This article has a talk page!This page details pre-release information and/or media for Mario Forever.
1996 predecessor#
On November 16th, 2017, the developer of Mario Forever, Michał "Buziol" Gdaniec opened a section of the Softendo website softendo.com focused on what he calls the history of his first steps in game development, showing the graphics of and talking about the first ever version of Mario Forever, notably started in the 90s (!) using the Backbone game editor for the Commodore Amiga: 1996 Mario Forever.
This version is called Mario Forever 1996 by Buziol himself after the year when it was started on the Mario Forever forum at the time, where that section was published and also had the opening date taken from. It has to be noted that Mario Forever might not have been the game's actual title at the time, as even during the Multimedia Fusion version's development it seems to have been known as Super Mario Bross Forever.
Buziol says he used an Amiga 1200 to make these sprites and that he was 14 when he did so. There was also a build of Mario Forever 1996, but it was lost along with that Amiga's entire hard disk. Whether any of Buziol's early Amiga games were released (for free as public domain or such) remains uncertain.
The art style of the sprites that can be seen on the website section is noticeably grittier than the official artstyle from Nintendo seen in Super Mario All-Stars that the final game just ended up ripping its sprites from, which is in-line with fan sprites from back then (especially ones done by Amiga users) being generally grittier. This part of the article will show the images displayed on that website section containing the sprites, categorized by their captions there. The images are, unfortunately, JPEGs in a very poor quality which means we can't get the original sprites from the pixel data; they can however still be recreated just from viewing the images at a good distance.
Enemies set + Mario + Fire Mario#
Miscellaneous objects all contained in one image, as well as Mario's sprites. Of note is the enemy obviously inspired by Pac-Man and its red version, as well as the red ball of which the purpose is unknown.
Blocks set 1996#
All the blocks that were going to be used in the game.
Lakitu 1996#
Lakitu's sprites, including its Spiny Egg.
Bowser 1996#
Bowser's sprites, including his fire breath.
Bowser and enemies set 1996#
An additional version of the objects image. This is likely an earlier version, as the red Pac-Man enemy is missing. Bowser's sprites and an extra Pokey part are also in place of Mario's normal and Fire sprites, respectively.
Development build screenshot#
A screenshot presumably sent by Buziol to the website Softonic shows an unknown build of the game being played, showcasing World 2-1 with "World 1-1" written in the HUD. Other screenshots of the game from Softonic either share the distinction of the level being incorrectly referred to as 1-1 (but have yet to be found in decent quality) or appear to be of final versions 3.0 or 3.51.
