Mario Kart Speedrunners Break Their Controllers To Set Faster Records

the goal of speedrunning is to go fast with runners commonly using in-game glitches to help them along the way but sometimes external tools and modifications are used to push the limit to its maximum super mario kart is one such game where runners physically alter their controllers so they can perform the boost mechanic without the requirement of a drift today we'll be looking at why the decision was made to allow modified controllers other games that allow hardware mods to help us reach a better understanding and where this may lead other games in the future and if you like life altering decisions you'll definitely want to check out this video's sponsor boxu boxu is a premium snack box subscription service that delivers original assortments of japanese snacks and tea pairings right to your doorstep each month and the best part is every month has a different theme this box is the pink valentine theme and it contains a huge assortment of decadent chocolate and pastry style snacks like 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period in super mario kart history 2005. at this point in time the community had been tracking world records for about six years and things were getting close to the limit that current strats provided during this period one player was dominating the leaderboards corral van duvenboden or kvd for short and his reign was viewed to be almost unbeatable but one player noticed something peculiar joe bernier would be watching runs from other top players and he observed that they were taking long slides when doing their boosts but this was very different from the method he was using when joe wanted to do a boost he would zigzag his cart by pressing left then right on the d-pad which allowed for tighter turns and even the ability to charge a boost on a straight section of track he asked the other players why they drifted this way and after some discussion they attempted to recreate his method with no success except for one person kvd why were kvd and joe able to perform drifts in a different way from everyone else this question perplexed the other runners as well and with some key discussion on the forums it was revealed that they were each using a third-party controller when joe and kvd tested the zigzag method on an official nintendo controller the technique failed to replicate so the community asked why are these controllers able to perform zigzag boosts if we look at how you perform a boost on an official controller an answer will start to materialize to charge a boost you need to do three things enter into a drift by pressing and holding the l or r shoulder button hold down the b button to keep accelerating and hold right or left on the d-pad once the boost is charged all you need to do is countersteer and release the shoulder button to activate it with your top speed getting increased for a short time if you try and do the zigzag method on an official controller you will lose your boost charge and if we look at the function that governs how boosts work we will find out why the assembly language may look intimidating but what's going on here is no different from what i said above you need to hold b a shoulder button and a direction but this line in particular should turn on the light bulb if left or right are not being held on the d-pad the boost charge will reset to zero since when you switch from pressing one direction to another there's a period of time when no direction is being held due to a bump on the back of the d-pad itself that prohibits holding two opposite directions at the same time so what was happening with the third-party controllers that kvd and joe were using these controllers didn't have the bump on the back of the d-pad so when switching from left to right it was possible to keep the opposite button held down until the other was pressed which didn't trigger the code to reset the boost that explanation wasn't available to the community back in 2005 since the source code for smk didn't leak until recently instead it was proven by former top player kart7 she decided to open a controller and file down the bump on the back and once reconstructed she fired up the game and sure enough the zigzag method worked this was the birth of what the community called the pro nbt controller with nbt standing for new boost technique but it didn't come without controversy when it was first discovered the site runner and godfather of the smk community sami chetten made the decision to allow kvd and joe's controllers since they were hardware that anyone could purchase and use in the game this caused some unrest but when kart 7 proved that an official controller was able to zigzag with modification things went off the rails players divided into two camps and a vote was held with the pro nbt players arguing that this was a good thing for several reasons the strat was built into the game it leveled the playing field since anyone could do this without buying a new controller it wasn't hard to alter the d-pad players aren't altering the circuitry and records could progress past the current level of optimization the players against weren't convinced by these points and argued the following this wasn't how the game was intended to be played modifying controllers puts this strat into the territory of a glitch and players shouldn't be forced to alter their controllers just to be competitive at a high level but there was one more point that needed to be considered and that was players from brazil reporting that they could perform the zigzag boosts without modifying their controller to be pro mbt when they opened them up to see what was going on the bump on the d-pad had worn down from natural play allowing the technique without the need