Hitting The Same Block Billions Of Times Is The Weirdest Way To Crash Paper Mario 64

The great thing about Nintendo 64 games is that dedicated players are still finding exploits years later. But the true die-hards are discovering glitches that are purely theoretical.

In Paper Mario 64, there’s a yellow block which appears to do nothing. Hit it with the hammer, and it still does nothing. Hit it a shit-ton of times, and you start getting items. Glitch wizard Stryder7x found that the game keeps track of how many times you wail on this block with an unsigned four byte value — and that the largest value it can hold is 4,294,967,295.

Obviously he needed to see what would happen after smacking it for the 4,294,967,296th time.

At that point the value overflows and you can start collecting items from this poor, abused block, albeit new item boxes start spawning on top of the old ones. Overflowing the value YET AGAIN would cause the game to crash, but Stryder did the maths. Presuming you could avoid sleep and were able to hit the block with perfect frame accuracy every time, this crash would take a little over 416 years to achieve, making it by far the most inconvenient exploit discovered in the game. In a realistic model, the controller would break or the Earth would be swallowed by the sun first.

[Vibby Vibbs]