In Super Mario 64, there’s a star in Cool, Cool
Mountain that goes as follows. You enter the cabin at the top of the mountain, go all the way down
the slide, and then exit from the cabin at the bottom of the mountain. And that spawns the star
for you to collect. But something everyone always tries is going back into the door. Though as you
find out, that doesn’t work. And let me tell you, as a kid, I really wanted to get back in there.
I mean, we were just in there, but the idea of a door that you can’t open from this side
just made me want to open that much more.
And let me clarify something. For most doors in
the game, opening them just takes you from one side of the door to the other. And so if you
clip through the door, like by getting pushed by an object, then you can bypass the door.
But some doors are special, because opening them unloads the current area and warps you to a
new area. If you clip through this kind of door, you don’t actually go to the new area. Instead,
you just end up in a sort of fake area behind the door. In other words, the only way to load the
new area is to literally open the door, because that triggers the transition between areas. Now
the door in Cool, Cool Mountain is the kind that loads a new area. See, opening it unloads
the slide area and loads the outside area.
Now, since there are two different areas involved,
there are two different door objects involved. There’s one door in the slide area that warps you
outside. Everyone’s opened that door before. And there’s one door that’s outside that warps
you back into the slide. But no one’s ever opened that door before. So to emphasize,
this is actually a fully functional door, despite that it was given a special model
that doesn’t have a doorknob on the outside.
So the reason you can’t open the door from the
outside is NOT because the door doesn’t work, but simply because the cabin wall blocks you
from getting close enough to the door to open it. As you can see on the right, the wall
triangles cover the whole side of the cabin, without any opening for the door. But if the walls
were gone, as I’ve done here with hacks, then we could get close enough to the door to open it
and re-enter the cabin. That raises the question, can we open the door without any hacks?
Well, going back to the door, let’s look at it from above. Here are the floor triangles
around the cabin. Note that there are no floor triangles inside the cabin. Here’s the door’s
hitbox. So if Mario walks into that hitbox, he opens the door. And to emphasize, he must be
walking to open the door. No other action works. And then here’s the cabin wall, and its hitbox. If
Mario enters that hitbox, he gets pushed south.
So the door’s hitbox basically
has 2 parts to it. The south part, that’s inside the wall hitbox. And the north
part, that’s not inside the wall hitbox, but it’s in the air. Remember, for Mario
to open the door, he has to walk into the door hitbox. But that’s seemingly impossible for
both parts of the hitbox, for different reasons.
For the south part of the hitbox,
if Mario tries to walk into it, the wall pushes him away to the south. This
wall push happens every time he moves forwards, and so he’s not able to be inside the door’s
hitbox when the game checks if he’s touching it.
And for the north part of the hitbox,
it is possible to get there. See, we can deliver the baby penguin to the mother
penguin, and then regrab the baby penguin to make the mother penguin get mad at us and follow
us around. And the mother penguin has a hitbox that pushes Mario outwards. So we can use the
mother penguin’s hitbox to push Mario through the cabin wall and into the door hitbox. But even
though he touches the north part of the hitbox, he still doesn’t open the door, because he’s
in freefall, not in the walking action.
So the door seems impossible to open.
And that’s what everyone believed for 28 years. Until April 22nd, 2024, when
Alex Palix posted this video on discord. He had found a way to do it! But how does
it work? Well, we already knew you could use the mother penguin to clip behind the wall.
But of course, since there’s no floor there, that puts Mario into freefall, and you can’t
open doors in freefall, only when walking.
So to solve this, Alex Palix did a turn
around. See, there’s an interesting thing about the turning around action, which I’ve
explained in a previous video, and that’s what actually gave Alex the idea to use it to
open the cabin door. But I’ll explain it again now. So when Mario turns around, he goes into
the turning around action. And then a bit later, he transitions into the walking action,
because he finished turning around.
Here’s the code for the turning around action, and
here’s the relevant logic. So when Mario finishes turning around, he goes into the walking action.
But a bit earlier, we have the code that handles his movement. This one says, if Mario leaves
the ground, put him into the freefall action. So the issue is that the programmers never expected
these two conditions to happen on the same frame.
If they do, then the logic goes like
this. First, Mario left the ground, so he goes into the freefall action. And
then second, Mario finished turning around, and so he goes into the walking action. So
that first action change gets overwritten by the second action change. And so even though
Mario left the ground, he still ends up in the walking action. Now this exploit by itself just
results in one frame of walking in midair before transitioning to freefall on the next frame.
But that one frame of walking in the air is all we needed, and that was enough to open the
door. Let’s play it again. On this frame, the mother penguin’s hitbox pushes Mario through
the wall and into the air. And also on that frame, Mario finished turning around. So first his
action got set to freefall, and then his action got set to walking. And since he’s now walking
inside the door’s hitbox, he opens the door.
And you’ll notice that Mario downwarps to
the death barrier when he opens the door, because Mario’s programmed to snap to the floor
every frame when he’s in the door-opening action. But fortunately, the death barrier doesn’t kill
him, because it has no effect when Mario’s in a cutscene action, like opening a door.
Now one question that this brings up is does this technique save time in a run? After
all, if we can enter the cabin at the bottom, then we can just exit from there and
get the star, skipping the whole slide.
