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Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 51: Three Letters, Two Digits
🕑 Added 2024-10-30 22:35:57 +0000 UTC
Welcome, everyone, to the 51th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone - and the first long-form Patreon article created in my capacity as a full-time Mario obscure content archivist, all thanks to your incredible support! Let's dive into the depths of Mario's world together!
Today, I will be analyzing the internal filenames of Paper Mario maps, pointing out oddities that may provide insight into the game's development.
Three Letters, Two Digits
Video games did not always have the luxury of being able to have file systems where the files would be able to be referenced by humanly-readable names. Up until the fourth generation of video games (i.e. the SNES/Sega Genesis), it was standard for games to be compiled into a form where all data was concatenated (laid out in a row with no gaps for file headers and filenames) and the only way to reference a specific image, sound, or other asset would be to call its memory address directly.
This is not to say that the filenames did not exist during development - even the earliest video game source code used labels to delineate where an asset or a routine began or ended, as can be seen e.g. in Super Mario Bros. source code here:
This is the section that regulates the movement and properties of Bowser's fire (what the developers call 'Big tortoice fire' [sic], Bowser being the 'big tortoice' in question), which is called BGTFPS, presumably standing for BiG Tortoice Fire PropertieS. Whenever another part of the code would need the fire, it would call BGTFPS, which itself calls 6 subroutines. However, this would not actually survive into the game's source code as the names were only there for the benefit of the programmers, and were optimized by the compiler into simple "jump to address" instructions in the game.
Starting with the fifth generation of video games (N64/PlayStation), the developers started having enough space on the cartridges to be able to actually keep the filenames inside the finished program (another reason being that the programming paradigms and the actual languages used to program the games also changed as games evolved, but this is beyond the scope of this article). This is precisely what we are going to look at today: filenames from the Nintendo 64, the first generation of Nintendo home consoles that has allowed dataminers to actually see some of the names the developers chose for their creations and derive additional information from them.
Paper Mario games have been developed by Intelligent Systems. In the first three games (which were released relatively close to each other within only 7 years, so many of the same staff worked on all three), the system for naming the game's areas remained the same: every single room was given an internal name consisting of an area index of three letters, followed by an underscore, and then a room identifier of two numbers (e.g. mac_01). I will refer to these as Three Letter Two Digit codes in this article, or 3L2D codes.
First, we must clarify what "rooms" and "areas" are. A room is a space that is loaded all at once into memory; not all of a room needs to be rendered at once, but it is all loaded at once so that some sort of transition (fade to black or otherwise) is needed to enter a different room while the new assets load. For example, this is a room:
(Image taken using the map viewer on noclip.website)
Mario and Luigi's house is a room because it is all loaded at once. This includes the interior, as there is no loading transition happening when Mario walks into the house, only a visual one. In general, all spaces in the first three Paper Mario games that contain buildings Mario can enter contain the interior of the buildings as part of the same room. As such, all of this has a single filename: kmr_20.
On the other hand, these are two rooms:
(This and other images that will not have separate sources in this article are sourced from the amazing work of dataminer Peardian to create maps of Paper Mario, which can all be found together here. Additional images inserted into the maps are sourced from noclip.website. Note that all captions added to the images with white text in black boxes were added by me for the purposes of this article.)
These are not loaded into memory at once, and there is a transition of a fade to black when Mario walks from one to the other. As such, these have two different filenames.
An area is a collection of rooms the developers considered to be related. Most of them make immediate sense as they are part of the same in-universe location, e.g. all rooms of the Koopa Bros. Fortress are part of the "trd" area. However, some others are not obvious, such as Mario's house being part of the "kmr" area which otherwise contains Goomba Village and Goomba Road.
Now that we have established the terms, let us look at what the developers named the areas in Paper Mario! First off, Peach's Castle as it appears in the beginning of the game is part of the "kkj" area:
For all area names, I will attempt to do my best to decipher what it could stand for. While Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door contains very helpful unused text that explains every single internal area name, Paper Mario and Super Paper Mario do not, resulting in me needing to make educated guesses.
UPDATE (November 1st, 2024): I have been informed hat the internal area name text has in fact been found for this game earlier this year, and can be seen here. I was not aware of this at the time of writing the article as I went off my knowledge that for over 20 years, only Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door's internal names were found, and did not believe such an important discovery would occur only in March of this year, so much later. This just goes on to show how a game is never truly "finished" being analyzed; even games about which we can assume we know everything can keep secrets for decades within their data.
