Bonus game (Super Mario World)

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Mario winning 1-Up Mushrooms after completing the minigame.
Mario playing the bonus game in Super Mario World. Here, a "perfect game" of nine Fire Flowers rewards him with eight 1-Up Mushrooms.

The bonus game is a special minigame in Super Mario World. It can be entered only by collecting 100 Bonus Stars at the Giant Gates. When that is done, the bonus game automatically starts just after the iris out at the end of the level.

The bonus game takes place in a Switch Palace-styled room that Mario or Luigi enters via Warp Pipe. There are nine Item Box-like blocks, eight of which are circling around the ninth. The ninth block is the only one that has a stable item in it (a Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, or Super Star); the others are constantly changing their items. The player's task is to hit the circling blocks from below to stop their reels on a matching item. The actual game works just like tic-tac-toe: Getting three of the same item in a row (vertically, horizontally, or diagonally), no matter which item it is, earns the player a 1-Up Mushroom. The player can win up to eight extra lives.

It is impossible to get exactly seven 1-Up Mushrooms in this bonus game. All attempts to do so either miss the seventh or add an eighth.

References in later games[edit]

Names in other languages[edit]

Language Name Meaning
Japanese ボーナスゲーム
Bōnasu gēmu
Bonus game

Italian Giro di Bonus[1]
Gioco Bonus[2][3]
Bonus turn
Bonus Game
Portuguese Jogo Bônus
Bonus Game

Trivia[edit]

  • This minigame is the inspiration behind Mario Roulette, a gambling arcade game exclusive to Japan.
  • In the game's code, the bonus game is either level 0x000 or level 0x100 (depending on the level from which the player arrived). If for any reason a Warp Pipe, door, or other "screen exit" warps to one of these levels, a player using that exit will get stuck in an endless bonus game, at least until the timer expires or they exit by pressing Start Button and Select Button. It is actually possible to do this in an unmodified game by using glitches.[4]
  • Reverse engineering has shown that Super Stars and Mushrooms have a 3/8 chance of appearing, while Fire Flowers have a 1/4 chance.[5]
  • In the original version of the game, the 1-Up Mushrooms that appear behave differently from normal ones; specifically, they cannot be eaten by Yoshi. This is not the case in the GBA version of the game.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Super Mario World Italian manual; pag. 8
  2. ^ Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World EU manual; pag. 109
  3. ^ Super Mario Bros. Enciclopedia; pag. 62
  4. ^ nathanisbored (June 17, 2012). Bonus Game Entrance error via Yoshi Wings (Super Mario World Glitch). YouTube. Retrieved July 27, 2023.
  5. ^ Retro Game Mechanics Explained (October 5, 2016). Super Mario World - Random Number Generation. YouTube. Retrieved December 6, 2020.