Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Never trust a hat with eyes: ‘Odyssey’ glitch lets Cappy kill Mario

By

Mario throws his hat.
Nintendo
There is something unsettling about the idea of a living hat, yet it proved to be one of the best additions to

Super Mario Odyssey

 when it released in October. As a new friend of Mario’s, Cappy turned out to be equal parts adorable and helpful. Was this all a ploy to lower Mario’s defenses? As it turns out, a newly discovered glitch allows Cappy to make the titular character disappear.

According to a gameplay clip from Twitter user DefinitivNichtSacha (via Eurogamer), Cappy’s ability to kill off Mario appears to be accidental. In order to perform the glitch, Super Mario Odyssey needs to be running in two-player mode. After Mario uses Cappy to capture a Piranha Plant, which can only be done by feeding it a rock first, Cappy can then attack the plant, killing it and Mario in one fell swoop.

Recommended Videos
Related

As players will discover, this sort of locks the game. Mario doesn’t exactly die but he does cease to exist. Cappy can still fly around and return to where Mario exists in spirit, but Mario can no longer progress. In order to continue, players can simply fast travel to a nearby flagpost to see their beloved hero reincarnated.

Nintendo has not mentioned the issue and it doesn’t appear to break the game, but it will likely be patched out in future updates. Anyone interested in recreating the glitch should try it before it’s too late.

Super Mario Odyssey launched on October 27 with almost universal praise, going on to sell more than 2 million units in three days. In our review, we praised its well-polished gameplay with tons of nods to past games. One modder enjoyed the new hat mechanics so much that they retroactively added them to Super Mario 64. While it is clear that the game was not intended for Cappy, his powers make it easy to take out certain enemies and reach difficult areas like the top of Peach’s castle.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Garrett Hulfish
Garrett Hulfish
Contributor
Garrett is the kind of guy who tells you about all the tech you haven't heard of yet. He also knows too much about other…
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games might be dead, producer says
Surfing Mario in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games.

The Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games series missed out on the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, and according to one former executive producer, it might signal the end of the franchise.

Lee Cocker, who worked at International Sports Multimedia (ISM), which was the official licensee of the rights through the International Olympic Committee (IOC), was sharing footage from his time working on the Mario and Sonic games on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn when he mentioned that the franchise "finished" with Mario & Sonic at the Olympics Games Tokyo 2020.

Read more
The best GameCube games of all time
Samus in Metroid Prime.

Even though we all enjoyed the best N64 games during that generation, there was a lot of pressure on the GameCube to take things to the next level. After all, Nintendo had to compete with the best PlayStation 2 games and best Xbox games in that generation. While it might not have sold as well as Sony's system, the GameCube still managed to release some classics that we still consider some of the best games of all time.

While we're always looking toward the future with upcoming Switch games to play, sometimes it's fun to look back at the best of the best from these classic systems. We've already ranked the best SNES games and best Game Boy Advance games, so let's give the same treatment to our precious little purple cube.

Read more
Nintendo World Championships turned me into a Super Mario Bros. god
Box art for super mario bros shows fire Mario running.

The newly released Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is all about mastery. The retro microgame collection takes 13 NES classics and breaks them down into bite-sized speedrunning challenges that beg players to replay them over and over to lower their best time. That process all leads to the package's big event, the titular Nintendo World Championships. Every week, players all submit their best times for five specific challenges and fight for a top ranking come Monday morning.

I had no idea how I'd fare against hundreds of thousands of people in the game's first week. While I'd been sharpening my skills during the review period for the game, I still didn't have much confidence that I could make a splash in games like Super Mario Bros. that have been mapped out to perfection already.

Read more