Luckily, most of my own guesses for what the map codes stood for were correct to begin with, and I am grateful I was given this opportunity to learn a small amount of Japanese. Below, I will amend all explanations that rely on this new knowledge of internal map names with text in italics to provide a complete explanation that covers all codes.
It is almost 100% certain that "kkj" stands for キノコ城 (Kinoko Jo), "Mushroom Castle", which is what the castle is called in Japanese in this specific game.
The first thing we can see here is that while the areas Mario traverses that are required by the plot are numbered sequentially in a predictable way, the kitchen is called "kkj_19". This is due to the kitchen likely being created for Peach's own side story first and foremost, resulting in it being numbered in a way that is consistent with a later area because Peach only goes there between Chapter 4 and 5, and Mario was only given access to the kitchen as a completely optional Easter egg later.
Now that you have seen what a typical area's naming scheme looks like (a combination of sequential and non-sequential numbers), I will propose the following hypotheses about what the numbering could mean in regard to the development of the game:
1. Gaps in numbering mean that an area at some point existed but then was removed. While arguments can be made for numbering that goes e.g. 00, 01, 02, 03, 10, 11, 12, 13 that the tens digit was simply used as a way to subdivide the area into sub-areas, a numbering like 00, 01, 02, 04, 05 clearly suggests that there was at some point a room 03 but it was deleted. In development, it is much easier to delete an unused asset and then create a new one with a new name than to create a new asset with a name shared by an older asset, and then go through all the places that reference it to make sure the references still apply and work correctly. If an object has a new name, then all references to the old name are automatically flagged due to no longer referencing an object, making it easy for the programmer to go through them all and delete or change them.
2. Areas with consecutive names were either worked on consecutively, or were worked on simultaneously and were intended to be visited by the played in the order indicated by the names. Both of these are logical conclusions; if room 05 is nowhere near room 04 we can still assume it was made right after room 04 because why else would it be called 05 if the names were given out sequentially. Conversely, if room 05 is adjacent to room 04 in the direction of plot-related travel, then it may be that they may not have been finished in that order, but almost certainly the files were created in that order because the developers were working on a specific path and first created the files they thought they needed before filling them out.
I hope you can agree that even if these cannot be claimed to apply in all cases, they are at least valid assumptions to make as the counterargument against them would be "the filenames were chosen at random", which is highly unlikely. Even if you do not agree with my personal hypotheses and conclusions, I hope you can at least take the filename information presented in the maps below - which is entirely factual and contains no interpretations - and draw your own conclusions you believe would be more appropriate! Of course, also please feel free to comment and let me know your own theories on the matter!
After Mario falls down from Peach's Castle following his fight with Bowser (the actual room he falls through in the cutscene will come up later) - he lands in the Goomba Road area, "kmr".
Here we have the beginnings of curious gaps and other potentially insightful information in the names. "kmr" most likely stands for クリ村, "Kuri Mura", "Goomba Village".
The upper part contains the Goomba Village and outskirts area. This one is mostly consecutive in terms of the plot, with Mario landing in kmr_00, proceeding to the village in kmr_02, falling down the cliff to kmr_03, checking out the playground in kmr_04, and finally returning to the village through kmr_05. However, kmr_01 is missing. I believe it existed and was deleted at some point; based on its numbering it would have been either an early Goomba Village or an area seen between falling down and seeing Goomba Village.
There is this very early pre-release screenshot of the game (as can be seen by the Mario sprite being completely different) that appears to take place inside a house that could be an early version of the Goomba Village Toad House, due to it also being a circular wooden building. While there is no evidence that this could have been related to the missing kmr_01 room, this is my best guess given the information we have about the game's development. Note that this would in fact fit the plot position of kmr_01, as Mario would wake up inside the house between landing in the meadow (kmr_00) and going out into the village (kmr_02).
The second part features the Goomba Road from the village to Toad Town. You may notice the names in this area are completely jumbled. kmr_08 does not exist, and I believe the other parts of the road were shuffled around during development. Particularly kmr_12, an area with almost nothing in it that serves just to pad out the road before the Goomba King's castle, appears to have been a late addition.
Finally, on the bottom we see something truly curious: Mario's house is part of the Goomba Village area! The "20" and "30" numbers, to me, are an example of adding 10 to the number to indicate a different sub-area rather than swaths of rooms being missing, but this is particularly interesting because in-game, Mario's house is only connected to Toad Town via a pipe, and is not reachable on foot from anywhere.
