A phisher has dug into the GameCube title of the Super Mario franchise and found some fascinating discarded figures.

Nintendo has brought back the football spirit with the unexpected announcement of Mario Strikers: Battle League Football. It left many franchise fans with fond memories of the previous GameCube and Wii instalments, but one data miner didn’t miss the chance to dig through the archives of the first game. And what did he find? Well, a handful of discarded footage shows a slightly different hardware piece.

User Dogon McBanana shared his findings in a Twitter stream, which you can see below.

With all that said, it’s surprising that Next Level Games made some generic characters that would presumably have made up the team of Mario and co. had they been chosen as team captains. With the release of the game, these characters have been replaced with classic enemies of the franchise if they were even considered for the game’s final version.

In addition, the data collector found other notable models, such as a camera-equipped earthman (later replaced in the game by automatic cameras), a Dull Bones (the classic Bones version of Paper Mario) who is portrayed as the “Doctor”, and even a character in a security guard’s shirt.

The data miner indeed found a handful of odd details about Super Mario Strikers. As for the Nintendo Switch version, due out on June 10, it’s already been confirmed that it’s being made by Next Level Games, who are also responsible for the other titles in the franchise. However, the studio’s president has announced his retirement from the video games industry, and in his message thanked Nintendo for the opportunity to develop.

Source: Twitter

Was digging through the game's files on a whim, and evidently the final build of Super Mario Strikers on Gamecube just has an entire team's worth of generic Mario style humans and a whole bunch of other unused stuff that I've never seen anybody talk about?? (thread) pic.twitter.com/Lty9Jp4zDH

— Dogon McBanana (@Dogon_McBanana) February 25, 2022