Super Mario 64 Tool-assisted speedrun world record explained

[Music] Super Mario 64 is one of the most iconic video games of all time with Princess peas trapped inside her own castle Mario needs to collect seventy out of the 120 power stars to take down Bowser's barriers in defeat King Koopa over the years clever players discovered that there are ways to take down these barriers other than collecting all those stars here's how a team of dedicated tool assisted speed owners managed to find a way to beat Super Mario 64 in four minutes and 20 seconds before we go on if you don't know what a tool-assisted speedrun is please watch the suggested video in the upper right corner it will cover all the basic things you should know before understanding this speedrun okay so first why does Mario go over to the water instead of entering the castle the answer is the result of two decades of optimization the castle is divided in three levels the ground level the basement and upstairs to progress to a new section of the castle you need to get a key by fighting Bowser in the previous section the basement key is found behind a starter that requires eight stars to open to go upstairs you need to get a second key from Bowser this time after getting thirty stars to open the door plus one extra to unlock the level you then need to collect 50 stars to open another star door and to reach the final Bowser fight you need to collect 70 stars otherwise the door was to let you in but the staircase leading to the final Bowser stage will be infinite at first the fastest known way to beat the game was to collect 70 stars in both keys but it was discovered that he could skip the 50 and suddenly star door requirements using a trick we'll get to you in a minute this meant that the fastest way now involved getting 31 stars to get the second key and skipping the upstairs section entirely it was then found that you could bypass a 30 star door using nips a rabbit which appears after you've collected 15 stars so the requirement went down to 16 next it was found that you could skip the eight star door and get the first key with zero stars but it didn't help that much since she still needed 15 permits to appear until a new trick was found that lets you skip the 30 star door without nip switch lower the star requirement to 1 later a variation of this trick lets you skip both the 30 star door and the dire dire docks and the requirement was brought down to zero because these three castle levels are in separate Maps entirely there was little hope for any major improvement on the speedrun route but it turns out that there is another way to the basement the moat door this underwater door leads directly into the basement of the castle so if Mario manages to enter at this door from the outside he will enter the basement without a key and without any stars the caveat is that mario can't open doors on their water to make this door accessible the water needs to be drained from the inside first which means the basement can't be accessed right away however there is a way to open the door under water and this is what we're gonna see here let's look at this step by step mario does a long jump but immediately reverses his direction to go backwards this sets up a trick called backwards long jump nor blj for short when mario alone jumps backwards the game gives him a little bit of extra speed at the start of his jump how much extra speed well only half of his current negative speed - little bit of speed loss for the time he was on the ground as you can see mario quickly loses that speed and returns to about negative 15 speed by the way here's a sense of scale one unit of speed means that mario will travel one unit of distance in one frame this is one unit of distance which is roughly equivalent to about one centimeter a ceiling at mario is human sized in this case mario moving at negative 15 speed means that he will travel by 15 units backwards on each frame however if mario was able to land immediately after jumping he can long jump again and get another small bit of speed this time half of negative 23 speeds so he gets to negative 33 if he does it again he gets half of negative 33 this time which brings him up to negative 49 speed this quickly spirals out of control as each consecutive jump multiplies his backward speed by 1.5 - a negligible speed loss after a while Mario speed is so large that he reaches the vanished cap on their denote entrance in a single frame you might have noticed the four pauses here this is called pause buffering and it can be helpful while doing a blj since super mario 64 runs at 30 frames per second the fastest a button can be pressed is 15 times per second when pausing the game Mario's universe in its physics stopped advancing in time but the game still registers buttons being pressed or released here's what happens Mario jumps and the game is paused at the same time there is one frame needed to really start and then one frame - press it again on the next frame the game is still paused and you can use it to really start on the frame after the game is unpause then you can jump in pause again this is what it looks like with the pausing time removed as you can see Mario is able to jump 30 times per second according to the game's physics without actually pressing the a button that fast this helps generate all the speed required for this trick in the tight space it can be performed in at the cost of a little bit of time spent pausing the game you might also noticed how mario seems stuck in place towards the end of his blj this is because at this point the bridge is preventing him from