The in-game map shows the house outside of the walls of Toad Town, but very close to the west gate, which is part of Goomba Road. This means that it is possible that at some point, the developers could have intended Mario's house to be reachable on foot by going north from the west gate, making it a true part of the Goomba Road area. It would also give an additional reason for Goombario being named after Mario, as the Goombas would be essentially neighbors to the Mario Bros., living a short walking distance away. However, the Goombas all act like even though they like Mario, they have never met him in person, so even if this closer relationship was at some point planned, it was ultimately erased from the script.
Next up, Toad Town:
Toad Town is a very straightforward area with little that can be gleaned from the filenames, except that they are clearly numbered in the order that they become important in the story, so that the train station comes before the residential area leading to Chapter 4, and the port that leads to Chapter 5. "mac" is almost certainly short for "machi", meaning "town". Interestingly, Flipside and Flopside in Super Paper Mario also are named "mac" internally, and serve the same hub city role as Toad Town.
The Playroom areas are named "mgm", almost certainly meaning "minigame", and are also numbered sequentially.
Interestingly, the outside of Peach's Castle has its own area code, "osr", which likely stands for "大城" ("oshiro", "big castle" in Japanese). Thank you very much to Patreon supporter Dodecalope for this information!
Also note how these are not named sequentially based on when they appear, with osr_03, the room showing Bowser's Castle abducting Peach's Castle, being placed before osr_01, the room showing that the castle is gone, and osr_02, the final approach to the castle at the end of the game.
The Toad Town Tunnels area, "tik", is an absolute mess and it was very difficult for me to put this together since three of the rooms (tik_01, tik_18 and tik_24) share a single model and I needed to use several different tools just to be able to determine which one of them was which. Note also that rooms 11, 13 and 16 are missing. "tik" is a Kunrei-shiki romanization (a type of standardized romanization that does not strictly reflect the actual sound) of the word "chika", meaning "underground". The same "tik" area code is later used in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door for the Rogueport Underground area.
I cannot even begin to theorize about the development of this area because the numbering is truly labyrinthine, but at least a common pattern that emerges is that rooms that are accessed in a row after unlocking the first of them are mostly sequentially numbered. However, some numbers are wildly out of order such as tik_18 being between tik_06 and tik_02, suggesting it was a very late addition. Even if nothing specific can be gleaned from this map, looking at it fills me with a sense of appreciation for the hard work of the developers who clearly kept changing it around and adding new branches and paths in various orders just to create the optimal experience. Game development is never straightforward, and this map is a great example of what it is really like.
Pleasant Path and Koopa Village are a very orderly area:
"nok" stands for "Nokonoko", the Japanese name for Koopa Troopas. This is yet another area code that is shared by an area in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, being Petalburg. Internal data from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door even indicates that Petalburg's Japanese name was ノコ村 (Nokomura, Koopa Village) early in development (though the Koopa Village in Paper Mario is called ノコノコ村 (Nokonokomura), using the full length of the word), suggesting there was a connection between these two settlements.
The rooms make up two paths of completely sequentially-named rooms, one for Pleasant Path and one for the village, so there appears to not have been any shuffling around or deleting of rooms. Note that Koopa Village does appear in some of the earliest material shown for the game, so it is possible that this was one of the first areas that has ever been worked on.
"trd", Koopa Bros.' Fortress, is also very orderly, with each area being named in the exact order they are visited during the plot. "trd" almost certainly stands for "toride", Japanese for "fortress". One thought I had while researching this is that the fact that the Chapter 1 areas are so neatly numbered compared to later areas almost seems to suggest that whoever was in charge of naming them could have tried to keep the names as well-ordered as possible in the beginning of the project, but quickly lost the desire, ability or priority to do this as development went on. There is nothing that would actually corroborate this, but I am certain all of us know the feeling of wanting to do everything as neatly as possible at the start of a project only to realize that the effort expended on this would be entirely excessive if it was kept up over the course of the entire project, leading to abandoning the idea and simply settling for something "that works".
As you will see with the rest of this article, the ability of the developers to keep it orderly gave out more and more as the game continued, with them only deciding on a last push towards a categorization system when reaching Bowser's Castle.
