Mario Galaxy’s Scrapped Beta Planets

Four planets planned early on in development ended up getting scrapped from Super Mario Galaxy — three of them only made it as far as the concept art stage, while one was actually programmed into the game. We’ll start with the planets that died first.

Discarded Concept Art

Super Mario Galaxy’s official Prima strategy guide came in two editions — the Premiere Edition and the Collector’s Edition. The latter revealed some concept art from early in the game’s development, including art for this unused castle planet. It doesn’t look like the kind of castle that would belong to Bowser, so it might have been Peach’s castle. But without clarification from Nintendo, we can only speculate. There appears to be some kind of mountain environment and a few small structures on the underside of the castle planet as well.

Then there are two renderings of a giant fortress planet. The planet is home to the heavily-armed fortress itself, as well as waterfalls, a lake containing a large cannon, snow, and a warp pipe at the very top.

And, well, this third location showcased in the Collector’s Edition isn’t exactly a planet — rather, it appears to be some sort of platforming galaxy. The galaxy seems reminiscent of some of Mario Sunshine’s platforming areas, the ones where Mario’s jet-pack was withheld and he was forced to jump around the stage the old fashioned way.

E3 2006 Beta Demo Planet

The last location on this list comes from E3 2006, where attendees were given the chance to play a 10 minute demo of an early build of Super Mario Galaxy. This beta build contained a hub planet that wasn’t present in the final release, which was home to a group of NPC Toads much like Peach’s Castle in Mario 64.

In fact, the model for this planet is still in the final version of the game. But it was apparently deemed unnecessary and ended up going unused when the Comet Observatory was later decided to serve as the game’s hub world. This beta hub didn’t have an official name in the demo, but the internal data refers to it as “homeplanet.”

Aside from Home Planet, the demo galaxy was otherwise made up of planets that could be found throughout various stages in the game’s final release, as well as a large number of asteroids. It’s worth noting that Galaxy’s release version only included two asteroids. Interestingly, this demo galaxy was made up of branching paths, allowing Mario to explore at will in different directions. The final game did not include branching paths, only linear paths. Which is a shame, because as great a game as Galaxy was, branching paths could have made it even better.

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