moving inside of it however by the time he gains enough speed to break out of this pot he has way more than enough to overshoot the bridge in a single frame so why doesn't he break out of it sooner the reason is pretty simple when processing Mario's movement the game subdivides the movement in four steps which we'll call quarter steps as mario is moving the game checks if there's an obstacle on each quarter step of his movement as long as nothing is in the way mario will keep being moved on each quarter step however if he's about to move into his healing the quarter step will be cancelled and he will stay in place in other words if mario is about to move into a ceiling he will be moved up to the last valid quarter step of his movement here's an example on the first quarter step the game is trying to put Mario inside the ceiling that makes up the underside of the bridge because Mario can't be inside of a ceiling the game cancels his movement for that quarter step the same process happens again on the second on the third and under fourth-quarter steps at the end of the frame although mario has negative 1,800 speed he ended up not moving at all but this interaction doesn't change his speed on the next frame even though he has negative 2,700 speed now the same problem occurs each quarter step the game attempts to move him into the ceiling which it can't so mario stays in place this means that to break out of this part of this angle mario needs to have enough speed so that his first quarter step is past the bridge which means he needs to have enough speed to cover four times that distance in a single frame another way to break out of this spot is to change his angle until it doesn't put him into a ceiling or in this case to jump down into the moat finally you may wonder how Mario got from all the way up here to all the way down here in a single frame using a jump first because mario has negative 6150 speed by now he's able to cross that distance in a single frame horizontally but what about vertically how can a jump make Mario move down by nearly 1500 units in a single frame well to answer that let's look at how Mario jumps when you press a the game will make Mario jump that jump gives Mario an initial vertical speed and gravity subtracts for speed on each subsequent frame until Mario lands or until he reaches his terminal velocity of 75 units downwards this initial speed varies depending on a type of jump for a single jump like the one used here the initial speed is a constant value of 42 plus 1/4 of his horizontal speed for a double jump that constant is 52 instead this means that the faster Mario's moving the higher he jumps by a small amount however this formula also applies if Mario's horizontal speed is negative if mario has negative speed then his initial jump speed will be lower than 42 if mario has enough negative speed his jumps will also have negative speed this is called a negative jump in this case Mario's initial jump speed is 42 plus negative 6150 4 divided by 4 or negative 1497 this negative vertical speed means that his quarter step movement puts him under the bridge instead of inside of it so Mario moves unobstructed for the full duration of the frame this puts him right on the loading someone that leads to vanish gap on the demote which is normally only accessible when the water has been drained at this point since Mario's underwater something shall happen on the next frame at the start of each frame before Mario starts moving the game checks if he's colliding with anything like walls water or enemies once the game detects if he has entered water it will attempt to place him at the surface in a swimming State however the game handles the interaction with a loading trigger before the interaction with water so the loading zone is triggered first and Mario who never gets to enter water [Music] here Mario should have taken damage from this long fall but thanks to hitting this wall he reset the falling distance and avoids taking damage you may think that the movement that led us here wasn't quite optimal and in fact you would be correct but because this next blj requires the elevator platform to be in a specific spot all that matters is that we get there on time the reason why I was able to start another blg on the elevator is because the game doesn't consider the momentum of a platform mario is on when he jumps long jumping from a platform moving upwards has interesting results Mario will start moving up but so will the platform after a frame mario moved up less and the platform hat so he stopped back up on the platform's floor and he lands from his jump immediately these are the perfect conditions for a blj to happen behind this wall is out-of-bounds so when creative speed the game is trying to move Mario into a place that is out-of-bounds this works mostly the same way as moving it to a ceiling so Mario is kept in place while he keeps building up speed here the game is pause to change camera settings you can press R to switch between two camera modes Mackie the cam and Mario cam changing the camera setting enables you to replace Mario cam with fixed cam which will hold the camera in place while it stays focused on Mario as long as you hold the R button the reason for this change will make more sense soon the reason why this couldn't be done during pause buffering at blj is because for the exit course and camera options to be available the game needs to be paused while Mario is in the level and while he's doing one of thirty-nine specific actions and long jumping is not one of them now what happens here while this blj was much longer than the