Moving on to Chapter 2, I have put together the "iwa" (Mt. Rugged) and "dro" (Dry Dry Outpost) areas due to both being rather small. Again, there is very little to say about these areas in particular due to them also mostly being ordered by how they are visited in-game, with the exception of the train ride cutscene area being "iwa_11", following the "iwa_10" train station area. This indicated that it is possible that the train ride originally did not have its own area and the train could have been simply shown to leave the Toad Town train station and arrive at the Mt. Rugged one, with the dedicated scene being added later.
"iwa" appears to mean 岩, "iwa", Japanese for "rock". Particularly, internal names reveal it stands for "岩山", "iwayama", "rocky mountain". I am not entirely sure what "dro" could have meant, although since the Japanese name of Dry Dry Desert and Outpost also references dryness, "dro" could be short for the English word "drought". Patreon supporter awesometownrocks suggests it could be based on "dorobo", Japanese for "thief", based on information stated by Goombario whereby the town was founded by thieves. Interestingly, this is the only map code that remains unexplained by the internal names, as those list "カラカラタウン", "Karakara Town", "Dry Dry Outpost" as the internal name, which cannot be abbreviated to "dro".
Next up is the area that was handled very elegantly - Dry Dry Desert. Take a look at this:
"sbk" stands for "sabaku", Japanese for "desert". Note how the rooms use the two digits of the 3L2D system as a kind of coordinate index here, with the first digit indicating the row and the second digit the column. As such, just by seeing the name one can automatically deduce where in the desert the room in question is. The entrance room is given the number 99 to make sure it is special and not part of the grid.
I believe this was able to be done in this manner because from the concept stage for the desert it would have been clear that every room is identical in shape. As such, what I think happened was that before any of the rooms were actively worked on, the designers created 49 identical rooms and numbered them all in the manner shown above, before working on placing objects in them. Unlike the rooms everywhere else in the game, where changing a room could require it to be deleted and replaced with a differently-numbered room, here no room would ever actually have to be deleted since all that could possibly change is the objects placed in the room rather than its model. Unfortunately for the developers, this area and Forever Forest were the only ones where such an efficient approach was possible.
Dry Dry Ruins is called "isk", which almost certainly stands for "iseki", Japanese for "ruins". The area starts off very orderly with all rooms being consecutive but slightly unravels towards the end with rooms 15 and 17 missing, room 18 being between room 10 and 12, and room 19 clearly having been inserted before the boss chamber after the area was complete; likely for dramatic effect to have a room completely empty except for the Save Block for Tutankoopa to deliver his final warning in:
This suggests that perhaps the warnings were either less emphasized early in development, or were not even planned to be added until far into the design of the area.
Interestingly, the area has more "in-universe" rooms than actual rooms in the code, which is used in the three rooms that feature Mario draining sand from the top into the bottom of the room (isk_03, isk_06 and isk_12). These simply have a black bar in the middle of the room to make the player think each of them is two separate rooms, but due to the cutscenes needing to show the sand draining from one part of the room to the other, these need to be loaded simultaneously and are as such a single room.
Moving on to Chapter 3, the Forever Forest area is called "mim", presumably standing for まよいの森 (Mayoi no Mori, Lost Forest), its Japanese name. Interestingly, 迷いの森 (the same phrase, Mayoi no Mori, but written using kanji instead of hiragana) is also the Japanese name for the Forest of Illusion from Super Mario World, heavily suggesting that these two are actually the same location. In addition, the same phrase is also used at the name of the Lost Woods recurring location in the Legend of Zelda game series.
Forever Forest is also arranged rather neatly, which I would theorize is due to the same underlying factor as Dry Dry Desert: that the rooms are all the same size and use largely the same model, with only different objects needing to be placed. When the designers first drew the map of the area, they could have easily created nine identical rooms in the proper order first before populating them with the necessary objects.
Boo's Mansion ("obk", presumably standing for "obake", Japanese for "ghost") has no missing room numbers, but the rooms are wildly out of order in relation to how they are visited during the game's plot. The plot order is: 01, 08, 07, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, and finally 09. This could very well mean nothing, but it could also suggest that the puzzles and their solutions were shuffled around during development (note that the internal order does not just number them from bottom to top, but also seems to trace a specific path through the mansion that seems intentional, but completely different from the actual path). The internal order suggests Mario would continue ever further up in the mansion in a climactic manner, with the last two puzzles being on the second floor; in the finished game, the first two puzzles are on that floor instead.
