16 Years Later, Fans Find Secret Messages Hidden In Paper Mario

Sometimes, developers put stuff inside of a game that players are never supposed to see. Such was the case with the original Paper Mario, which apparently had a bunch of dialogue that was not discovered until very recently.

As Paper Mario expert Stryder7x explains in the video below, if you go out of bounds using a glitch called “log skip” on Toad Town, it’s possible to load into the southern portion of locale. Typically, players can only access that southern area after the first chapter of Paper Mario, so by performing this specific glitch early in the game, you can teleport ahead of where you “should” be at that point in the story: 

In the Japanese version of Paper Mario, if you talk to the NPCs in that area after glitching into it, many of them say things they wouldn’t normally. Mostly, they acknowledge that the player shouldn’t be there, or that the player shouldn’t be seeing these messages. Actually, some NPCs tell you to to “get in contact” if you see their message, presumably with the developers—so Stryder7x did exactly that:

https://twitter.com/embed/status/790381013364899840

Nintendo didn’t respond (boo), but hopefully whoever worked on Paper Mario way back when gets a chuckle out of it.

You can check out Stryder7x’s YouTube channel here, where he features a variety of other interesting new discoveries about Paper Mario—if you’re a fan, it’s worth a look.