So let’s do a side-by-side comparison. On the
left, I’m showing the current strat for the star, which involves entering the cabin at the
top of the level, going all the way down, and then exiting from the cabin at the bottom
of the level to get the star. And on the right, I’m showing the potential new strat for the star,
which involves going into the cabin at the bottom of the level, and then immediately exiting
to get the star. But even in this new strat, we still have to spend time going to the bottom
of the course. And then there’s the whole process of interacting with the mother penguin and
luring her into place. And interestingly, triggering the star this way actually messes
up the camera during the star’s cutscene, though that doesn’t cause any trouble.
And so in conclusion, even though we can use this technique to skip the whole slide, it
doesn’t actually save any time. But regardless, it is pretty cool that Super Mario 64’s
unopenable door has now finally been opened!
And now, for this video’s member event.
In case you missed it from my last video, all my regular videos from now on are gonna
have a member event at the end, where all the member names participate in the event Now last
time, there were only 13 members. But this time, let’s just say we have quite a few more. Over
200! So thanks everyone, it really does mean a lot to me that you guys are so willing to support
me! And if all goes well, this can become my full time job! So if you’re not a member and you
want to get in on the action, you can click on the join button below the video or the link in
the description. It’s sort of like subscribing to someone on Twitch, where you pay them a
little money each month. The lowest tier is $5, but you can pay a little more to get more perks,
like a colored name, a gradient name, a moving gradient name, or for me to call out your name.
And like I said, each member event will be different. This time, I turned everyone into
3D marbles. So welcome everyone. Glad you could make it. Haven’t seen you in a while.
Hey, nice to meet you. Yo what’s up? How’s your life been going? Long time no see.
Now the rules are simple. You guys are all gonna be rolling down the slide. If
you fall off the slide, you die. Also, the shortcut is off limits. And so basically, the
first person to cross the finish line wins. So, does everybody understand the rules?
You my good sir. Mr. uh Lunarcomplex. May I call you Lunar? Errr! Okay, Mr. Complex.
Do you understand the rules? Yeah sorry, I was just still thinkin’ about the door, it
was pretty cool. Oh okay, I’ll keep that in mind. But let’s try our best in the race, okay?
And so without any further ado, let’s begin!
Okay, off to a good start. In the back,
there’s a mad dash to get out of the cabin, and squeeze through that tiny opening. But it
looks like everybody made it onto the slide. Oof, we already lost our first person, OwlBag.
And there goes another one! Man, you guys are ruthless! Is winning really worth pushing your
fellow competitors off the edge? Yes, yes it is. And now the first turn of the slide. You guys are
doing pretty good so far, no casualties. Uh! There they go. We lost Shanna, Eric Vilas, Mangomens.
It’s just pure mayhem on this turn! We also lost Chrixiam1998 and hollow220. And remember, that
was just the first turn, there’s way more turns to come on the slide. Now we’ve lost Kyle Fluharty,
Kaydax, Cubik, Hannah, Chillaxel, Shaun Glaze, Lugmillord, Rage Man, SomeKindOfTaco, and Fat
Goomba. Man, there is some aggression going on at the back of the group. I mean I know you
guys want to win, but can’t you have a little more decorum like the front of the group? It’s
like ripples of collision propagating backwards. Now we’ve lost thebroz. I guess you guys weren’t
his bro. And there goes Chase T. Now a couple more turns coming up. Can you guys handle it? Let’s
see. Uh! Pushing each other off on the far side of the slide. And now we’ve lost Valton Zenola.
Gone, but not forgotten. But forget about them, we’re on the final stretch of the slide. Down
to the elite few. And now the even eliter few. Now this part of the slide is pretty straight,
so it seems like you guys are maintaining an uneasy truce to not push each other off, despite
ramming into each other at every opportunity. Uh! We’re losing some more people at this little turn.
And we’re even losing some people on the straight part. Come on guys, just last a little bit longer
and you’ll make it into the tunnel. Just a few more turns. And now we’ve lost Hot Joe! Not Hot
Joe! He was so hot, he melted the ice and slipped off. A few more casualties on that last turn, but
we’re finally in the tunnel. So congrats to our 6 finalists: Cameron Cookl, Hum4n1ty, Midnight
posting, movezig5, Protectator, Scarristo. And lastly, the ice bridge. Can they all make it
across? Uh! We lost Hum4n1ty. And for the other 5, they all made it! But who got first? Well, if we
check the instant replay, we can see that Midnight posting was the first to cross the finish line!
So, congrats to our first place finisher, Midnight posting. And good job to the other people
who also made it to the end. And everyone else will be ranked by how long they lasted in the race
before dying. So yeah, that’s what a member event is like. So if you want to get in on the next one,
consider becoming a member of my channel. Like, I know other YouTubers will take sponsorships and
talk about how a company’s product revolutionized their life, or something like that. And I’m not
hating on them, but that just doesn’t feel like me. Like, I don’t use many products, and of the
ones I do use, I’m not like super passionate about them. So I really don’t want to have to
pretend to like some product to get you to buy it just so I can make money. Plus, what if I did
back a company, and then it turned out they were doing some shady business practices or something?
I don’t want to be associated with that. I don’t wanna stake my reputation on some thing that
I have no control over. And so that’s why I like these member events. It’s like the perfect
alternative that feels right for me. You guys get to pay to be in the video and participate in
the event. And I get to express my creativity by putting you guys into interesting scenarios
in the game. So yeah, that’s why I’m glad I came up with this idea of member events. But
let me know what you think in the comments.
And one more thing. Mr. Lunarcomplex, I’ve been
thinking about what you said, and you did try your best in the race, so I have an idea that I think
you’ll adore! Yo, I’m the doorknob on the door!