Gusty Gulch has some very suspicious numbering ripe for juicy theories:
Patreon supporter awesometownrocks suggests "arn" is likely based on 荒野 ("areno", wasteland)! The internal names corroborate this by also using this word, but spelling it with hiragana instead: "あれの".
First off, arn_01 (and potentially 00) is missing, and the first room of the area is actually arn_07. Then, the road to Tubba Blubba's Castle is out of order, with the village near the windmill being rooms 03 and 05. This suggests to me that the village could have been intended to be more "scattered", with Mario passing through two non-consecutive village rooms connected with barren enemy-filled rooms. This could have been intended to make Gusty Gulch feel like a more sprawling settlement that has been partially destroyed and reclaimed by nature, as opposed to a small settlement concentrated near the windmill.
Another very curious detail is that inside the Windy Mill, the boss room is arn_11, but the two rooms leading up to it are arn_12 and arn_13. I believe a plausible theory for this is that the developers first wanted to have only one corridor leading up to Tubba Blubba's heart (arn_10). However, later in development, it was suggested that having three consecutive corridors would add drama and suspense to the situation, making the player question what kind of awful secret would be worth creating such a long underground bunker for. I remember playing the game myself for the first time in 2001 and feeling a slight sense of dread from the overly lengthy corridor, so the idea that it was specifically lengthened later during development hopefully seems plausible to you as well!
Compared to Gusty Gulch, which is full of unexplained inconsistencies, Tubba Blubba's Castle ("dgb", standing for "Dogabon", Tubba Blubba's Japanese name) is extremely orderly, having no missing rooms and the rooms being laid out in exactly the order in which they are visited during the plot. I believe it is precisely the contrast between orderly areas like this one and completely out-of-whack areas like Boo's Mansion that shows that the filenames do in fact tell a story: if they were ultimately irrelevant, surely either all areas would have seemingly random orders or none of them would. To me, it is exceedingly unlikely that Boo's Mansion was designed with the same order of puzzles in mind as the finished game displays while having completely unfitting room numbering, at the same time as Tubba Blubba's Castle's rooms are numbered so precisely in line with the finished game.
Shy Guy's Toy Box ("omo", most likely standing for "おもちゃばこ", "omochabako", Japanese for "toy bag" or "toy box") is a very interesting example from which we can see extremely clearly how rooms were swapped in their positions during development. Note how the top row (the first set of rooms Mario visits) has rooms 01, 13, 03 and 04, while the bottom row (the last set) has rooms 10, 11, 12, 02, 14, and 15. As such, it is nearly inarguable that room 02 was intended to be in the first set and room 13 in the last set before they swapped places during development. What is remarkable about this is that nothing about the two rooms suggests they are out of place - absolutely no amount of careful analysis as someone merely playing the game could lead one to this conclusion, yet the internal naming shows it (hopefully) clear as day.
In addition, the second row has room 17, which was seemingly inserted there much later than every other room. Note that this room is pure filler; it contains absolutely no plot-relevant NPCs or items and only exists to make the path to and from room 05 longer. As such, it is plausible that during playtesting the developers thought that the second set of rooms went by too fast and decided to add an extra room of no further importance.
Chapter 5's overworld consists of a few areas I have put together in one image. It starts with the whale ("kgr", likely standing for "kujira", Japanese for "whale"), before transitioning to the whale riding cutscene that actually belongs to "mac" - Toad Town, likely because it uses the Toad Town dodecahedral hill background. Finally, Lavalava Island itself is called "jan", possibly standing for "ジャンボル島" ("Janboru Island", its Japanese name). Actually, the internal names reveal that it just stands for "janguru", the Japanese loanword for "jungle", though the name of the island itself in Japanese is based on that word to begin with.
Lavalava Island is missing the rooms jan_20 and jan_21, which most likely would have come shortly before the end, i.e. near the volcano entrance. As the volcano entrance is a very involved room that is one of the few that undergoes a permanent change in its geometry as a result of the plot (with the Ravens building a zipline for Mario), it makes sense that the developers likely went through a few iterations of this room before finding one they were satisfied with. The rest of the rooms appears to be roughly in the same order they are visited during the plot.
Mt. Lavalava ("kzn", almost certainly meaning 火山, "kazan", Japanese for "volcano") starts off completely orderly and by-the-book until getting to the second wide lava room, kzn_11. The next room after that is kzn_17, meaning that rooms 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 are absent. If the next room were 20, it would easily be interpretable as the beginning of a new subarea that increments the first digit, as seen many times throughout this article. However, 17 in no way resembles the beginning of a new segment of the area, so that it is much more likely that rooms 12 through 16 did at some point exist and were deleted.
