Recently, a certain rumour about Super Mario 3D All-Stars started circulating on Twitter and other social media sites. According to this rumour, exiting Super Mario 64 in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection would crash the game or softlock the entire Switch console, since people who’d had pirated the leaked version of the game had been experiencing similar issues.
If you try to exit SM64 the entire Switch just softlocks.
The game stops but never successfully exits, and you cant back out to the Switch home menu, so you have to reboot your entire Switch.
— DeathChaos (@DeathChaos25) September 15, 2020
This rumour was so pervasive (and the evidence so credible) that we also posted about it on our own Twitter account, and asked a few other gaming journalists whether they could confirm or deny it.
However, there’s good news here for Super Mario 64. As it turns out, the rumour is (mostly) false. Exiting Super Mario 64 does not cause any problems in Super Mario 3D All-Stars, nor potentially damage your system.
Instead, as pointed out by various dataminers and other knowledgeable folk in the community, the issue shown in the original videos actually stems from the software used to play the leaked game. Basically, the official firmware added a new JIT module in version 10.0.0. And this module was used for both the emulators and the collection itself.
Problem is, the custom firmware people were using to run said leaked game didn’t have it.
Hence all the issues reported online. It makes perfect sense really; if you accidentally leave out a core file for any piece of software, there’s a good chance it’ll break horribly. Or not even run at all.
Either way, you can see what actually happens when you exit Super Mario 64 in this video by Twitter user ForceWave, who proves you can quit the game just fine:
Mario 64 DOES NOT CRASH when you leave the game. People who claimed that it does are using unofficial custom firmware. Those who use the latest OFFICIAL firmware update will not have this issue. pic.twitter.com/uYMl7OFdgd
— ForceWave Palpa… SKYWALKER! (@forcewave1139) September 17, 2020
You can also see more evidence of this via a comment by dataminer MrCheeze on our YouTube post about the matter, where he states it’s a problem in the emulation software:
This is false, it’s a bug in the homebrew software people are using to run the pirated version.
So don’t worry about this folks. There’s no game crashing/data corrupting bug in Super Mario 3D All-Stars that Nintendo needs to patch out, and any footage of such comes from leaked copies run on outdated firmware. For most players, the game works just fine.
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