This is the star technical demo of Nintendo's August 2000 Space World show, created by Keizo Ohta (lead programmer of Wave Race 64). After demonstrating the demo, producer Shigeru Miyamoto referred to it as "Fried Rice", however it was officially called
Mario 128.
The demo begins with a 2D Mario walking onto the screen - the classic Mario tune cues in. The camera zooms out and quickly zooms back in on a large 2D Mario now composed of 3D boxes on a round 3D platform. All of a sudden, one of the boxes that forms Mario's nose pops up with a pair of legs underneath. You find that there is a 700-polygon 3D Mario model underneath. He carries the box over his head to the edge of the round platform and throws it off. He returns to the large Mario made of boxes and picks up another box up. Another 3D Mario appears underneath. The two proceed to pick up boxes and throw them off, with a new Mario appearing under each box. It gets to a point where there are 64 Marios on screen.
Action on-screen slows for about five seconds, and then picks up again, faster this time, until it reaches 128 Marios on the screen. Marios then begin jumping off the side while other Marios and boxes continually fall out of the sky back to replenish those that fell. Suddenly a barrage of boxes falls on the platform. The Marios get a kick out of this and begin doing all sorts of different things. One lays down while another rolls him off the edge. This ignited a laugh from the crowd as the falling Mario still had a huge smile on his face. The action of the camera continually switched from character to character.
After about 30 seconds, the camera zoomed in on one Mario who began waving his hand. A few seconds later the once round and flat platform begins to deform. Miyamoto supposedly controlled the deforming of the platform. Valleys and mountains are created across the platform. The Marios begin rolling down the hills and get stuck in the valleys below.
Then a variety of effects were applied to the characters and environment, including light and shadows, cell-shading, and blur effects. At one time, an impressive 128 700-polygon Marios and all effects were applied.
All the Marios were eventually gathered into the middle of the platform. The next scene is why Miyamoto named the demo "Mario Fried Rice". A barrage of boxes fell onto the screen, and the platform began vigorously shaking, throwing the Mario and boxes in the air and mixing them together.
After about 10 seconds of that chaos, the platform, interestingly enough, transforms into a pepperoni pizza. The pizza expunges all the Marios and boxes, tossing them off the sides and then shrinks down into the size of a GameCube optical disc and snugly drops into a GameCube. The lid of the GameCube closes and the demo ends.
Miyamoto commented on how he would like to include Mario 128 as a pack-in demo for the release of the GameCube. Things didn't turn out that way, and nothing has been heard of Mario 128 since.
