Comments on: Thank youu mARIO, bUTOUR &pRINC$ES$ &# aNO@**ER &?=)!&&&33377G

Thank youu mARIO, bUTOUR &pRINC$ES$ &# aNO@**ER &?=)!&&&33377G

JHarris — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:53:08 -0800

Take a game like Super Mario Bros. Introduce garbage data into the code, either through random Game Genie codes or a corruptor program. Try to play what results, while the laws of reality slowly go insane in the background, and upload the "best" results to YouTube. Can Mario make it to the princess when stomping a Goomba turns the air to water, when hitting a block ends the world, when the world is infinite length, if the ground can't support his weight, when touching a flagpole destroys his mind, when brought into being over an ocean immediately before a fatal heart attack, before the enemies turn into Bowser-halves, while the universe is freaking out around him? (hint: no)

By: JHarris

JHarris — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:55:22 -0800

I'm not sure why I enjoy these so much, but I do. I think I'm scanning them to watch for warning signs in case God ever decides to jiggle the switch himself.

By: griphus

griphus — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:57:28 -0800

This is awesome. Very much reminiscent of Street Fighter II Rainbow Edition.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:58:39 -0800

Isn't this essentially what the Game Genie did? After I'd used up all the codes from the book, I spent a lot of time just putting in random codes, or codes for the wrong game. The results often looked quite a bit like this, though sometimes the differences were much more subtle.

By: keithburgun

keithburgun — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:00:27 -0800

Very cool! Reminds me of a weird hack version I saw of Street Fighter Alpha 3 for Atari. The characters are represented by HUGE blocks of color, but you still have the jump kick and sweep, so really, it feels just like playing SF!

By: mannequito

mannequito — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:02:05 -0800

ha. Last time I played SMB was about two years ago, when I came home still very much under the influence of certain substances. Started with the intention of playing for 10 or 20 minutes and next thing I knew it was dawn. Anyways, good to see it hasn't changed much since that night.

By: Asparagirl

Asparagirl — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:14:16 -0800

Maybe Mario shouldn't have eaten so many mushrooms.

By: The Winsome Parker Lewis

The Winsome Parker Lewis — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:20:13 -0800

That's awesome! I guess this sort of trick probably wouldn't work on modern games, would it?

By: gurple

gurple — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:23:28 -0800

I remember a Commodore game called The Last V8. I loved that game. Near the beginning of the game, there was a sort of wall that you weren't supposed to be able to drive through, but for some reason you could. If you drove through that wall, you were in some kind of weird buffer overrun area filled with random bits of memory interpreted as game tiles. Usually it would kill you pretty quickly, since a lot of the tiles in the game did damage. But sometimes you could get a pretty long, insane run.

By: porn in the woods

porn in the woods — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:28:15 -0800

Rad! Reminds me of the Paperboy finish line bug.

By: keratacon

keratacon — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:28:43 -0800

Modern systems have typed languages and error handling. They'd just crash with an error message if subjected to this kind of stress.

By: JHarris

JHarris — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:36:12 -0800

keratacon: Modern systems have typed languages and error handling. They'd just crash with an error message if subjected to this kind of stress. If they were programmed in assembly, however, they'd still exhibit this kind of weirdness unless they were implemented with lots of extra redundancy checking. And even then they might not; you're thinking about if the code were randomly permuted, but what would actually get scrambled would be the object code, which would be either straight machine code or bytecode analogue. Graphics data usually permutes pretty well without actually causing crashes. Program data permutes badly, but when it works you get really weird results like the later links in the post. Midway between them is stuff like shallowly-compressed data, which games like Super Mario Bros. and Metroid used frequently to make the most of limited ROM space. If, say, a cloud is depicted internally as a code and a pair of coordinates pointing to a tilemap, it'll corrupt a lot better than if it were a tilemap: it could potentially produce interesting results if the garbage data hits either the code, the coordinates, or the tilemap itself. A good thing to start with if you want to understand the kinds of behaviors that code corruption can produce is the classic hackersport Corewar, which has to do with two competing computer programs trying to overwrite each other in a cyclical memory arena.

By: sourwookie

sourwookie — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:40:56 -0800

The music at 5:37 is an absolute masterpiece.

By: bayani

bayani — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:41:03 -0800

gurple: I wanted to throw my joystick at the wall so many times trying to play that game. It was near impossible for me and I was never able to beat it!

By: bayani

bayani — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:42:12 -0800

Also, the title of this post is brilliant, JHarris.