This is the longest streak of plausibly existent deleted rooms in the game; my only hypothesis is that the volcano could have originally been larger and repeated the same basic patterns (e.g. slope going down, wide lava room etc.), so that the developers decided that this would become too tedious for the player, and cut 5 rooms from the middle of the dungeon. One number, kzn_21, is also missing from the escape sequence at the end.
Chapter 6 contains only one area code - "flo", clearly standing for "flower", comprising Flower Fields and Cloudy Climb. This area is in a similar state of chaos as Toad Town Tunnels, containing only brief sequences of neightboring rooms having sequential numbers, while most of them seem rather haphazard. Note how many early rooms are missing - 01, 02, 04, 05 and 06 are absent.
This, combined with the fact that the "surviving" early rooms are the ones with the event flower NPCs such as Posie and Petunia, makes me believe that this area underwent a very tumultous development where the first iteration of the paths going from the center to the NPCs were scrapped, and only the rooms with the NPCs were left. Then, the rest of the area was populated with areas (out of order) until the designers felt satisfied with how long the chapter turned out to be. Note how some areas were inserted extremely late - room 25 is leading to room 07, and room 23 to room 11. It is possible that there were simply no rooms there in the first place and the paths were simply much shorter, prompting the designers to "beef up" the chapter.
Note also that this transitional screen is not its own room unlike the other such rooms in the game, but just a lower part of flo_19:
The "loading transition" at the end of that room is simply a fakeout to mask that Mario has never actually left the room, and is merely teleported to a different part of it.
Chapter 7's overworld segments have the "sam" area code, presumably standing for サムイサムイ村, "Samuisamui-mura", ("Cold Cold Village"), the Japanese name for Shiver City. This area presents a true mystery: why is East Shiver City sam_11 when the rest of the area is perfectly ordered in accordance to the plot? Was Shiver City truly intended to have only two rooms originally, and the final one was added much later?
However, as I was thinking about it, something struck me. I have known for years that East Shiver City was special, somehow different from the other two town areas, and now all the pieces have fallen into place. Take a look at how (nearly) all the trees in Chapter 7 look, such as this one in West Shiver City:
Note the extremely faint colorful dots, likely supposed to represent Christmas lights. However, I did say "nearly" all of them. The trees in East Shiver City are different:
They have no Christmas lights on them! I have always found it so bizarre that instead of the logical choice of the trees within the city having lights and the ones outside the city having none, the trees outside also have lights, but one specific room in the city does not feature the lights.
This means that something was indeed peculiar about the development of East Shiver City, and that the room was presumably added so much later that the developers used a different tree texture despite it not fitting the environment. I first noticed this in 2001 and now, 23 years later, I feel vindicated in my perception that something was wrong.
The Crystal Palace ("pra", possibly short for "palace" written as though a romanization of it when pronounced according to Japanese rules, replacing "l" for "r") is an area that is an utter jumble. My suggestion turned out to be wrong for very interesting reasons: the internal names reveal that this area used to have a name not reflected in any finished varion: Parallel Palace. (パラレルきゅうでん) As such, "pra" is clearly short for "parallel". It makes sense when looking at the layout of the palace, which features mirrored versions of hallways going parallel to each other. This was the last bit of information for which the internal names were necessary. The others happened to line up with my own suggestions for them.
It was confusing enough for me to map the rooms to the 3L2D codes; I cannot possibly imagine actually being on the development team and having to retain a spatial understanding of the area as it keeps being shuffled around and rooms are being added and removed. Just take a look at the uppermost row of the image: rooms 04 and 06 are connected by... room 05? No, it's room 39, and that is only the beginning.
Rooms 07, 08, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26 and 30 are missing, and as for the ones that were moved, there are too many to count. Looking at this map, it appears that this dungeon has gone through so many room replacements that its in-game appearance cannot possibly resemble its initial form, which of course raises the question of whether that initial form was simpler, or somehow, frighteningly, even more complex than what we got in the release version.
We're in the endgame now:
Chapter 8's overworld is bundled together in the "hos" area, standing most likely for "hoshi", Japanese for "star". Most of it is ordered by plot appearance, with the only curious detail in terms of playable areas being that Merluvlee's house is the last one, possibly being added after everything else as a form of bonus content. In terms of cutscene areas, hos_10 is the transition room of Mario falling after losing to Bowser in the beginning of the game (which I mentioned in the beginning of the article would be coming later), and hos_20 the Star Ship cutscene room.
