Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 31 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 31st issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.  

Today, I will examine textures from Super Mario Sunshine that appear to depict nonsense symbols which, upon analysis, turn out to be coded English.

Deciphering the Pianta Language

It all began 8 years ago, in 2012.

The author of the - at the time - newly founded Tumblr blog "Supper Mario Broth" had asked me to provide any obscure facts about Mario franchise games that I may know of, knowing that I had a propensity for collecting this sort of information. Among the other facts I have gathered for the blog was an observation regarding the sign over the entrance to Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine:

When I first saw this sign upon Super Mario Sunshine's release in 2002, I thought it was simply another collection of nonsense symbols as is commonly encountered in video games for textures that are supposed to represent some kind of text but are not important enough to actually have the text in question be readable.

This technique is also used for other reasons: if the language of the game world is not supposed to be any real-world language, or if the texture is supposed to be reused and having it be unreadable masks the fact it is the same texture every time, or if it would be too troublesome to translate it for every language into which the game is localized.

However, upon looking at it in 2012, I thought that it looked slighly like the word "Parco" in stylized font. "Parco" is Italian for "park", and I thought, since Isle Delfino is clearly inspired by Italian culture and contains Italian words in its place names, some designer might have had the idea to make the sign spell out "Parco" from those spiral-like symbols.

The first one has a descending element on the left like a lowercase "p", the second one looks like a cursive lowercase "a", the third one looks admittedly more like a "K" than an "R" but has a curve to its upper right portion, while the final two look a lot like "C" and "O". This is how I explained it to the author of the website, who agreed with me and made this into a post.

The reception of the post was mixed, with readers arguing that this was only a coincidence, that there is no other instance of "Parco" in the game, and that if anything, this could just as well be spelling out "Yakgo" or any other word. Thus, the post was deleted on grounds of being pure speculation.

As time went on, I found myself coming back to this sign. I was also aware of other instances of the same spiral symbols in the game, but somehow never thought of trying to see them as English letters, until I found out about a regional difference in the game:

This is the sign above the beach house on Gelato Beach in international versions. You may already notice that the symbols are not random here, but it took me seeing the Japanese variant to realize it:

Even without trying very hard to see patterns, it is clear the Japanese sign's large letters say "Mamma". This just so happens to be the Japanese name for the level, "Mamma Beach". Thus, logically, if these were changed in the English version, then the word they should be changed to is "Gelato".

With this in mind, it becomes easy to recognize the word "Gelato" here. The "a" and "o" are identical to the "Parco" sign, while the "g" and "e" look too much like the letters in question to be a coincidence. Finally, the "l" is simply jagged and the "t" also has the same basic cross shape, only ending with a spiral flourish. Given the evidence, it is clear this reads "Gelato".

Also, since the sign was localized instead of left as-is, it is clear the localization team was aware that the symbols were in fact English letters. With all this, a question immediately comes to mind: can we decode all of the symbols in the game, and if so, can we build a full English alphabet from it?

The answer to the first part is yes; unfortunately, the second part is more complex. We are able to find clear images of 15 letters across the game, more than half of the English alphabet, which I will compile at the end of this article. There are slightly less clear images of three more, and finally near indistinguishable images of the rest. 

Let us go back to "Parco". Even with the knowledge that the letters correspond to the Latin alphabet, we cannot be sure it is indeed "Parco", as only "a" and "o" are accounted by the Gelato sign. Fortunately, there are now resources that were not available to me in 2012 when I first made the observation; namely, Super Mario Sunshine debug material.

The data for Super Mario Sunshine contains several debug level select menus; the one above is the oldest. As you can see, it lists not only levels found in the finished game, but also ones removed very early in development and never shown in any pre-release material, such as "Hotel Lacrima", "Fire Shrine", etc. Note that here, Pinna Park is called "Pina parco", the exact word that would fit the sign. This alone is enough evidence for now; however, this evidence will be even stronger later, when we discover another instance of spiral symbols spelling out text from this very debug menu.