By: DevilsAdvocate

DevilsAdvocate — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:56:59 -0800

when brought into being over an ocean immediately before a fatal heart attack Oh no, not again.

By: RobotVoodooPower

RobotVoodooPower — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:01:11 -0800

This was touched on in a previous post, but I'm glad to have a dedicated followup. The reason that frying works so well on NES games is the simple 8-bit code and small state space, like its even simpler cousin, the Atari 2600. If you turn the console on and off very quickly (best results are obtained when you make the switch hover in-between) interesting effects are obtained, similar to corrupting code in an emulator. Check out Pitfall or Centipede.

By: penduluum

penduluum — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:16:30 -0800

After I'd used up all the codes from the book, I spent a lot of time just putting in random codes, or codes for the wrong game. The results often looked quite a bit like this, ... God DAMN I wish I'd thought of that when I was 12.

By: NMcCoy

NMcCoy — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:18:36 -0800

THANK YOU█MARIO! BVT OUR PRINCESS JS IN ANOTHER DASTLE!

By: kzin602

kzin602 — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:20:18 -0800

That is one hardcore beat in the first video.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:26:26 -0800

I just read the actual text of the post and I am an idiot.

By: Joe Chip

Joe Chip — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:27:00 -0800

These are like the dreams I used to have after playing Mario all day. Imagine if the developers of Mario had run a simple checksum over the data files to check for corruption, all of this fun would be lost!

By: PercussivePaul

PercussivePaul — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:28:14 -0800

This one is awesome.

By: theichibun

theichibun — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:39:12 -0800

And there goes any chance I have of being productive today. Damn you. Anything relating to Mario makes me a very happy boy.

By: triceryclops

triceryclops — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:55:34 -0800

Ah yes, there were many summer afternoons as an 8 year old at my friend's house intentionally mistyping game genie codes to elicit these crazy results. We naturally got bored pretty quick because the results were so random and often often didn't get anything special. These videos brought much joy to my day. Thanks for this.

By: ShawnStruck

ShawnStruck — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:18:37 -0800

Related: Let's Break Pokemon Blue.

By: mek

mek — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:31:14 -0800

Man, I spent probably over a hundred hours screwing with Final Fantasy 2 (4j) on an SNES with a Game Genie - you could make the game do some extremely strange things by using a simple wall-walk code to get into locations which triggered scripts to fire at the wrong times. And that was just the beginning. Relatedly, there's a very substantial following for Smash Brothers Brawl hacking via Wii homebrew, of course the goal there is to improve the game, not screw it up. But nothing will ever beat hex-editing Bungie's classic Myth to screw up the physics. There were some serious goodies to be had in there, and the game was very kindly structured by the developers for ease-of-hacking.

By: fyrebelley

fyrebelley — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:35:30 -0800

I have so many fond memories of Super Mario Bros. When I was younger, my sister and I played the game so much that it became too easy for us. So, we turned the computer monitor we were playing it on upside down. Voila! A whole new game. Running right to left at the top of the screen. Much fun! Also, for some reason, it made the sky pinkish-purple. My little brother and I used to play SMB all the way through start to finish, no warp zones, every Christmas Eve. It helped us get kill time waiting for Christmas morning to open our presents. We tried that with Wizards and Warriors, too short and Metroid, way too long. SMB was the perfect game for such time wasting. When we got our Wii, I played the original Super Mario Bros and my husband could not believe all the tricks I knew...I was impressed I remembered them 20 years later. However, I am terrible at the additional Japanese SMB levels you can download.

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:01:19 -0800

Sadly the NES game genie had no way of going back so you could see the codes you put in, or I'd have been able to repeat the code I tapped in once that made Mario in SMB3 into a red-coloured frog-suit mario while walking, but back into regular Mario when you hit jump. Made the game a far sight more challenging.

By: fungible

fungible — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:04:54 -0800

THERE IS NO SPOON MARIO

By: speicus

speicus — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:59:20 -0800

The music at 5:37 is an absolute masterpiece. Holy crap it's like Koji Kondo and Anton Webern and Aphex Twin and Iannis Xenakis and Autechre all got together and threw a party and everyone was invited TO DIE

By: ryaninoakland

ryaninoakland — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:20:24 -0800

This happened completely accidentally to me as a kid (no game genie) and I still vividly remember it. I felt like I was Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, the world as I knew it was only barely concealing another much stranger reality just below the surface. I believe all of the Koopas had Mario heads instead of shells. Kind of disturbing.

