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The actual voice of video game Mario, Charles Martinet, shows up in the movie itself. He plays a character called Giuseppe who's hunched over an arcade cabinet playing a game called 'Jump Man', which is a cheeky nod to Mario's original name from the 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game.
Not content with one cameo, Charles Martinet also voices Mario and Luigi's dad in the film. It's a much more disguised performance than his Giuseppe cameo, so most people miss it completely on their first watch.
Mario and Luigi's old boss Spike isn't just a random side character, he's pulled straight from Wrecking Crew, a fairly obscure 1985 Famicom title. In the movie he gets a dig in at Mario, calling him a joke, clearly still bitter about being his old employer.
Before the brothers get sucked into the warp pipe, they sprint across a Brooklyn construction site to make it to a job on time. Look at the layout closely and it's basically a live-action recreation of World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros, right down to Mario sliding down a sign post like it's the end-of-level flagpole.
Keep your ears open during the plumbing commercial scene, because when Mario's phone goes off, the ringtone is the Nintendo GameCube startup chime. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it audio gag that only really lands if you grew up with the console.
Mario and Luigi watch their own cringey ad back in a place called Punch-Out Pizzeria, complete with newspaper clippings of Little Mac's boxing exploits pinned up on the walls. It's a nice little shoutout to Nintendo's Punch-Out!! series tucked into an otherwise unremarkable diner scene.
As the brothers walk home through Brooklyn, they pass a restaurant with the French name Chasse au Canard painted on the window. Translate it and you get Duck Hunt, a sly little tribute to the 1985 NES light gun classic hiding in plain sight.
Mario and Luigi's bedroom is basically a shrine to Nintendo history if you pause and look properly. There's an F-Zero poster showing off Captain Falcon's ride, plus a poster of the sunglasses-wearing polar bear from the Ice Climber games, both easy to miss while the scene is moving.
When the brothers head into Brooklyn's sewers to fix a burst pipe, the music playing underneath is a callback to World 1-2 from the original Super Mario Bros, the very first underground level in the series. There's even a sign behind Luigi labelling the area Level 1-2, just to make sure nobody missed it.
Long before Peach, Mario's very first damsel to rescue in 1981's Donkey Kong was a woman named Pauline. She gets a quick, easy to overlook cameo in the movie, a nod to fans who remember her as the original Mario girl before she got sidelined for decades.