first one if you thought negative 6150 for speed was a lot hold on to something because you're not ready for this here Mario keeps building up speed until it reaches negative 3.4 million with that amount of speed he's actually able to move somewhere I won't explain where exactly just yet but don't worry for now let's just say Mario is very very far away in fact he's three million units away or about 168 times the size of the map what matters here is that the elevator Mario was on just one frame earlier has started rotating because of an oversight in the game's code under specific conditions rotating platforms can affect Mario for one extra frame after he's no longer on them now a platform rotating by 2.8 degrees usually has no noticeable impact but magnify it over 3 million units of distance and suddenly those two point eight degrees definitely matter in fact they matter so much that in one frame mario instantly gets walked below to death barrier which in this stage doesn't kill him but instead kicks him back out into the castle ground specifically here the reason why this is useful is that Mario speed has two components a horizontal speed and a sliding speed the horizontal speed is used for most movement and the sliding speed is used when sliding both speeds are set in the same value most of the time but some scenarios real update Mario's horizontal speed without a taping his sliding speed being on the water is one of those scenarios therefore while Mario is swimming around he keeps whatever sliding speed he had entering the water which in this case is two million nine hundred sixty five thousand seven hundred and twelve and this is where the magic happens okay so how does this part work to answer that we need to talk about overflow jumps oh and parallel universes in Super Mario 64 Mario's position can be in any area of 3d space however when the game checks to see if Mario has a floor under him it converts that position into an integer that can range from negative 32,768 to positive 32767 if Mario's position is beyond this range then this conversion overflows and loops back around which means that Mario's real position and this floor detection position become disjointed if Mario's floor detection position happens to be in a place where there's ground to stand on then he can stand on that ground so for all intents and purposes there is a copy of the map on each multiple of 65,536 units that Mario can sort of interact with I say sort of because only the floor detection is handled this way so there are no walls objects or textures out there these incomplete copies of the map are called parallel universes or be use for short this is a two scale diagram of parallel universes as you can see most of the space is out of bounds and so it cannot be accessed this means that navigating D use Bart is a very specific speed in order to actually work but remember when attempting to move Mario the game divides his movement into four quarters steps for Mario to actually move into a BU he needs to have a large enough speed that even the first quarter step is in FPU which means he needs to be able to move up to a multiple of four P use over the speed required to perform a PU movement is called the syncing speed small deviations to the syncing speed and angle will still give Mario to the PU but they will also move him relatively to the main map now remember what happens if Mario's position is valid after one quarter step what becomes invalid after the next one he is moved up to but not beyond the last valid quarter step of his movement this means that if the first quarter steps of Mario's movement lined up with the PU but at some point they stopped lining up Mario will end up moving into a PU but not by a multiple of four so with this in mind where did Mario end up when he was three million units away in the vanished app course well it turns out that he was in a parallel universe Mario ends up here thirty two peas away in each direction but his floor detention position which will call his relative position from now on barely moved since the game still detects him as being on the elevator he can stand where he is for one frame before the game that takes out he's too far for the platform to be solid thankfully Mario only needs to be on the PU elevator for that one frame at this point the elevator starts rotating in the two point eight degree rotation is applied over a distance of 32 P use warping Mario down under the death barrier which triggers immediately and kicks him out of the stage so now with two point nine million speed up his sleeve Mario is ready to embark on his magical journey into parallel universes let's go through it step by step to understand what happens in Hawaii unfortunately like I said earlier the camera is set to fixed that is because a Nintendo 64 console crashes if the camera tries to follow Mario in qpu fixing the camera onto the main map gets around this limitation which allows to run to be played back on a real console with no issues so to help visualizing everything we'll use four different screens the actual view which won't be very useful because the camera is fixed the relative view which will follow Mario while making P use visible using a camera hat the relative map which will show where Mario's relative position is or in other words where - location inside of the TU relights on a map and finally the PU map which shows where Mario actually is on a map that spans PU distances the PU map is intentionally not the scale to make it easier to see so the first movement we see is Mario going 3 P use up into the right followed by another movement of TP