Watch: Speedrunner reprograms a ‘Super Mario’ game to beat itself
This is how we anger the robots, folks. We fuck around with programming, exploit it. We fuck around with the robots, making them humiliate themselves. I’m not saying we can play the robot uprising on this hacked copy of Super Mario. But we can.
Speedrunners have long been exploiting 8-bit games by “reprogramming” them. Pixel-perfect inputs can be used to trigger memory events, usually for the purpose of beating games in fractions of the time it would ordinarily take. A similar exploit exists in the classic Mario Game Boy game 6 Golden Coins, but it exists in a physical, semi-playable form. Welcome to glitch hell.
By falling through the map in a particular stage, speedrunner Chris Grant is able to interact with the game’s memory and make it think it’s been beaten the next time he enters a new level. Apparently, 6 Golden Coins stored all the data for the cartridge underneath levels (where players were never intended to go) as blocks, pipes, and other broken but familiar in-game objects. Touching some of these objects causes a hard reset or renders the entire cartridge unusable. But one block in particular tells the software to load the end-game sequence, which in glitch speedruns, counts as beating the game.
There must be some reason why the 6 Golden Coins programmers found storing memory this way more efficient, but I’m not aware of other Mario games doing anything similar. The bonus is that tinkering around “inside” a game looks a lot like a bad early 90s plot device, a la hacking the gibson. Don’t go dusting off your old Game Boy though: the glitch only works on older versions of the cartridge.