One of the things that’s always tickled my interest is the concept of video-game speed-running, the meta-game of playing games fast that extends into almost absurdities of technical mastery that challenge the idea of what it even means to “play” a game. And one of the speed-run games that I find most interesting is Mario 64.
Mario 64 was a pivotal game, taking one of the world’s best-known video-game franchises and making the leap from 2D to 3D gameplay. And it’s amazing that it feels like a Mario game, despite being so substantially different from earlier Mario games. The motion is so varied and sharp and lively and fun. I have a lot of happy memories of playing the game as a kid, and replaying it over the years, including with my daughter in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars re-release. And yet, it’s a game with numerous bugs and deficiencies that has been utterly broken by speed-runners, who can achieve unlimited velocity and take shortcuts through alternate realities. Walls are just a suggestion, after all: If you want to make a discrete simulation of continuous physics and have limited hardware and (even more significantly) limited experience developing that sort of thing, things can get a little odd around the edges.
One of my favorite creators in this area is the YouTuber pannenkoek2012, who seems emblematic of the speed-running community in this combination of mind and heart, technical mastery and joy. My favorites of theirs are probably these two pieces, first this short music video that I think highlights some of the charm of this game:
My other favorite is this video that dives deep into one of those physics-simulation edge-cases. Mario 64 players have over the years run into situations where the character “bonks” against apparent obstacles with no relation to the visible geometry. These “invisible walls” are one of the mysteries of the game, and in this video Pannenkoek dove into a technical breakdown of all the causes of the invisible walls in Mario 64, but also a detailed breakdown of every instance of that phenomenon in the game:
Though this one is nearly four hours long. Sometimes a wall is not a wall, and as with speed-running, sometimes the goal (in that case, of going fast) is not exactly the point.
ComplexMeme 