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Super Mario World: A 1989 Map Prototype For The SNES Game Has Been Found
By NATHAN SIMMONS
In early 2023, video game archivist @codfish1002 announced on Twitter that he’d managed to retrieve the image of a lost world map from an early version of “Super Mario World.”
As longtime fans of the series can probably tell right away, there are some clear similarities between the prototype map and the map of its predecessor, “Super Mario Bros. 3.”
An obvious comparison between the prototype and “Super Mario Bros. 3.” is the numbers for each level tile, rather than the glowing circles in the final version of “SMW.”
The enemy castles in the prototype map also resemble the ones from “SMB3.” Notably, many whimsical design elements from this prototype made it into “Super Mario World.”
The trees from the Forest of Illusion are evident, as is the design team's habit of shaping anything and everything like a mushroom — including the island itself.