Since we can now assume the sign reads "Parco", let's take another look at it and the Gelato sign. The R in "Parco" corresponds to the last letter in the first line of the Gelato sign, meaning the word is "_ar", with "_" being an unknown letter. Since the hut contains seats, tables, a counter with a register, and fruit sitting on the counter, it is clearly intended to be some sort of bar or restaurant; in addition, the mystery letter resembles a lowercase "b"; thus, we can infer it stands for "bar". 

Another instance of these symbols can be found on top of the Noki Bay seashells, in the form of banners:

It is difficult to fit the entire banner into a screenshot and still have it appear readable, so I have extracted the texture from the game's data:

Interestingly, the vast majority of the letters used here, we can already recognize from the previous signs we examined. It reads "mare__llage"; with the Ls being less jagged than in the Gelato sign but still recognizable as a stylization of the same letter. Since there are very few words that end in "llage" in English that would make sense here, we can fill it in to "marevillage". The "V" is another letter with two spirals, like the "M", and the "I" is simply a shorter version of the "L" with fewer waves. You may not be entirely convinced that this is the correct reading, until we take another look at the debug menu:

"Mare Village" was the original name for Noki Bay. In the finished game, it is called "Mare Bay", with "Mare" being the Japanese name for the Nokis. Thus, with the addition of the debug menu, not only could my original idea about the Parco sign be confirmed, but a new sign be translated, as well.

Let us move on to another sign in Pinna Park; that near the pirate ships:

This one is slightly more mystifying than the previous ones; we can tell from the confirmed signs it spells "vi_i_g". The only word that can fit here, and have the missing letters resemble the symbols, is "viking". However, the obvious question here is, why "viking"?

As it turns out, in Japan, these types of tipping ship amusement park rides are called "viking", due to being often modeled after viking ships. The fact that the Pinna Park ships are pirate ships either means they were changed from viking ships early in development - as most of this script refers to very early content - or that the word "viking" is meant only in reference to the type of the ride, and not its particular aesthetics.

Unfortunately, although there are other instances of that script in the game, most of it has repeats of letters we have already confirmed.

For instance, these panels in Noki Bay have the letters "A", "B" and "C" in the top row, which makes sense, but then followed by a "K" in the middle row and a "T" in the bottom row. The other panels in that level are simply copies of these. 

There are signs in the game that also depict spiral symbols; however, they seem to not form any coherent message. Here is the texture in question; unfortunately, the texture is extremely low-resolution:

The top row spells out "r_t_", the middle one "bc_", and the bottom one "tvr". I am inclined to believe the top two rows are excerpts of the alphabet; being "rstu" and "bcd"; this would make sense for placeholder text, however, does not explain "tvr" instead of "tvw". The letter "d" being a mirror image of "b" makes sense, as well as "s" consisting of two vertically stacked spirals. There is really no external evidence that this is correct outside of the fact that the alphabet, in order, does appear as spiral symbols somewhere else in the game, in its entirety.

Now, you may be wondering: "if the entire alphabet appears in order, why did the article not begin with it; and what was the entire point of looking at signs that did not contain the entire alphabet?" I hope these questions can be answered with a single look at the extremely low quality of the texture that contains the alphabet:

This is a long, looping texture that decorates the hangable ledges in Noki Bay. From a distance, it does not even look like symbols, but rather, random patterns in the stone. However, with our knowledge of the script, acquired from the other signs, we can see it starts off with "abc" on the left, and then follow it all the way to the right, counting 26 symbols on the way, with each letter we already know corresponding to the texture.

Here is the entire texture in question:

As you can see, it has two loops, meaning each letter is present twice. This is good since we have two examples of each, but bad since all of them are in near unreadable quality. 

Taking all the information we have learned from this, I present this chart of each spiral symbol in the game next to each corresponding letter. The pictures of the symbols are taken from the instances of their highest resolution, with two present if they were only available in the Noki Bay ledge texture:

Although many of them are nearly impossible to recreate exactly, we now have a solid understanding of the Isle Delfino script. I hope this guide could be of use to those who may want to include that script in their own works or fan projects.

Thank you very much for reading.