Note that the other rooms seen during that cutscene, where the sky in Toad Town appears like the night sky in the Chapter 8 area, are literally the Toad Town rooms but with a different skybox being loaded, instead of separate rooms.
Now, on to the largest dungeon in the game:
Bowser's Castle ("kpa", standing for "Koopa", Bowser's Japanese name and international surname) is so large that the developers did something they did not do in any other area of the game: they actually subdivided the rooms vaguely by their purpose or location within the castle. Below are the meanings of the numbers the way I understand them:
0x: related to the bottommost part of the castle, the dark cave with the stalactites.
1x: related to the lava corridors that present the first part of the dungeon. Also note that the first lava corridor is actually two rooms, one used when the lava is hot and one when it is cool. It is unclear why this was necessary as the other lava rooms simply swap the lava texture around instead.
2x: missing; it is likely this category at some point existed and was deleted.
3x: only two rooms, both the hub-like grand halls.
4x: only two rooms, both related to the looping room with the torches.
5x: generic hallways. Three of them use the same model, one is slightly different but still is only a hallway without anything plot-relevant in it.
6x: outdoor areas. Note that room 60 (which has Peach's Castle visible) is used for the first outside room during cutscenes of entering/exiting the castle, but room 62 (which does not have Peach's Castle rendered for performance purposes) is used during gameplay.
7x: only one room, 70, with the lava scooping/gear mechanism.
8x: the rooms with the talking Bowser doors that block Mario's progress. Each room uses the same geometry model.
9x: related to the Toad House rest areas and the stairs that go to them, as well as the shop in room 96.
10x: miscellaneous, mostly small rooms with a single item in them
11x: rooms related to Bowser block pushing puzzles, all occur in a row
12x: only one room, 121, which is the exit to Peach's Castle at the end.
13x: large rooms such as the water puzzle and the Bill Blaster grand hall.
Note how much easier this area is to overview because the developers bothered with this categorization, as opposed to the nightmarish jumble of the Crystal Palace. Going back to my comment about losing the motivation to be neat as the project goes on, this is the opposite of that: a final push to try to be as efficient as possible near the end of the project.
Obviously many rooms are missing here as well, but it is clear that the developers first decided on the numbering scheme before going ahead and deleting the rooms, resulting in the numbering still making sense even after so many of them were removed. The only downside is that since the category numbering scheme clearly overrides any attempts at naming the rooms chronologically in order of creation, I cannot make any statements about what I think was made in what order.
Back in Peach's Castle for the final confrontation, the rooms are mostly numbered sequentially, though I must confess it is somewhat unsatisfying that the final boss battle room is not the last room in the game, being only number 25 while the actual final room is the pre-Chapter 6 quiz, kkj_29. It is likely that the quiz was tweaked until later in development than the final battle, resulting in this anticlimactic ending to our look at the 3L2D room codes.
What a journey! I hope I was able to present some plausible theories, include some curious facts, and perhaps share a little bit of appreciation for game development through this article! Tune in next week for more Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone!
Thank you very much for reading!
Comments
Kzinssie
Very late response to this article, but Mayoi no Mori is actually a very common stock name in Japanese media, more describing a type of fantasy place than a specific location. There's a good Legends of Localization article on the subject: https://legendsoflocalization.com/articles/lost-woods-many-translations/
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much! Your suggestion about the coin block makes perfect sense - I have wondered about its strange inclusion but never thought about it this way on my own! I might make a separate post about this at some point, and you will be credited with a link to your account!
Kit Sovereign
What an interesting write-up! I really like the extra Gusty Gulch windmill tunnels - it tells a clear development story and was a good change. Makes the chase on the way out flow better. I wonder if the potential original plans for a different Gusty Gulch town might explain that bizarre hidden 1-coin block inside one of the dilapidated houses. (...Maybe they just changed it to a single coin because an item bouncing out might get stuck on the walls and roofs.)
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much! And yes, that is true - I have not considered it, but I hope it is still acceptable to call them 3L2D codes even in light of this exception as the vast majority of them do conform to that pattern!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you, I really appreciate it! I hope that my other analyses in the future can be similarly interesting!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much! I am glad you enjoyed it; this analysis of minor details is exactly the kind of content I am passionate about!
