarry, appears in a cutscene at the beginning of the game, and Mario can't interact with him. This, on its own, started rumours that all companions from the first game, rather than just those two, can be found as well. Cameos for the rest of them were planned, but were Dummied Out, based on the existence of their sprite sets in the game's code.
- In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, in World 5-1: Shy Guy Jungle, one of the things Mario can find in the pile of trash is a serial key: "XD3R-B8HH-9ZR2-FL16". Some say that this is an actual serial key for something, but nobody knows what it's for. At the very least, it's not a Club Nintendo or eShop code, because both display a "wrong code" message instead of the "code has already been entered" message.
- In any game where Luigi is not playable, there will be rumors of how to unlock him. But in games where Luigi is the main character and Mario is not playable, the situation is reversed; this includes games like Luigi's Mansion and New Super Luigi U. Interestingly enough, Luigi's Mansion includes a Dummied Out Mario model, fit to Luigi's structure with a lot of his animations. Going by the filename, it was probably a scrapped boss.
- In 2007, a YouTube video popped up that claimed that 100% Completion of the game with both Mario and Luigi unlocks a new galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy, and completing said galaxy gives you the ability to play the game on your Nintendo DS. While the DS can connect to the Wii for some games, it doesn't have the graphical capabilities to pull off what was shown. The hoax is very well executed, though, and people believed it.
- Mario Sports Mix has had many gaming sites say that if you beat all the minigames (or "Party Games" as the game calls them) in a certain order, you'll unlock Rosalina as a playable character. This is false.
- Mario Party DS Anti Piracy, a series of fan-made videos for anti-piracy measures in Mario Party DS, became extremely common in late 2020, to the point where the top autofill result for searching "Mario Party" was "DS anti piracy". The alleged countermeasures ranged from a simple warning screen on boot-up, to the game throwing punishments during gameplay to deter would-be pirates, to calling 911 through Wi-Fi. The videos never explicitly state that they are fake, which led to many people genuinely believing they were real, in spite of the fact that the entire Mario Party series (let alone DS) lacks anti-piracy measures of any sort, with not even a simple crash to deter pirates being documented on The Cutting Room Floor (and some users tried to edit Mario Party DS's page on that site, which led to it being locked).
- Supposedly, New Super Mario Bros. contains a Dummied Out enemy known internally as "Scripulous Fingore", who would have appeared in the Ghost House stages, resembled a floating, beak-like head with a single disembodied hand, and despite being fully coded, went unused as Miyamoto personally hated it and didn't want it in the game. In reality, this was a hoax started by the parody Twitter account "Cut and Obscure Video Game Content", who created a supposed 3D model of the enemy and a doctored screenshot of it in action in 2021.
