With the Mario Strikers series in the spotlight again thanks to Mario Strikers: Battle League, fans’ attention has naturally been drawn back to the previous Mario soccer games. As a result, some interesting, potentially never before seen discoveries have been made regarding the first game, Super Mario Strikers for the Nintendo GameCube.
Self-described Mario historian Dogon McBanana on Twitter recently decided to look through the game’s files on a whim, and through their datamining efforts, found several character models that were never used in the final game. Perhaps the most interesting find was an entire team of generic human characters, meaning Super Mario Strikers could have featured regular people 12 years before the release of Super Mario Odyssey.
We say “regular,” but unlike Super Mario Odyssey’s realistic looking humans, these unused characters are far more cartoony and bear proportions and features very similar to Mario himself. Dogon theorizes that each playable team captain was originally going to have a pre-set team of unique sidekicks, as they also discovered a team of Donkey Kong-like characters. In the final game, players could instead choose a team of established Mario characters as the sidekicks, such as Toad and Boo.
Some of the unused character models include a 3D replica of a Dull Bones, an enemy from the Paper Mario games, labelled as a medic. It’s even wearing a medic’s outfit, although it’s not clear what sort of role it would have had in-game. Piantas from Super Mario Sunshine would also have appeared as security and cameramen, although these were swapped out for futuristic automated cameras in the final release.
None of this is likely to be brought back for Mario Strikers: Battle League. The new game has done away with sidekicks altogether, allowing you to form a team of any of its playable characters — but they remain interesting and novel discoveries.
