4-2: The History of Super Mario Bros.' Most Infamous Level

this is stage 4-2 in the original super mario bros it doesn't really look that menacing an area at the start with no floor sure and an elevator gap just after and as soon as you enter 4-2 you're able to exit it if you hit these blocks to reveal this fine you can climb up it and you'll be above ground and there you can warp to either world 6 7 or 8. this stage has seemed so pivotal to speedrunners who have been trying to beat super mario bros as fast as possible for years it's a gateway to world 8 arguably the most dangerous part of the game so this is a level that's gonna make or break your speed run but as short and simple as this level may seem little do most people know that 4-2 has caused more pain and agony than just about any other level in the game [Music] come on [Music] man [Music] welcome to the mid-2000s this is when the first super mario bros speedruns were completed runners such as scott kessler and trevor sagan were the pioneers and they knew that 4-2 is a simple level with a simple goal run through it climb up the vine and warp the world 8. doing that quickly wasn't too hard doing it as fast as humanly possible on the other hand definitely was it was obvious to most back then that the start of 4-2 is really straightforward you jump across this gap stomp on a goomba and then continue jumping forward until you're on the platform then you jump off the platform to hit the block that makes the warp zone vine appear but this is where it got really tough you have to tap left to slow down to nearly a stop and then jump to reveal this invisible block then you tap left again just enough to completely stop landing just to the right of the invisible block you revealed finally you jump on top of the block onto the top platform and onto the vine doing this in real time at full speed requires a ton of precision and it took runners quite a bit of time to get good at it this is scott kessler's 510 from april 2004 as you can see he hesitated a bit while climbing on the blocks and clipped through the vine by accident when he was trying to climb up onto it yeah the hit detection in super mario bros is a little bit weird at times but runners eventually got better at this section in trevor sagan's 507 from a few months later you can see that he was able to get a smoother climb to the vine ultimately ending the section with the 376 on the timer which counts down from 400 when you start the level and when he improved his run to a 506 a few weeks later he once again improved 4-2 getting it smoother than ever before with a 377 on the timer so alright speedrunners had established a way of getting through 4-2 very quickly and given how short the level was you might wonder what else could possibly be found for speedrunners to go through the level quicker after all you are already going directly to the warp zone as fast as you could but if there's one thing you should never do it's doubt the ability of speedrunners to figure out something even faster [Music] when you're playing through super mario bros you're occasionally able to leave the screen you're on to enter another screen sometimes this other screen is an underground coin cache sometimes it's a bonus section and sometimes it's a warp zone every time you can exit the screen you're on to access one of these zones be it a pipe a vine or whatever i'll be referring to as an exit zone now 4-2 is a little bit unique almost immediately after beginning the level it has two of these exit zones back to back the first one is the vine that you take to the warp zone and the second one is this pipe a few blocks down that takes you to an underground room with coins but there's a catch the game can only have one of these zones loaded at the same time it can't say if you go up the vine you go here but if you go down the pipe you'll go here so the way the game works around that is by changing what the one destination is depending on how far the screen is scrolled for example if you're standing here and managed to activate an exit zone in some way the game will send you to the above ground warp zone now when we move forward closer to the pipe suddenly the next zone gets loaded so if you manage to activate an exit zone then you'll go to the underground section what this means is that if you're somehow able to get into this pipe while the game still has the warps unloaded as the exit zone destination the game will send you to the warp zone without playing the long climbing the vine cutscene that it normally does the only known way to do this is by moving mario closer to the right side of the screen the game thinks mario is farther back than he actually is so it loads the exit zone destination from where the screen position is in this case it's the warp zone so players had to figure out how to get mario closer to the right side of the screen for this trick to work you couldn't just run forward since whenever you pass 112 pixels from the left side of the screen the screen automatically starts scrolling blocking mario at that 112 pixel position one of the earliest methods of doing this was worked out in the mid-2000s by tool assisted speedrunners tool-assisted speed runs are a little different from regular speed runs they're not performed in real time by a human but rather somebody goes inside an emulator and manually tells the game which buttons will be pressed on each frame from start to finish in 2004 mana published a tool assisted speed run that showed mario clipping into the wall at the start this pushed mario forward exactly 20 pixels those 20 pixels were just enough to stop on the first pixel of the pipe go down it and be taken to the warp zone any farther than the first pixel of the pipe and the screen would have scrolled too far causing mario to go into the coin cache this wall clip however was essentially impossible for a human to ever pull off which is our main focus of interest here it required jumping in just the right way at just the right angle and then mashing the jump button in just the right way once you're on the wall nobody thought that these inputs could be done back then simply put this method of moving to the right was completely out of the