Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 17 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 17th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.  

Today, I am going to tell the story of trying to find out the source of the mysterious phrase "le searching for Power" from Super Mario 64 DS.

Searching for Power

Almost exactly one year ago, on October 9th, 2018, I submitted the following post to the Supper Mario Broth Twitter account:

First, some background information. Super Mario 64 DS contains a debug mode that boots up with a stage select screen. It is possible to activate the mode with a simple Action Replay code (22029E00 00000002 for the North American version). Here is what it looks like in-game:

The entries scroll down beyond those fitting onto a single screen, for a total of 53 entries. The main purpose of this menu is to allow the tester to quickly access not just all the regular courses, but specific rooms within them. For example, entry 17: "Desert Py" deposits the player directly into the pyramid in Shifting Sand Land rather than the entrance.

Most of the entries represent places the player can access during normal gameplay, however, the very first entry, 0: "Test Map", does not. The test map that appears is a large room used for testing movement; here is what is looks like from above:

You may have seen very similar test maps in other game's code before if you are interested in behind-the-scenes video game content; especially the checkered textures of different sizes indicating how many units each object's size is are very common in such rooms. Here is a video of a very similar room in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or here for Super Mario Sunshine.

The room itself does not contain too many features of interest; it is mostly different slopes, a few bodies of water, and some objects like Question Blocks. In the upper left corner are testing strips for slow quicksand (the kind filling up the center of the inside of the pyramid in Shifting Sand Land, where Mario has up to 20 seconds until he sinks completely) and a conveyor belt, while the top right corner with the kanji characters is an area for testing footstep sounds, with each tile representing a different material.

However, today's topic is not the test map itself, but rather the brief intro when it is accessed, as seen in the original Twitter post. Now, here is why the intro is special: when a regular course's main area is accessed from the debug mode, the regular course intro screen is displayed correctly. When an sub-area (like the pyramid), a Secret Star area (like the Hidden Aquarium), a Bowser area or a Peach's Castle area are accessed, the intro screen is instead this:

A wordless screen with a Bowser emblem that is unused during regular gameplay. It also plays Bowser's laugh sound that usually accompanies his messages. This is hypothesized to have been the intro screen for Bowser stages at some point in development, however, it is only used in the debug mode.

The test map is the only entry in the list that uses the regular course select intro despite not having special data for it, resulting in it saying "Course 0: le searching for Power". Clearly, this sentence was not intentional. Popular YouTube creator Chuggaaconroy, whose content I am a big fan of and who I am grateful to count among my readers, commented on my post with this suggestion:

He hypothesized that the message is cut off from a larger sentence present somewhere else in the code. I replied that this is very likely and that the word was likely "castle" as that seemed to make sense to me at the time, given how often the castle is mentioned in the game's text due to its prominence in the story.

However, I did not have an actual answer as to what exact sentence the source was. I tried to remember, but I did not come up with anything at the time, so I set the thought aside for a while. It continued to be in the back of my mind every time I would research content related to the game: what is the source text that "le searching for Power" was cut out of? Finally, when watching this video of the game's early Stars, I saw something relevant:

When Yoshi picks up a Mario Cap for the first time in a save file, a message appears that reads "While searching for the Power Stars, you found a red cap." Since I use a complete save file for my own research, it had been a few years since I had last played through the beginning portion of the game, so I had completely forgotten about the phrasing of that text box. 

I thought, "this is it! The source has finally been found! It was the word "while" being cut off all along, not "castle"!" However, this lasted only for a few seconds until the realization sunk in: there was an extra word in the message. It read "while searching for the Power Stars", not "while searching for Power Stars", which is what it would have needed to be to be shortened to the mysterious course name.

I started thinking about how it would be possible for the code to drop a word from the middle of a message. I researched things like that possibly happening and came to a conclusion that they simply don't. It was exceedingly unlikely to neatly drop a single word out of a message if the code simply grabbed text from somewhere; so it had to be a different message from the one I had seen.

It seemed I was back to square one. The message when picking up Mario's cap was very similar but not the correct one. However, there was still a slight chance of this being a hint in the right direction: what about the messages displayed when picking up Luigi's or Wario's cap for the first time? It is common for this game (and video games in general) to have similar wording for similar messages, so it was not out of the realm of possibility for one of them to start with a slightly modified version, one that dropped the "the".

I played through the game until I was able to access Luigi's cap for the first time (this happens on the second Star of Big Boo's Haunt). I approached the cap, had Mario put it on, and then this happened:

There is no message displayed for this occasion. Mario simply puts on the hat, and unceremoniously, gameplay continues with the player moving Luigi around without acknowledging that this is the first time you are playing as this character. I then remembered that I had wondered about the lack of a message for this in the past as well, many years ago, a memory lost until I saw it happen again in front of me.

I then searched for reasons why the message would not display. Maybe it was the fact that Mario picked up the cap? Since Yoshi cannot enter Big Boo's Haunt, which is the only course where Luigi's cap can be found before rescuing Luigi, I had to play until Luigi was unlocked and then get a Luigi cap as Yoshi in another course - still no message.

Then I recalled that a Wario cap was available in Hazy Maze Cave before rescuing him. The same thing happened - not Yoshi, not Luigi, not Mario got any message upon picking up Wario's cap and turning into him. This was very peculiar to say the least. I had to dig deeper. I had to search the code itself for the text.

There is a Super Mario 64 DS editor by Arisotura that can be found here. Using it, I was able to get a list of all the text in the game, when finally, I found it:

Message 0194 started with "While searching for Power Stars", and seemed to be a message intended to be displayed when the Luigi can was found for the first time - except, it wasn't actually displayed during normal gameplay. The next message afterwards also contained the same words:

This was Wario's cap message, also unused! I looked through the entirety of the text messages and these two are the only ones to contain the substring "le searching for Power", and both never appear during regular gameplay.

Now, consider the entirety of this. The string appears as a title for the test map, accessible only through the debug mode. It appears to have been taken from an in-game message, however, the two messages it could possibly be taken from are unused. Not only are they unused, they are clearly meant to be used (since the game otherwise explains every event that leads to a change in controls) but somehow, most likely through an oversight, never appear during gameplay.

How is it all connected? Did the code for the test map intro screen grab the text because it was unused, or did the text not appear in-game because it was somehow "taken" by the test map, possibly with a wrongly addressed pointer? Unfortunately, Super Mario 64 DS reverse-engineering is not nearly on the same level as it is for the original Super Mario 64 (which has been entirely disassembled), so there is no answer to this currently.

Still, the series of events that led to me discovering additional unused content when looking for the source of other unused content is hopefully interesting enough to have been worth this article. I'd like to thank Chuggaaconroy for the suggestion, Arisotura for the Super Mario 64 DS editor, and the contributors at tcrf.net for finding the debug mode code in the first place, for making this all possible.

This concludes today's issue. Thank you very much for reading.