Did you know Mario and Luigi have 254 cursed doppelganger brothers?

Over the decades, fans have asked numerous questions about Mario’s origins as a character, actual plumbing abilities, and even about his last name, which we’ve previously answered just to get your brain high on very important knowledge. Sometimes, however, we get answers for questions nobody would ever think to ask, such as “Does Mario happen to have around 254 more brothers who are not fit to be in the game?”. The answer is “Yes, and what a good guess!” Mario has exactly 254 more brothers.

Because of a recent tweet by Supper Mario Broth that revives a 2022 thread from BWGLite, many people are learning a strange little detail in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. The first Super Mario sequel has Luigi (who’s just Mario with a different coat of paint that you can play as) and then 254 other iterations of Mario whose fashion sense they apparently did not vibe with.

This happened because there were only meant to be two playable character sprites: Mario, the one whose value started with “0”, and Luigi, who started with “1”. The game uses a “brother byte” to determine the brother we’re playing as, but a byte holds 256 values in total, which resulted in over two hundred unwanted Mario clones.

To me, if they were just different-colored sprites in a game, I’d see them as nothing more than cosmetics. But the game’s code actually gave them names. Granted, most of those names are wacky number and letter mix-ups, but a rare few seem like they could’ve been picked by Mario’s parents, such as Iolui and Uigiy. This detail makes this example of family erasure so much more heartbreaking.

If you’d like to see what these brothers would look like in classic ’80s Mario art style, then you’ll probably be happy to learn that BWGLite went through the trouble of illustrating them all:

Sadly, there’s no mention of any datamining effort discovering similar sprites in any of the other Mario games. I’ll just choose to believe that every single one of Mario’s brothers that Nintendo didn’t see as fit for plumbing have since moved to a mushroom farm where they are all very happy and alive.

Join us next time to learn if Bowser has a leaner and meaner brother called Wowser.