Super Mario Galaxy has a "horribly inefficient" secret: the credits are always loaded in the background while you play, which has the "inadvertently heartwarming" side effect of making sure the platformer always remembers the Nintendo legends who made it

A crop of the Retro Gamer 252 The Magic of Mario cover image showing Mario spinning through space with stars around him — (Image credit: Nintendo)

Mario games are full of secrets, some of which were never meant to be discovered, and fan detectives have spent years trying to track them all down. The two Super Mario Galaxy games hold one particularly odd detail that's equal parts inefficient and heartwarming, as they both keep their credits loaded into memory at all times while you play.

"In the Super Mario Galaxy games, the staff credits text is always loaded into RAM despite not being needed until the ending," according to Mario trivia enthusiast Supper Mario Broth on Bluesky, citing information from HEYimHeroic. "While horribly inefficient, this is inadvertently heartwarming as the games appear to honor their creators by keeping them in memory at all times."

In the Super Mario Galaxy games, the staff credits text is always loaded into RAM despite not being needed until the ending. While horribly inefficient, this is inadvertently heartwarming as the games appear to honor their creators by keeping them in memory at all times.
— @mariobrothblog.bsky.social (@mariobrothblog.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-08T17:20:03.821Z

For the first Galaxy, all of the text from the entire game is loaded at all times, so it makes some sense that the credits would be included here. But with a total of "4,643 lines of text" in the file, according to Mario Broth, that ends up filling about "1/400 of the RAM at all times, which could be used for 1 or 2 extra objects."

In Super Mario Galaxy 2, the text was split up a bit more efficiently, with a different text file for every in-game galaxy. "But the credits are still always loaded," Mario Broth adds. That's a level of dedication to proper crediting that modern Nintendo would never abide – even if it is better described as a quirk of programming rather than a direct effort to make sure the creators are remembered.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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