Over the decades, fans have asked numerous questions about Mario’s origins as a character, , and even about his last name, which answered just to get your brain high on very important knowledge. Sometimes, however, we get answers for questions nobody would ever think to ask, such as “Does Mario happen to have around 254 more brothers who are not fit to be in the game?”. The answer is “Yes, and what a good guess!” Mario has exactly 254 more brothers.
Because of a recent tweet by Supper Mario Broth that revives a , many people are learning a strange little detail in . The first sequel has Luigi (who’s just Mario with a different coat of paint that you can play as) and then 254 iterations of Mario whose fashion sense they apparently did not vibe with. This happened because there were only meant to be two playable character sprites: Mario, the one whose value started with “0”, and Luigi, who started with “1”.
The game uses a “brother byte” to determine the brother we’re playing as, but a byte holds 256 values in total, which resulted in over two hundred unwanted Mario clones. To me, if they were just different-colored sprites in a game, I’d see them as nothing more than cosmetics. But the game’s code actually gave them names.
Granted, most of those names are wacky number and letter mix-ups, but a rare few seem like they could’ve been picked by Mario’s parents, such as Iolui and Uigiy. This detail makes this example of family erasure so much more .