question for a human but another method was found also in 2004. michael f posted a tool-assisted speedrun that confused the game into wrapping mario to the other side of the screen using the vine this method saved about 2 seconds over the standard method of climbing the vine and it was a humanly possible trick however still real time speedrunners didn't use it you see this method of vine warping was considered to be a glitch and for many years because of rules from websites like twin galaxies glitches were discouraged and usually outright banned from humanly played speedruns so the 2000s continued to pass with all speedrunners playing through 4-2 by running through and climbing up the vine but eventually one guy had enough that one guy was andrew g while he had followed the glitches rule set for many years by 2007 andrew decided to ignore it so he began to look at the options he had in 4-2 method 1 the block clip method wasn't humanly possible so he quickly rolled it out method two the vine teleporting glitch did save a couple of seconds but andrew wanted something better 4-2 is such a small stage though was there really anything else he could squeeze out of it but after a while of searching andrew found something that would forever change the way speedrunners played 4-2 this was method 3 the easiest and fastest humanly possible strategy the backwards bump method all right like i mentioned before mario can not naturally move past the 112th pixel from the left side of the screen this is a rom hack of super mario bros that displays how many pixels you are from the left side in the upper right corner where the time usually is see it's locked at 112 pixels but check this out if you run right in front of a wall tap left turn around and then jump while brushing up against the top of it this number moves forward quite a bit meaning that mario has moved forward that many pixels you usually get mario to move forward somewhere between 7 and 10 pixels from doing backwards bumps like this and once again you needed to be 20 pixels further to the right for the wrong work to work at all and the more pixels past 20 you were the more pixels you had to go down the pipe if you managed to get mario to exposition 132 you could go down the first pixel of the pipe if you managed to get them to exposition 133 you could go down the first or second pixel and so on since it was very difficult to immediately stop on the first pixel or the first few pixels andrew wanted to give himself some leeway with his pixel gain so he elected to do three backwards jumps in order to guarantee somewhere between 21 and 30 pixels of gain letting him stop basically anywhere on the pipe that he wanted the puzzle that andrew g then had to figure out was where to do these three backwards jumps look at how long the stage itself is you wouldn't think there's too many different combinations he could try but some jump locations gave smaller bumps than others some involved waiting for piranha plants to move and some were impossible to get if you did others first this was the first three bump method used in april 2007 [Music] notice how he's able to go down the middle of the pipe and the wrong work still works that's because these three bumps were able to push from far past the minimum 20 pixels needed when he returned to the game a bit more than three years later he had a new route brushing down on this section and then the same two pipe jumps as before but finally a year later in december 2011 andrew was able to get some help from another guy weirwindle111 to figure out the ultimate three bump [Music] strategy it was able to get him into the pipe at a 375 instead of a 374 and ultimately ended up saving one frame rule over the previous three bump methods oh yeah you might not know what a frame rule is [Music] because of what runners call the frame rule you can only lose or gain time in increments of 21 frames or approximately 0.35 seconds in super mario bros in every level other than 8-4 this is because at the end of every level the game only checks for completion every 21 frames instead of every frame to quote current world record holder darbian it's as if at the end of every level a bus arrives every 21 frames to bring you to the next level even if you miss the bus by just one frame you still have to wait 20 frames for the next one to arrive sometimes though you'll arrive just before a bus comes and you'll hardly have to wait at all anyway for years this particular three bump method was the fastest method that any runner was attempting to complete 4-2 in a speed run of super mario bros but androgee did know of one potential faster method if done correctly you would go into the pipe at 376 and save a frame rule over the fastest 3-buff method however at the time this was by far the hardest and most random method any runner had ever come up with to complete any stage in super mario bros let alone just 4-2 it would lead to years of resetting speed runs over and over again in 4-2 just to save those .35 seconds ladies and gentlemen i present to you the two-bump method better known as fast 4-2 [Music] if you recall from before you need to get mario to exposition 132 from exposition 112 for the wrong work to work those 20 pixels were possible to obtain from two bumps since you get between 7 and 10 pixels from each backwards bump that you do so if you got 10 pixels from each one then you could be exactly on x position 132 stop on the first pixel of the pipe go down it and be taken to the warp zone doing only two bumps instead of three would save another frame rule over the old three bump method andrew figured out that the two bumps that gave you the greatest chance of getting 10 pixels each were right here you could sort of control how many pixels you got from each bump but not reliably it was so precise that getting 10 pixels was essentially just luck on average you'd get the 20 pixels you needed maybe one in every four tries but that was just the beginning if you happen to make it to exposition 132 you then had to stop on the first pixel of the pipe and go down it if you stopped even a pixel too soon you couldn't go down the pipe if you're a pixel too late you would go down to the coin cache and set it