use down and 11 to the right at this point his relative position is on the beach next to the cannon but he's actually about 1 million units away from the main map from there Mario pivots in place to adjust his angle and prepare for his next move here Mario jumps this has two major effects the first one is actually quite simple when moving at high speeds Mario's single in double jumps slowed him down by 20% this means that if he has a horizontal speed of 100 and he jumps he will lose 1/5 of that speed and continue with 80 speed here he goes from 2.9 million to 2.3 million but the principle is the same the second effect is a bit trickier remember the negative jump from earlier well the same principle applies here with a high negative speed jumping causes Mario to move down instead of up however we're not talking about negative 6000 speed here but negative 2.9 million what happens is that Mario inherits one quarter of that ludicrous speed or seven hundred and thirty six thousand speed headed down this is more than enough to reach a parallel universe but this time vertically so what happens when Mario enters a vertical parallel universe or vpu well it turns out things behave a bit differently here when Mario's next quarter step position is in a TP you again the game converts his vertical position which we'll call his wife position into a number between negative thirty two thousand and thirty-two thousand and it overflows just like for horizontal key use then it tries to find the closest floor below Mario one thing to note is that Mario's exact coordinates are calculated at a point between his feet so his Y position is at the bottom of Mario's model to make it so Mario could climb stairs and go up slopes this floor check actually starts seventy-eight units about Mario's y position once the game found the highest floor that meets this condition it compares the floors height with Mario's Y position but this time Mario's real y-position is used not his relative position obviously Mario's real white position is below the floor even if his relative position is above it when the game runs into this scenario it's usually because the floor is between Mario's position and the point 78 units above it which means if he's going up a slope or a flight of stairs so the game simply snaps Mario's Y position up to master Force position since the force position is within the real map Mario is instantly snapped out of the dpu back onto the horizontal pu grid this is called an overflow jump it all happens inside of a single frame so there's no moment where Mario is inside of the GPU in fact it always happens inside of a single quarter step because for a jump to overflow into a vbe the speed needs to be large enough to reach it in a single quarter step and upon colliding with the ground Mario's movement is automatically interrupted for that frame this is exactly what happens here on this frame mario has negative two million six hundred and forty eight thousand speed in the x-direction and 1 million 287,000 speed in the Z direction or 40 P and speed in the negative x-direction and 20 pu speed in the z direction after losing 20 percent of the speed he goes down to 32 P use B to the left and 16 P to speed down this allows him to perform an overflow jump and move by 1/4 step which is 8 P use to the left and 4 P use down the final part of this entire trick is moving to the moat Dorner now mario is able to open the moat door if he walks into it unfortunately the water in the moat extends well into the castle so he can't just come at it from the height however if mario manages to walk outside of water and on the next frame walking to the door under water the interaction with the door will take priority over the underwater check the only way this can be done is by coming in through a parallel universe this would be simple if it wasn't for a couple of hurdles first Mario needs to be actually walking for the door interaction to happen when going at these speeds this can be a bit tricky when Mario moves between P use he'll start walking only if his next position happens to be where a floor is close enough to him if the floors below him Mario will start falling instead fortunately the moat floor is large and flat so this doesn't pose a much of a problem the second hurdle is a bit more complex in short while Mario is walking with P to speed if he doesn't complete all four quarter steps of his movement without encountering any collision the game will crash due to an overflow error here unfortunately Mario speed and position don't work out for this to be possible in fact because Mario is at position 390,000 on the x-axis and 194,000 on the z axis and his speed is negative 1.5 million on the x axis and negative 780,000 on the z axis he needs to move for a single quarter step to line up with the original map which would cause the game to crash thankfully there is a clever workaround if instead the stick is left completely neutral Mario will also start walking and the conditions that caused a crash are reversed now the game will crash only if Mario does complete all four quarters steps without encountering any collision this means that Mario can move for a single quarter step without crashing the game however since the stick is in a neutral position it's impossible to change your angle at the same time this poses an interesting problem usually navigating between T use is done by having an invalid angle until your speed decreases to the exact value you want at which point Mario pivots into the correct angle for his next intended position to be valid however in this case you can't spirit mire into