Ben Salvidrim
Fascinating read! And interesting that Koopa Castle actually becomes.... 3L3D !!
RainbowBatsuit
I was skeptical that map filenames could be interesting enough to sustain just a post, but I am glad to have been prove wrong!
halfyou
ahhh I’m so excited that these articles are back!! this was such a fascinating read, thanks for putting in the effort to go through and identify/analyze all these rooms!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much! I am glad that you, as someone who has been active in game development, agree with my conclusions! Regarding backups, I do plan on starting this now that I have the budget to upgrade my equipment thanks to all your generous support; I have ordered SD cards to be able to keep backups of my data and will start doing it as soon as they arrive! I hope you will enjoy the future articles!
Michael DeMarti
Very fun read! Based on my experience in development the scenarios you imagine are very realistic. By the way, please be sure to keep backups of all your hard work. Looking forward to the next one!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you so much for your research! These are both very likely; I have added both of these explanations to the article, crediting you under your Patreon username!
Stark Maximum
Make them as long as you need, I'll still read them!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you, I really appreciate it! Yes, some of these articles will not be this long, but many of them will be - and longer, of course!
awesometownrocks
Immediately after posting this I discovered the word 荒野 (arano) meaning wasteland, making it highly likely that Gusty Gulch being shortened to arn was based on this word. It was fun finding this out! I definitely learned something
awesometownrocks
As somebody who is currently learning Japanese, I really enjoyed guessing what the names could mean in this article! Also, I would like to add that dro could be short for dorobo, meaning theif in Japanese, considering that the Goombario tattle mentions that Dry Dry Outpost was founded by theives The gusty gulch area got me thinking arn could be like 荒々しい (araarashii, wild rough etc.)? Because it's a beaten up desolate area with hyper goombas, but I feel like that ones a stretch
Stark Maximum
So glad to see that you're back producing such long-form content. It's so satisfying to read such involved deep dives on the games I love. Hopefully you give yourself a break from time to time with some shorter, lighter articles, but stuff like this is why I got interested in the first place.
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much for your kind words and generous support! I can only hope you will like my future content as well!
Colonel Mustache
Typos happen to the best of us, especially when making long posts. It didn't affect my ability to enjoy the post at all, I just mentioned it in case you wanted to know.
Mike Ostman
Brand new to your content and I’m already ready to say - you are a legend. Keep up the great work.
Supper Mario Broth
I am terribly sorry. Please understand that this is my first time writing such a large amount of text for a post since 2020, and this is one of the longer posts I have made on Patreon, so I am a bit rusty on my ability to spot typographical errors in such large volumes of text. I will endeavor to triple-check all of my spelling and grammar in the future to avoid such errors. The error has been corrected.
Colonel Mustache
Great post! I also spotted what I think is a typo near the second Forever Forest paragraph: "with only different objects needing to be places." I assume that's meant to be 'placed' and not 'places'? Very excited that the special zone is back! I can't wait for next week's post!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much, I hope I will be able to provide other analyses like this for other games in the future!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much!
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much, I am so glad you liked it! I will try to make sure to offer similar analyses for any other games I can find such information for!
Supper Mario Broth
Oh, thank you so much! I did look up castle but it gave me only "shiro", not "oshiro" so I dismissed that possibility! I will edit the article to add that!
BAZO27L
This was a really intriguing read! Absolutely facinating to get a look inside the games development like this! Fantastic work as always!
Will Weaver
That is some seriously interesting stuff, Broth. Keep up the great work!
Vaguely Genius
Really interesting article! I always wish I could peek into what the development was like for my favorite games and movies, and here you've managed to figure out which parts the creators struggled with and tweaked! Awesome work!
Wrongtown
This was my thought also 🙂
Dodecalope
"osr" is probably "oshiro" for "castle".
Supper Mario Broth
Thank you very much! That is definitely a possibility that I haven't considered! I did believe everything that was abbreviated from English needed to be one word, as you stated, but there is really no reason why this should be a rule!
Sleep Deprived
As soon as I saw that this article came out, I dropped what I was doing and read it immediately! This may be a stretch, as the other English abbreviations are one word, but "dro" could stand for DR-y O-utpost.
Supper Mario Broth
Ah, thank you for pointing it out! It was supposed to be "that the", I have corrected it!
Audrey Haas
Very well written! You have a typo you may want to correct, two the’s in a row near the end: “somewhat unsatisfying the the final boss battle”