to the warp zone believe me when i say that doing this was ridiculously hard but doing this combined with needing 10 pixels from each of your two bumps nearly impossible and to illustrate just how difficult i'm talking about i'm going to refer to a video from a guy named patrick lemieux lemieux took a stream of hundreds of world record attempts from andrew g and overlaid them on top of each other [Music] whenever an attempt died lemieux simply removed that run from the overlay for the first three levels hundreds of andrew g's were tied with each other to the frame those same androgees entered 4-2 to attempt to fast-forward ash 2. but out of all those hundreds just one made it to the warp zone on fast 4-2 pace whenever a run happened to make it past 4-2 andrew fell silent the voices of 100 andrews that were active just a minute before now didn't say a word [Music] these fast 4-2 attempts continued for months and eventually years andrew g lost at least 95 of his speed runs that made it to 4-2 because he needed to save a third of a second eventually runners stopped trying for fast 4-2 because other easier time saves were found in other levels but by 2016 the world record got back to the point where the fast 4-2 frame rule needed to be saved for a good chance at the world record but runners hated doing 4-2 it was stupidly hard and largely out of your control derby and cosmic d12 andrew g none of these guys really wanted to do fast 4-2 anymore was there anything else they could squeeze out of such a small stage remember before how i mentioned that weirwindl111 helped andrew discover the best three bump method of fast forward s2 well it turns out back in 2011 weirwindle also discovered something [Music] else [Music] using a tas rear window was able to clip partially inside of a block and get pushed forward several pixels runners didn't look into this trick anymore back in 2011 however because it didn't actually push you enough pixels ahead to get the 20 pixels needed only about 17 and the inputs that werewindow was doing required pushing left and right on the controller at the same time which wasn't possible for a human so runners forgot about it for a couple of years but one day in 2016 andrew g realized a couple of things one you didn't actually need to press left and right at the same time to get this to work and two you could just do a bump earlier to make up for the pixels you're short of 20. if you did all this really quickly you would potentially have a few more pixels to go down the pipe and still be taken to the warp zone unfortunately it was really difficult to get enough pixels from this clip while still being fast enough to save the frame world needed to match fast 4-2 so andrew g went back to the drawing board he remembered the old tool-assisted method of clipping into the blocks at the start his attempts at this trick from years in the past nearly universally resulted in him not clipping in and on the extremely rare occasions when he did clip in it was far too slow to match the fast 4-2 frame rule but that had been a long time ago he had gotten a lot better at the game since then so he tried this method again one day in early 2017. oh my gosh wait [Music] holy crap i can't believe it about a hundred thousand more times [Music] holy crap [Music] holy crap unbelievably the once considered impossible task method was now humanly possible if done correctly it could just barely be fast enough to match the fast 4-2 frame rule and while andrew g did find some immediate success with this trick in the long run his success rate with the trick started to go down and no other top level runner cosmic d12 derbian or some west for instance was having any notable success with it so 4-2 still needed some universally agreed upon fastest and best method the block clip and wall clip methods were just a bit too inconsistent and standard fast 4-2 was just ridiculous as well but then in 2017 the ultimate method for 4-2 was found and it came from perhaps an unlikely source this guy's name was xx420 blaze it xx he noticed another old tool-assisted method of clipping into the wall a few blocks above the ground the reason why speedrunners never attempted this was because clipping into a wall in this way almost entirely depends on what mario's subpixel is subpixels are values smaller than the pixel that tell your position on a very precise scale you cannot normally control what your sub pixels are as they rapidly change as you play a level so most people simply ignored this wall clip method but not 420 blaze it you realize that your subpixel values are always the same when you start a level and this wall was right at the start of the level as well and it turned out the subpixels you needed to clip into the wall just so happen to be the same that you started the level with so 420 blaze it ran up to the wall without doing anything else first and jumped into it while tapping left to clip in a couple more quick jumps and boom he was in and pushed forward 20 or more pixels to the right he usually had a few pixels of leeway to still go down the pipe and yes it was fast enough to match fast 4-2 runners were a little skeptical of this method's viability but soon runners like mav6771 were showing it off in practice with great success he could get it one in every few attempts and slowly other world record contenders began to implement it into their runs they realized that this was it a decade and a half of playing 4-2 and this method was able to send them to world 8 in the fastest time with the best consistency and it was all thanks to a guy named 420 blaze it over the course of 14 years the amount of work that speed runners have spent on 4-2 is remarkable game developers designed this level over 30 years ago and i doubt they could have imagined how many people would tear it apart to discover every little jump every possible region that could be exploited to save time every few years something new has been discovered that makes the stage even faster and more consistent and i doubt the journey is done quite yet thanks for watching [Music] hey it's time to plug my twitch again you guys should come follow me at twitch.tv summoningsalt i speedrun stuff there sometimes thanks

