Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code (opens in new tab)

There’s a whole mythology of Mario 64 conspiracy theories regarding Luigi, Wario, Wet-Dry World, and other things. Googling “Mario iceberg” will get you started. A lot of it is just bad fakes, so it’s not as entertaining as something built purely out of unused assets.

The model is not in the cartridge. It was only in the game assets in the source code dump.

Why delete it? You never know if they might reinstate it (before release that is, and why bother deleting on release day?) or the model could be used in another game, making them costs money, storing them not that much.

> especially on a N64 cartridge to save space?

The space obviously wasn't needed during development (this is leaked source, I don't know if it made it to the gold version) so there's two likely possibilities:

a) They knew about it but didn't have the dev/tester time to vet the change. This is coming from an era when most game testing was done manually and the N64 toolchain had some big issues around launch. Higher priority fixes might have just pushed a cleanup task like this off the list.

b) They just didn't know. This is also from an era where DCVS weren't particularly common in the games industry and CVS was still black magic in some circles so auditing changes or doing code reviews were very rare.

I'm going on a limb here and assume the codebase wasn't as easy to manage back then. They missed a lot of fancy tooling to review it.

Also, as a developer (game and webdev), there's tons of leftover stuff. Most of which is assets. For games, the artists would've put them in the codebase at some point. For web, it's usually just forgotten when removing features.

I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo has the source code for most everything they've made. You don't become a 150 year old company without fastidious bookkeeping.

Now if they'd just pay the emulator people a bucket of cash to make officially supported emulators that run on the Switch and all future hardware (without having to rebuy the titles), they'd make so much money they'll be around for the next 300 years.

That's too coincidental. Given the size of the Mario iceberg, maybe it's time to get the SCP Foundation involved?

And the leak happened on the 25th of July.

24+01 = 25.

2+4+0=1 = 7.

> Nah, commenting out is better in case decisions are reversed.

But worse in all other cases. If your decision process is such that that weighs in favor of cluttering your codebase with dead code, that's a problem.

And, actually, since the commented code almost certainly isn't being maintained and uncommented for testing as the rest of the codebase evolved, it's probably not even better in the case that decisions are reversed.

> Once it's deleted, there's no way to get it back

There's rewriting it in light of the actual requirements and current state of the rest of the code base.

> Version control isn't reliable.

Neither is unmaintained, commented-out code dragged along with your code base. If your VCS isn't the vastly more reliable of those two things, that's a problem you ought to address.

(Of course, at the time of Mario 64, the calculus might well have favored a different approach.)

# JIRA: L-2401

# Dev-only code.

# Fixme: delete before release.

As long as delete means "commit the deletion of unused files to source control", I agree. Though I don't know what kind of source control they had back then, and if they used it for such assets. In my opinion if something is not serving any current purpose in your code base it should be deleted from source control. The repo should be a reflection of the precise range of capabilities that you intend for the project to have; leaving dead vestiges of the past just laying around is like growing a garden and never cleaning it of deadwood and debris, giving more places for weeds to grow unnoticed.

I think we need better tooling for browsing historical artifacts that may be valuable in the future -- which I think is the main reason I've seen people intentionally keep dead code. Maybe the solution to that is to just tag the commit in which you deleted the code with a note on what it was so you can find it again.

Edit: An uncle comment mentions that this may have been a discovery from digging around in the CVS history for the game, so they may have kept the assets in source control after all! Some might reasonably take away from this to protect your source repo, but I think it's pretty cool it's possible to find these historical artifacts.

Smaller file sizes, less bloat