Super Mario 64 is a solid-gold classic, and for that reason, fans have spent the past few decades digging into the game to find as many secrets as possible. Amazingly, despite the time that has passed since it launched on the N64, it seems the game still has hidden features to reveal.
Hacker Kaze Emanuar, who has been systematically pulling apart Nintendo's 3D classic for a while now, has discovered yet another Mario 64 secret which, he claims, has only been found because Nintendo "didn't anticipate anyone would be as annoying as I am being right now."
This latest discovery is related to one of the many in-game timers which govern the behaviour of various elements of the game. In this particular case, as spotted by Games Radar, it's related to one of the game's enemies, Sushi the Shark in the Dire, Dire Docks stage.
Sushi plays a repeating swimming sound, but because the sound is triggered every 16 seconds, you never hear the whole audio clip. However, after 14 months of the game running, the in-game timer reaches its limit, and the sound stops looping. Because it doesn't loop, you get to hear the whole sound, and then Sushi falls silent.
"Doing this is actually the only way to hear the full sound effect," Kaze explains. "So we have kind of unlocked a secret sound effect no one else has heard before in Mario 64, which I think is pretty neat."
To be fair to Nintendo, it's hard to see how it could possibly have accounted for people like Kaze pushing the game to its absolute limit decades after launch—and we're kind of glad it didn't, as these cool little secrets are fascinating.