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 8,538,447

Rating: 4.8260064 out of 5

Keywords: speedrun, speed run, world record, world record progression, world record history, speedrun history

Id: i1AHCaokqhg

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Superfrick]

That was... that was actually pretty interesting. I was expecting to bounce out early, but the video was put together in a way that kept it interesting for a non speedrunner to enjoy

[u/AlfredHoneyBuns]

Welcome to speed running, where people do spend over a decade trying to find the quickest way through a small stage of a 30 year old game.

Jokes (not really) aside, go check out SummoningSalt’s channel, where he explains the World Record progression of many famous speedruns, including (that he’s done so far) Super Mario Bros 1, SMB3, LoZ, Sonic 2, SM64 and more!

[u/MaximShitcock]

Very cool video a lot more interesting than I thought. Lost it at the end with "All thanks to a guy named 420_blazeit", lol.

[u/Zylexian]

What am I doing with my life. I don't speedrun. I haven't played Mario since I was about 6 and I don't now who any of these people are.

10/10 Video though. Very interesting.

[u/Nentee]

Thank you xx—420–blazit—xx

[u/Spartan_exr]

That was way more interesting than I thought it would be!

[u/Dicethrower]

Well, I just watched a 20minute video on a 23 second section of a mario level, wasn't bored for a second.

[u/parada45]

I have watched all of the videos on here

Really good stuff

[u/TheZixion]

This is how games can instill a "sense of pride and accomplishment"