to file it down yourself this meant that over time d-pads would allow the technique due to natural wear and when it was put to a vote the use of pro-mbt controllers would be permitted but a section of the community was so against this decision that they stopped playing altogether for those that remained a new era of karting was born and the community emerged from a period of stagnation to one where new records are still being set to this day ultimately cart 7's discovery made the advanced technique possible for everyone but was this the right decision or did it cross the line for a non-glitch category to understand that we need to look at other games and how they handle controller modification and there's no better place to start than one of the most popular speed games on the planet super mario 64. sm 64 has a huge speed run following and was almost solely responsible for bringing speedrunning to a larger gaming audience back in 2012 it may come as some surprise that official nintendo controllers aren't mandatory for running in fact they not only allow the use of third-party controllers but you're also allowed to remap buttons there are some restrictions pressing up on the analog stick cannot also be mapped to the a button as it would allow for situations for strats to be performed that aren't possible with a standard controller such as this moment from pace this was a race between four legends of sm-64 siglemik pulled out a smashbox controller that allowed him to do a technique that is otherwise impossible since he had the up on the stick also mapped to a button on the box since this wasn't being submitted to the leaderboard it was allowed under the rules of the race but these types of strats aren't permitted in leaderboard play but there is an interesting case that is controller swapping you are allowed to swap controllers in sm64 provided that the controllers you're swapping share the same button mapping so you couldn't swap from a standard controller setting to one that has the a and b buttons reversed under this rule it's common for players to switch to a hori mini pad exclusively for bowser throws as it offers more consistent performance when lining up bowser with a bomb that's the only situation where it's used however as the hoary minipad has disadvantages with normal gameplay that a standard controller doesn't like smk the controller swap in mario 64 is permitted because it offers consistency with a strategy and despite not using the third party controllers to use a glitch i think it offers some insight on the consistency factor with regular mechanics but the next game does allow a glitch and it's become a staple of high level play perhaps the most notable game that allows heavy modification of controllers is melee going so far as to allow additional capacitors to be soldered onto the board of the controller the reasons for these customizations have a lot of depth and they fall into two categories mods to avoid controller degradation and mods that make mechanics more consistent if we look at the first category one of the big reasons for modifications is because gamecube controllers have a lot of variants out of the box with joystick calibration and spring tension in the triggers being inconsistent between controllers but perhaps the biggest issue is snapback snapback occurs when a joystick is released and has so much rebound that it will cross the directional threshold and point your character in the opposite direction of where you intended it to face to fix this problem players have soldered capacitors onto the motherboard of the controller that stops this type of hardware malfunction from occurring this isn't the only modification done to improve consistency the springs inside of the triggers will often get shortened to decrease the amount of pressure required to press them down as well on the other side of the coin there are mods that make doing certain advanced mechanics a lot easier which come in the form of special notches that players carve around the joystick and there are two cases that notches are commonly used for that i'd like to highlight wave dashing and firefox angles perhaps one of the most important skills for playing at a high level the wave dash is actually a physics exploit that occurs when you try to air dodge diagonally into the ground if you time your dodge correctly the vertical movement of the character will transfer into horizontal movement that causes you to slide along the floor wave dashing allows for some very interesting options in combat and has become a staple to high level play offering a huge amount of depth to the game that's no doubt played a role in its longevity as a mainstay fighting game but it's not the easiest technique to perform on a regular controller as the movement is very intricate so let's look at what the modified controller offers with the addition of special notches the inputs to perform a wave dash become a lot easier as you're no longer estimating the angles when moving the stick and when it comes to firefox the notches help to hit very precise angles without the risk of falling off the stage or going somewhere you don't want to bottom line they increase consistency so are either of these glitches firefox clearly isn't an exploit or glitch since it's a special ability designed to be used in this way but what about wave dashing it turns out that the development team were aware of wave dashing or at least the physics exploit that allows it as sakurai acknowledges it in nintendo power 228 he doesn't say why it was left in or how much the dev team explored it but does say they took it out of brawl due to the skill cap it created between beginners and advanced players and if we compare this case to super mario kart we may see some commonalities i don't know how