It’s something that most players wouldn’t even think is possible: playing a game in a certain way that jumps you completely to the end, without beating its final battle. But there it is, just executed in Super Mario World.
A new video by YouTuber Minecraft SethBling shows him executing a set of moves, which as he explains it, effectively rewrites the game’s code in real time as he plays. The fact that this is allegedly happening on a Super Nintendo console — and not on any kind of emulated software — makes it even more impressive. In addition to his speedrunning, SethBling is someone already known for an impressive depth of knowledge in the Minecraft world. The amount of knowledge needed to suss out this glitch and the exacting nature of its execution (discovered by Twitch streamer JeffW356 and explained in depth here) is simply incredible. It shows off just how important the work of speedrunning and hacking/modding communities can be insofar as opening up the possibilities of what’s able to be done with video games. You need to know how the game was written and the effect that player actions have on the way that the console and the game talk to each other. Just amazing.
Note: SethBling’s pulled off an even faster time of 4:49.8 with the glitch, making it an incredibly fast completion performance for SMW.
Comments
12 responses to “Near-Impossible Super Mario World Glitch Done For First Time On SNES”
Boggles my mind how people figure this stuff out.
Crazy.
That’s freaking weird. Imagine the amount of work it would have taken to figure this out…
So would this be classified as a speed run?
Very interesting how someone figured all that out.
This should now be in it’s own category, similar to how you can have a SMB 3 “NoWarp” run that doesn’t allow you to use the warp whistles.
You can see all the categories that the SMW speedrunning community utilises here:
http://www.deanyd.net/smw/index.php?title=Common_Race_Routes
In a given category there will be defined points for the timer to start and stop. In the Any% category, the timer stops with the last hit on Bowser, however using this glitch the player skips straight to the credits. They’ll either redefine the Any% category or, like @themunga says, create a new category for runs using this glitch.
Do you get to see the SNES console in the video? (I cant wait the video ATM)
Curious if he is using an original SMW cartridge and not a Super Everdrive cartridge
I don’t remember seeing it, it’s just facecam and the game screen.
Not that there is anything ‘wrong’ with using an everdrive, I have one and its awesome
But the ROMS can be modified before you put them on the cart, and as long as the header and byte size is consistent, the SNES will still load the ROM. it also has a built in Action Replay system
I dont like to be the skeptical one, but someone once told me “dont believe everything you see on the internet!”
He would need to go through allot of code to figure this out, I imagine his screen has allot of pen marks also to measure spots easier. Pretty tricky stuff.
People with time. 😛
It doesn’t really make it impressive but more legitimate because when you are talking abuse of the memory addresses then it comes down to a question of “Is this the original device or is this a bug in the emulator?” It’s impressive to see this kind of thing being done outside of a hacking context (According to the explanation, it seems to be similar to a Buffer Overflow hack).