10 Features You Didn't Know Were Cut From Classic Video Games

It's typical for levels to be scrapped from a game during development. Usually these areas are completely erased, but it turns out a ton of discarded beta levels are actually still present within Super Mario Bros. 3's code.

Rather than being deleted outright, they were merely made inaccessible - through normal means, anyway.

The unused areas run the gamut from grasslands to ice worlds to sky stages. Some are clearly unfinished or experimental, lacking enemies or exits, but a few of them are so well-designed that it's actually a shame they didn't make the cut. There's even a fun water level, and fun water levels are so rare in gaming that googling the phrase returns "did you mean tortuous aqua-hell?"

There are also some enemy variants in these beta levels that are otherwise unused in the game, including an aggressive, golden version of the Cheep-Cheep - and yes, technically this makes it a "beta fish."

If you'd like to check out these lost levels, The Mushroom Kingdom has a patch that makes them all easily accessible, but it requires an SMB3 ROM and NES emulation software (and Nintendo's lawyers are too intimidating for me to share those here).