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Sunday, July 20, 2008

Toad’s Piranha Plant-Controlling Cousin?

Hello. Every now and then, I test the power of this blog and the reach of the internet to determine if a thing I have back in the recesses of my memory actually existed or if I just made it up then forgot I made it up and continued life thinking said thing was real. I did it a few years ago with George and the Star, which, it turned out, was real. I’m hoping I’ll find luck with this one as well.

Way back when — between 1993 and 1996, I’d guess — I was a regular reader of a video game magazine called Diehard Gamefan. I loved it. They reported on games with a certain style that other magazines didn’t, and they often focused on obscure stuff, much of which would never see the light of day in the United States. I distinctly remember one day reading about an aborted Mario game that, unless I’m mistaken, would have been released on the CD-ROM attachment Nintendo had initially planned for the Super Nintendo. (That attachment never came, of course, and a lot of titles planned for it were either scrapped or changed into Super Nintendo titles. This was the case for Secret of Mana.) This game was a sequel, of sorts, in the regular Mario franchise, but had some significant differences — mainly lots of playable characters, including some who could “talk” their way out of a fight and one in particular who was described as “Toad’s Piranha Plant-controlling cousin,” or something to that effect. In retrospect, it would seem like Gamefan was describing some early iteration of a Mario RPG. Who knows if this project was eventually mutated, bit by bit, into other Nintendo games.

I no longer have the magazine where I first read this. I’ve Googled it and found nothing. The only three unreleased or cancelled Mario games I can find any information about are Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds, Super Mario 64 2 and Super Mario 128. So now I’m posting it here in hopes that others may be looking for it too, may find this site and may tell me once and for all that I didn’t hallucinate all this.

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