I feel like the ultra well hidden secrets in Mario 3 might be a consequence of coming out 2 years after Zelda, and also one of the first times a game was aware enough of its Fame to hide stuff so deeply that not even the crowd could figure it out for a long time
Also don’t they show off the second warp whistle in the movie that had Mario 3 in it before the game even released?
Anyway as a contained object, yeah the warp whistles are way too hidden, but as a product and response to its time it kinda makes sense imo
All my childhood friends knew about the flute in the world 1 castle. It was universal knowledge, probably originating from the scene in the movie, which kids talked about as though it had happened in a real videogame tournament (not a fictional one). Even kids who had never played SMB3 knew it, it was school cafeteria small talk.
Nobody knew about the other flute below the white block though. I only learned about that one from a website much later.
Kind of a stretch because technically they could save, but: When i was a kid i had an N64 but no memory pak, and for some stupid reason never asked for or bought one until i was like 17 and about to sell my old N64 anyway in favor of just emulating everything (a decision i still sorta regret now that im more into playing on original hardware, when i can)
So whenever i’d rent a game that required a memory pak, i would just have to play as long as i could and try to do it perfectly. I remember this the most vividly for Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, a game i loved but never got too far in. I basically learned how to speedrun the Oedo Town part of the game, and the first Impact battle was always tense because of how hard it was for kid me — if i died, that was my game, time to start over. Might have led to my appreciation for permadeath and speedruns/efficient game routing, actually
There are probably countless arcade ports that don’t save but I found it weird that the PS2 Sega Ages series Die Hard Arcade port doesn’t save. Worth looking into not just for a smooth hi-res port but an adaptation of Periscope, one of Sega’s early mechanical arcade games. You have to put in cheats to unlock it every time you boot up the game though to unlock the art gallery and other bonus stuff (Periscope is open by default) which is what made me realize you couldn’t save.