to perform this analysis without angering some people so please sound off down in the comments and the first thing i'd like to do is consider whether these two mechanics fall under the umbrella of glitches and exploits to call each of these a glitch or exploit may be a fair label to apply as in the case of smk it's clear that it wasn't intended since the official controller can't perform it without modification and with melee it's not something the developers intended but was a byproduct of how the physics engine handles momentum i think it's clear that neither of these were intended to be methods of play and if you pulled up a design document i'm sure you won't see wave dashing or l plus r boosting outlined for a programmer to implement but their impact on the game is perhaps a better determining factor for assessing whether they should be legal or banned in the case of smk the zigzag boost allowed players to push records past the current level of optimization as it was becoming clear that with the current strats in 2005 the playing field was starting to stagnate while the zigzag boost did yield better results they didn't happen overnight and follow what looks to be a natural progression taking about five years for times to drop by more than a second for most tracks allowing the zigzag boost was a way to breathe new life into the community and a lot of the players involved in that decision are still around setting records to this day and if you ask them why they've kept playing it's always attributed to the zigzag boosting technique despite it not being a speedrun game i think the decisions that the early melee community made parallel the situation in smk as both have an unintended technique being made easier through controller modification that gives players more options when playing at the highest level by allowing these strats it's only natural to permit controller mods that make them more consistent just like in super mario 64 where players are allowed to swap controllers you can see the results for allowing these strats reflected in the meta for both games as they're a must use strategy for competition to this day and while i do understand that a section of players see any form of controller modification as cheating sometimes things need to be done for the overall health of the game if you choose to ban these techniques there is still a chance they could happen in normal gameplay accidentally and while you may say that even an accident should be a disqualification that would cause a lot of problems in head-to-head play as players would then be losing matches for things they didn't intend to do and have little control over i think that's a bad place for a game to be in because you would then have players arguing about whether the use of a mechanic was accidental or intentional with no clear way of discerning what the intent was it's a situation that's better solved by allowing their use in competition it's worth noting that these controller modifications don't do anything additional for the player they're still required to do the inputs unlike a turbo controller that simulates button pushes at a set frame rate for super mario kart it's also worth considering what would have happened to the world record set using the third party controllers prior to the vote if it would have gone the other way there's always the argument that they should have went into a new category and that's actually what the community did with two leaderboards being established the non-zigzag leaderboard was maintained in parallel with the pro nbt board but in recent years activity has fallen off and it now only receives updates every few months the pro zigzag leaderboard is still going strong with updates coming every week so it's clear which rule set was more popular for the community overall if you disagree or have another point of view you'd like to share please let me know down below as these certainly aren't the only instances of modified controllers in high level gaming but there's one more thing to consider what does this mean for the future some of you may know that super mario bros is approaching the limit of what's possible for a human to achieve with current strats but there is one strategy that could lower the time currently the leaderboard bans pressing left and right at the same time disqualifying controllers that allow for this functionality but there is a fast acceleration strategy that can save frames if you can press left and right at the same time currently it's only used in task runs of the game but i think once the perfect run is achieved you may see people start to ask if the rule banning l plus r can be removed or at the very least if a new category that allows it can be made i'm interested in hearing your thoughts down below there's one more thing left to cover i've launched a channel for shorts that will have 30 to 60 second explanations for glitches tricks and general speedrun and gaming information i'll be uploading content to it regularly and there's already a video up going over the exploit that forced from software to take down the dark souls pvp servers i hope you enjoyed this look at some of the big decisions concerning controller modifications in gaming and if you liked the video check out my patreon where i'm posting exclusive content as well as giving updates on current projects and be sure to join the discord thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Abyssoft

Views: 1,035,786

Keywords: smk, abyssoft, abyss, gaming, super mario kart, super mario 64, n64, sm64, speedrun, melee, gamecube, ssbm, leffen, modded controller, controller mod, capacitor, solder, notches, notched, speedrunning, world record, nintendo, snes, shorts

Id: 1-3aU9Vm0h0

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022