Top: how the explosions look when Bowser is thrown into a bomb during one of his battles in Super Mario 64 in the finished game.
Bottom: the game actually contains unused animation frames for the smoke that are not displayed due to the transparency effect that is applied to the smoke in the finished version only resulting in one frame being shown. By disabling the transparency, the other frames are displayed, resulting in a much more violent-seeming explosion due to the extreme amount of smoke.
It stands to reason that the bottom version is how the explosion was originally intended to look, as using the transparency effect makes the smoke animation redundant. Then, the transparency was presumably added sometime during development, possibly due to the designers believing the original explosion was too intense.
Source: packattack04082, 1upGuy
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