position because the stick needs to be neutral the only thing that can be changed between two frames is Mario's speed when the stick is neutral Mario loses about one unit of speed per frame which is extremely small so for this strategy to work this incredibly unlikely scenario needs to happen Mario needs to have an angle so that his back is facing towards the door while being inside of the PU his first quarter step position needs to be in the ceiling or out of bounds so that he cannot move into it on the next frame because his feet changed by about one unit his new first quarter step position now needs to be in a valid spot so that he can now move into it therefore on the first frame Mario's first quarter step position needs to be at a point that is out of bounds but that is within one quarter of a unit of a point that is not only in bounds but also within this radius of the moat door such a scenario cannot possibly happen right well it turns out it can happen it doesn't look like it but there is a tiny gap between the inside and the outside of the mode or where there is no ground to stand on so it is considered to be out of balance the walls have hit boxes that fill most of that gap but because there's no inside wall here the black space is out of bounds by very carefully manipulating Mario's speed angle and position he can be going towards a point out of bounds on one frame and inbounds on the next but just how precise is that trick this trick is so incredibly precise that simple control stick inputs are way too inaccurate to fine-tune the values to get around this limitation the camera position was manipulated by pressing and releasing are at the waterfall the camera is carefully positioned in a way that authors ever-so-slightly the angle at which it looks at Mario from millions of units away this specific angle is perfect for the entire manipulation to line up just right do you see it okay let me get closer this is Mario's next intended position on the first frame which is out of bounds so he stays in his parallel universe and that is Mario's new next intended position on the second frame which is inside of the wall so Mario is able to move and he is in the walking animation albeit backwards after being pushed by the wall he ends up in the doors radius and he is able to open it and this is how the first Bowser fight is kept entirely and Mario enters the castle basement without a key [Music] you [Music] the Eretz in smile entered the door from the inside out he appears outside once he's in the castle this dark room is used during the door opening cutscene so there is a real floor inside however there are no walls so once Mario hits the inside wall it pushes him back inside you can also see the entering water interaction that I talked about earlier as soon as Mario enters water he is instantly snapped to the surface and enters a swimming state this is called a dive grinding the way it works is quite simple Mario is on the very edge of the platform with he's facing away from the platform by a tiny amount on the next frame he is off the platform which puts him in a falling state in which he can dive at the same time the door stick is held towards the platform the frame after he dives he moves back on the platform and so he lands from his dives however on the next frame he slides off the platform again so the cycle repeats and he can dive once more since diving gives Mario a flat 15 bonus speed this quick diving and landing lets Mario accelerate much faster than usual saving a bit of time here Mario performs a weird-lookin wall kick this is called the glitchy wall kick and here's what's going on when Mario collides with the wall hitbox the game will push Mario to a point 50 units away perpendicular to the wall if he goes into a corner then he will be inside of two wall head boxes at once in that case the game simply pushes Mario 50 units away from one wall then 50 units from the other but in what order you might think that doesn't matter since it happens within the same quarter step in Mario who's never actually found inside one of the walls well it actually does matter the game has a variable in memory that references which while Mario is currently interacting with but it only has one as a result the second walls reference will overwrite the first and so the first wall will be unreferenced this is why in every corner between two walls Mario can run against one of them because it was processed first and the reference was overwritten by the second collision the other wall behaves as normal and Mario will push against them now the way a glitchy walking happens requires a specific set of conditions because this wall is unreferenced if Mario is simply in a corner between the walls he won't be able to walk it at all because the game will check for his angle against this instead and for a wocket to be possible Maya needs to face within 45 degrees of the wall he wants to walk econ what needs to happen is that Mario needs to hit only this wall on one of the quarter steps of his movement and then hit the corner on the later quarter step this can happen if Mario comes at the wall with a slight angle which means that even though he can walk it off the wall his speed still has a component parallel to that wall so in this case Mario hits the wall on his first quarter step the game pushes him back but he was also moving towards the other one at this point this is the reference wall and because mario is coming at it head-on he will bunk on it on an extreme aura be able to wall kick on the next quarter step the same thing happens and he moves to the left a little bit more