“Super Mario Bros. 3 is a stage play?!” 7 pop culture details we missed for years

I recently replayed the first Mega Man X game for our feature, and I was shocked to discover how many cool little extra details Capcom’s designers had snuck into every corner of their 16-bit debut. Levels interact with and tie into each other in weird ways, enemies will laugh at you if they manage to get off a hit, and bosses have oversized animated reactions that only play if you happen to strike them with their elemental weakness. (A classic bit of Mega Man design that’s only emphasized by watching the robot bastards go flying.) My mind got really blown, though, by the fact that the big honking airship from the game’s opening stage—the one that drops off a Boba Fett rip-off in mecha armor to kick the crap out of you in case all this SNES power had gone to your head—actually reappears later in the game, as the flying fortress where one of the level bosses (Storm Eagle) hangs out. Maybe I was just too dumb to notice as a kid, but that one little detail blew my grown-up mind. [William Hughes]