I am not going to talk about myself much and will just go straight into my story. I will keep my name brief; my name is Dennis, and I am nothing special. Now, with that out of the way, I will get to my story and note that screenshots of my experience will be included in this post.
Glitches have been a fascinating part of many games and a popular subject among gamers; some are pretty funny, some are convenient when getting past annoyingly hard areas, and some are downright horrifying, like MissingNo from Pokemon and the hanging shadow glitch from Luigi’s Mansion, just to name a few.
Of course, games like Paper Mario are no exception to having glitches, especially considering how it is an old game after all. Yes, I am referring to the original Paper Mario from 2001 on the Nintendo 64. I think many know about the glitches of this game, most notably the Peach Warp, Negative Damage, and the clipping out of bounds, like jumping through the walls in places like Toad Town and the Mario Bros.’ House.
However, this glitch is pretty much different. No sources brought it up at all, and I was basically the first person who encountered this. It all started around the time when I started playing Paper Mario again. I haven’t done much in the game, and I am just now coming back to it.
I started off where I was; I had progressed through Goomba Village and unlocked Goombario. I was just heading to the east of the remains of Peach’s Castle and to the location called Shooting Star Summit. For reference, Shooting Star Summit was this cosmic-looking landscape with a path leading to it; the higher path led to the top of the said area, and the lower path led to Merluvlee and Merlow’s House.
If that wasn’t a good enough description, you are welcome to look it up, but this is where the glitch started. I took the screenshot of what I saw as I was going up the mountain. I saw him, Luigi. He barely appeared in the game like this; he mostly spent his time in the Mario Bros.’ House.
Here, he was just standing there near a flower with him reading what seems to be a paper in his hand. He paid no attention to Mario; he just stood there, and then I tried to move. I could swear I could briefly see Luigi’s eyes move and glare at Mario and then look back at the paper. Then I could swear that I saw him twitch, something I never saw him do in the game nor what any NPC did for that matter.
He also just blinked and never did that again afterwards.
Then, out of nowhere, as I started moving again. I saw Luigi drop the paper and then chased after my character like an enemy approaching you and starting a battle, but his walking animation was in this drunken manner. This time, he just stood there for a bit again…and just had this horrible buzzing sound effect accompany him.
But again, this time, he had a horrific appearance. His brown shoes were becoming an error that seemed to be a palette glitch, and his head twitched upside down in this gross manner… I could see his face become pale as if the neck-breaking killed him, causing his blood to not flow to his brain.
His eyes were shadowed, eerily similar to that of that infamous clip associated with the beta of Luigi’s Mansion involving a depressed and flat-out unsettling-looking illustration and render of Luigi. His eyes were just white, empty circles with black holes inside of them, and his mouth was open very wide, and as I was looking closely at the image I took of this glitch, I could notice a red substance coming out of his mouth, which appeared to be blood.
Then Luigi was getting closer to Mario, and I could tell Mario was getting creeped out by what he was seeing. As if this was some intentional cutscene, the buzzing sound was still continuing at this point.
At this point, I knew there was something wrong with Luigi right here as I made Mario run with Goombario following him from behind, and then out of nowhere, he was pulled back to Luigi. Luigi made no animation of pulling him towards him; Mario was just forced back to him.
Then Luigi was increasingly getting closer as the buzzing got louder and louder, twitching occasionally as he lunged at Mario. Mario was making a pose that I don’t even think I’d seen him do in the game before.
No, I mean, I am serious. I played this game, and I don’t think I have gotten this far to see Mario do such animation like this, nor was it ever in this game. Mario just reeled back in horror as his eyes got wide, and his fear was genuine.
What was weird is how Goombario wasn’t reacting at all to Luigi’s attack and Mario’s fear.
However, that was the remainder of the described glitch; it just reverted back to the path of Shooting Star Summit, and I just moved there, and I saw no Luigi in sight. I just headed up to the summit to the three Star Spirits, and the gameplay went as normal afterwards.
I just decided to turn off the game and just try to process this glitch. I even went so far as to enter the game files—don’t ask how—and checked to see if this Luigi sprite was in the game. I saw absolutely nothing, but I did save a couple of screenshots, basically the necessary ones, so I tried to recreate my own upscaled-looking render without the usual N64 quality.
I saved it onto my computer and just looked at my screenshots and tried to come up with a theory of what seemingly happened. I am guessing that this was a memory issue, as the console is known for errors like that.
That or another possibility is an enemy animation override, and it happened to leak into this unsettling scene or the unintended sprite mapping with Luigi accidentally having a texture swap, which made his features nightmarish, stretched, and misplaced. This could’ve also been a faulty cutscene/script error, as if it went wrong where the game misplaced character assets in a way Nintendo didn’t intend.
Of course, this may have just been an issue caused by the console itself. It was just something rare where graphical data got scrambled in real time. I don’t know; the fact that this “bent” Luigi didn’t even appear in the game files either makes it weirder.
At the end of the day, it was just an error regardless. Nothing weird happened with my console, and I didn’t notice anything weird throughout my day. I just played the game as normal, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have nightmares of how Luigi appeared in that scene.
The fact that a children’s game showed something like that is beyond me. The look of Luigi was just horrifying. I tried contacting Nintendo about the error, but they didn’t know what I was talking about; they were undeniably unnerved by the screenshots I shared, but that was it. They just treated it as if my console was broken or something. It was probably just broken around the time that glitch occurred.