eventually on the last quarter step Mario ends up in the corner between both walls and the collision is handled with this wall first and this was second now at this point mario is already set to be able to walk on an extreme but since them the reference to all changed so he is able to wall kick but off the other wall which he's nearly parallel to when while kicking the wall acts like a mirror so Mario comes off the wall with the same angle he hit it with this is why Mario was able to walk ik yet stay roughly in the same direction here Mario performs a different type of blj called the side bill Jane the white happens is similar to dive grinding since Mario's angle is ever so slightly off towards the lower step with his input Direction is slightly towards the higher step when jumping from the lowest step he immediately lands on the higher step but on the next train his backward speed carries him back to the lower step where he jumps again this cycle repeats itself every two frames letting Mario gather enough backward speed so that none of his quarter steps collided with the wall he also lands on the fence for one frame which makes him go in a sliding state this allows Mario to change his angle by a little bit in midair can have better control over where he's headed to bounce on the ground also allows him to hit the back wall of the bowser and it fires the entrance while sliding backwards which doesn't allow him to grab the ledge saving him at a time he also completely bypassed a dire dire docks entrance this is simply because a loading trigger is only 378 units wide and checked on every frame so with Mario speed being negative 386 in the x-direction thanks to very careful positioning he's able to skip over the trigger entirely [Music] [Music] here Mario suddenly walks up the pole how is this possible well contrary to popular belief the pole itself actually has nothing to do with this trick it actually happens because Mario can hang on to the ceiling and move around the game tracks when Mario is under a Hannibal ceiling if Mario hits an adjacent lower ceiling the game recognizes that he hit a ceiling but because he's under a Hannibal ceiling it incorrectly assumes if Mario's should hang on to that ceiling because it expects to hang a bull ceiling and the one he collided with to be the same so Mario is placed at the Hannibal ceiling which means he is warped up to its height saving precious time here Mario uses another elevator to be LJ and gain a ludicrous amount of negative speed in this case about six hundred and fifty seven thousand he uses that amount of speed to perform an overflow jump which puts him two parallel universes over on this platform this platform is conveniently at the same height as devotees on trigger that leads to the Bowser fight so after adjusting his angle to head I go to the main map Mario ends up directly on the loading zone entering the Bowser fight immediately [Music] this blj looks pretty cool but it's not only for show it helps position my you closer to the bomb which saves time the camera is set back to Mario cam to save the game from rendering things that would make it lag this is actually slower on emulator with the community recently switched to timing this category's passes on console and optimize them with a Nintendo 64 in mind interestingly the basement door can be opened from the inside even without the key but the 30 star door can't so Mario is stuck in here but he can enter a diary diary dachshund and exit the stage with the pause menu instead [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay let's go through this sequence step by step we're past all the really complicated stuff now so this would all be pretty simple this spiral staircase has a weird property the floor up here is very close to the ceiling below when Mario is close enough to a ledge he can grab the ledge and pull himself up this interaction takes priority over the collision with the ceiling letting him go through the ceiling entirely when pulling himself up Mario hits the wall this cancels the animation of Mario pulling himself up and saves a few frames now Mario sets up yet another blj in the stairs this time Yami reaches about 700 speed but it is still enough to clip through walls with careful movement after hitting this wall he uses SIA which Strange's the camera to first-person in first-person mode while against the law Mario's facing angle will be directly at the wall since he still has backward speed he shoots away from the wall the first-person mode is then cancelled on the next frame to regain control of Mario ma who also kicks up the stairs kicking allows Mario to be airborne without the 20% speed loss that comes with a jump because he needs to keep as much speed as possible for the rest of this section kicking is much more efficient next Mario actually stops at the star door the text box that tells him he doesn't have enough stars has a very useful property Mario speed coming into it is preserved and his facing angle can be redirected anywhere after gaining control he does still turn around to face the door first which is actually useful when gaining control Mario crouches which puts him in a crouch slide state in this state sliding speed is used now there is a property of sliding speed that I glossed over when I talked about it earlier sliding speed is actually a vector with a direction and an amplitude equal to Mario's movement since he's now facing the door immediately before he gains control his sliding speed is pointing this way because that's the direction he was moving in and his horizontal speed is pointing that way because