Super Mario 64 was quite the revolutionary game for its time, as it perfectly implemented tight controls in 3D — at the time, at least — and made use of a proper camera system that allowed players to experience the game in ways that had not been seen before.
Many considered it to be the perfect game, and some could still make a solid argument to defend their claims even to this day — which is saying a lot for a game that was released 24 years ago.
Whether Super Mario 64 is a perfect game or not is open to discussion, but a recent discovery has actually revealed that the smoke effect in the game has always been a glitch — so much so, that we haven't actualy seen what the developers had intended for us to see; that is, until now.
A ROM hacker by the name of zoinknoise has recently released a patch that fixes the smoke effect in Super Mario 64. According to the user, a recent decompilation has revealed that the smoke's textures are being displayed in the wrong format — which causes the effect to look like a bunch of pixels, and not what it was intended.
What's even more interesting is that we never knew that smoke wasn't supposed to look that way, as this glitch went unnoticed for over two decades. The intended textures look actually very nice, and are even somewhat see-through in nature. It may be a small change, but it does look a whole lot better than the end product.
Below you can see what smoke looks like in Super Mario 64, and what it should've looked like had that line of code been fixed before the game was officially released all the way back in 1996..