he has backward speed this means that entering a sliding state turns what used to be backward momentum into forward momentum using first-person mode cancels that sliding state immediately it puts Mario in a different state called si up slide out of which he can't jump however he can punch punching brings its own set of problems though midway through his punch Mario hits a wall normally if Mario punches a wall he'll lose all of his momentum and B recoil back the reason why it doesn't happen here is a combination of many factors we've talked about already all coming together in the perfect way when Mario is punching the game takes a point 50 units in front of Mario and checks if there's a wall within 5 units of it if Mario's facing anywhere within about 25 degrees of a wall this check will find the wall in Mario go punching however everything involved with deletions and movement happens in a very specific order here's how the process goes and why Mario's bunch never finds the wall right in front of him first the game tricks if Mario is colliding with a wall he isn't so nothing happens then the game checks if Mario's sponge is within 5 units of the law since Mario is still a bit away from the wall it is it so again nothing happens next the first quarter step of movement happens and because of Mario's high speed he ends up here but this situation is a bit more complex you see Mario isn't actually against a wall but rather in the corner between two walls forming an obtuse angle on top of that the two laws happen to be processed in this order so first while one is processed but Mario is beyond its hitbox and is unaffected then while 2 is processed and Mario gets pushed back perpendicularly to the wall but because his angle is off by a small amount he also moved towards wall 1 and is now inside its hitbox but remember while 1 was already processed for this quarter step so this collision goes undetected on the next quarter step the same process happens he gets pushed back by wall 2 and inches further in wall 1 repeat this over all four quarter steps and by the end of the frame Mario is well inside of wall 1 now at the beginning of the next frame the first thing that happens is a new collision check this time the game detects that Mario is in fact inside of one and so it pushes him out before anything else happens and only then Myo sponge check is made but now because of wall Juan's angle mara was pushed away from wall two and his new position is again too far for the punch to connect the exact same process is repeated for every frame of marios punch and so even though he's right in front of it he never hits the wall and gets to conserve his precious speed now Mario needs to climb up the room to reach the infinite stairs to do that he does a series of special walking's when mario bunks in the wall he has five frames to perform a walking his speed is also set to negative sixteen on the next frame after his collision if mario x his wall kicked perfectly on the first frame of the collision with the wall he will be able to walk it off of it before his speed is set to negative 16 when that happens he gets to keep whatever speed he had this is called the first frame wall kick or firstly however when Mario jumps at the wall he hits it on a very next frame and since a was pressed to jump from the ground it has to be released for one frame before it can be pressed again for the wall kick this causes Mario to lose all of his precious speed this is why the initial wall kick is pause buffered by using the pause Mario is able to jump on two consecutive frames and get around this problem after that every subsequent walk is done frame perfectly to keep all of his speed and jump up the room that speed is enough to clip past a 70 star door and into the infinite stairs now you may remember that Mario's vertical speed is a function of his horizontal speed when he does a single or a double jump this is why he can jump up so high here because his horizontal speed is 315 he inherits fifty two plus one quarter of 315 or 130 vertical speed and then immediately loses for speed due to gravity however he does lose 20% of his forward speed as he jumps and he drops down to 252 so how can he go up to supposedly infinite stairs like there nothing well the way the infinite stairs work in Super Mario 64 is a clever magic trick in fact the stairs are never infinite what happens is that if you have fewer than 70 stars there's an invisible barrier that warps Mario back by four hundred and ten units because of the way the stairs and the walls are set up this creates the illusion that Mario didn't move an illusion that's easily broken by using a different camera setting or camera hack this invisible barrier is right here as you can see it's not very big it's only 150 four units thick so with a speed of 253 now Mario is able to be in front of the barrier on one frame and Beyond it on the next and this is how he can reach the entrance to Bowser in the sky with zero stars and that's it everything else beyond this point you should already understand I'll let the rest of this task play without interruptions there is going to be a few annotations to clarify some details but you should already know everything you need to understand the rest [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and there you have it super mario 64 beaten in 4 minutes and 20 seconds thanks to all sorts of crazy tricks i hope that with this knowledge you can now appreciate the work that was put into making this tool-assisted speedrun and i hope that you learned a bit about how this beautiful game works thanks for watching you

Channel: Bismuth

Views: 2,322,204

Rating: 4.9217176 out of 5

Keywords: Super Mario 64, SM64, Mario, speedrun, TAS, speed, run, speed-run, tool-assisted, perfect, world, record, Super, 64, Mario 64, best, fastest, top, explained, what, how, AI, computer, explanation, breakdown, speedrunning, TASing

Id: wjge1bVobN0

Length: 38min 59sec (2339 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Caltroop2480]

I love this video. I've never speedrun a game before but I can sit on my chair and watch countless of videos like this one. It does a very good job at at explaining this speedrun for newcomers. It's amazing how they managed to break the game

[u/BIGSTANKDICKDADDY]

Some of the graphics used are recreations of the original parallel universes video by pannenkoek2012.

Original @ 11:20 - Bismuth @ 12:21

Original @ 21:25 - Bismuth @ 18:25

pannenkoek2012 is credited for "research help" in the description but I think it's worth calling them out specifically as the source for most of the mind-blowing info you'll find in this video.

[u/obeseninjao7]

This is a very similar style to that old Pannenkoek meme, except it goes into more detail about any%. It uses very similar explanations and visuals, so if you have seen that old Pannenkoek video this might not tell you too much you don't already know.

However I should mention Pannenkoek is mentioned in the credits as assisting in research and is in the special thanks section for this video so this guy isn't stealing or anything, it is a collaborative effort.

Edit: There are some good explanations for stuff I haven't seen explained before though, such as first frame wallkicks and C-up slides. I had seen them done but never had them explained. All in all a good video, I like the homage to the old pannenkoek meme with the File Select music playing when he starts talking about PUs.

[u/rajikaru]

So fascinating. The concepts are explained so efficiently yet simplistically. It's insane just how precise the PUs have to work for this solution to even exist - it gets to a point where it's literally just manipulating numbers. Super cool stuff.

[u/bluefootednewt]

Is there any documentation on how parallel universes were discovered in Mario 64?

I've never come across any and like many others my first experience was the Watch for Rolling Rocks 0.5x A Press video but I've never found any kind of research on them prior to that. How could something like that even be theorized? Building up speed for hours at a time at extremely specific angles isn't something you just do accidentally.

[u/Parasitic_Leech]

Holy shit, how do people end up figuring this stuff out ?

Negative speed jumping, frame skipping, pause buffering... wtf.

I feel like in a few years they will develop even more crazier methods, finishing the game in a few seconds or something like that.