By: thecaddy

thecaddy — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:49:20 -0800

Ryaninoakland-- That's what happens in Super Mario World when you beat the last level in Special World. It was, in fact, pretty disturbing.

By: brett

brett — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:55:41 -0800

Thanks for this post; I enjoyed it all the way through. For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, the ones I like the most are the ones that ever-so-slightly subvert our expectations for Mario. Like the one where Mario goes into the 1-1 bonus room, and it looks completely normal until suddenly it starts scrolling like the overworld. It challenges your assumptions: why don't the bonus rooms scroll? Of course, there are often good technical and design answers to those questions, but it really reveals how our concretely we understand the rules of the game world without them being explicitly stated. Also, on a less serious note, the one where the world turned gray, had a flag pole right at the beginning, and Mario slid down it only to walk off to his death made me lol.

By: JHarris

JHarris — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:10:59 -0800

If, say, a cloud is depicted internally as a code and a pair of coordinates pointing to a tilemap, it'll corrupt a lot better than if it were a tilemap Argh, better than if it were just a tilemap.

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:58:19 -0800

This is how the world ends.

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:00:33 -0800

This one reminds me of the dream where my face melts.

By: ddaavviidd

ddaavviidd — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:27:40 -0800

My only encounter with this was when I'd jump over the flag pole, and continue into a repeating landscape until I ran out of time. Otherwise, any such distortion would lead to a rapid blow into the cartridge before reinsertion (did that really work?).

By: yeloson

yeloson — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:55:50 -0800

That really hurt my eyes but it was fun watching.

By: beardlace

beardlace — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:30:22 -0800

@ddaavviidd blowing in theory would remove dust on the pin connectors. It probably also damaged the pins. That's why they sold overpriced alcohol pads an cotton swabs to clean out a cartridge.

By: Scattercat

Scattercat — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:37:04 -0800

I had this spontaneously happen to me with Final Fantasy III (6 in Japan). I used to tap my hands and feet along with the music. One day, I was just idly tapping L and R while battling. Apparently, if you do that while Relm is using her Sketch power, the game just FLIPS THE FUCK OUT. I ended up in some sort of weird alternate universe full of mysterious holes and gaps. Also, Terra was always in Esper form and was rainbow colored and Edgar was a stone golem of some kind. That's just the weirdness that I remember. It was nearly unplayable, but I've always kept the save on my cartridge out of sort of nostalgia for the time I Fucked Shit Up But Good.

By: retronic

retronic — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 22:09:42 -0800

I think I'm scanning them to watch for warning signs in case God ever decides to jiggle the switch himself. Hacking Centipede...good times, good times....

By: seikleja

seikleja — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 22:28:24 -0800

You can get similar results by opening the ROM in Notepad and making small changes manually. As long as you keep the file length the same, there's a good chance the game will run. My favourite 'hack' was the time that jumping on a goomba produced no effect but a little heart appearing above their head in place of the usual 100 points.

By: Peztopiary

Peztopiary — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 03:04:25 -0800

I had a Mario/Duckhunt cartridge way back when. It got dusty and made everything transparent. Everything was just an outline. You could see the pirahna plants chilling out in the pipes before you got there. All the flying koopas though? Duckhunt ducks. If you shot them with a fireball you got a 1-up. It was possibly the greatest thing. Then my babysitter says "Oh you just have to blow on it." *everything goes back to normal* I never really played Mario again.

By: No-sword

No-sword — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 03:56:06 -0800

bayani, I hear you. I hated that death music SO MUCH.

By: Durn Bronzefist

Durn Bronzefist — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 05:55:28 -0800

Ah, the days of intentionally half-inserting cartridges to see what crazy ass "games" result. Good times.

By: Riki tiki

Riki tiki — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:26:48 -0800

When Skynet takes over, these videos are going to be evidence in humanity's collective trial for crimes against machinery.

By: JHarris

JHarris — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:10:35 -0800

This is how the world ends Well those Question Marks are there for a reason, right? This box: contains a coin. That box: FREEZES THE UNIVERSE. Choose wisely!

By: Zed

Zed — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 12:47:51 -0800

Another project for the list: trying this with zcode. Another project for Evil Zed's list: setting up an ifarchive mirror, and then trying this with zcode.

By: JHarris

JHarris — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 06:39:08 -0800

The music at 5:37 is an absolute masterpiece. Whenever a level is finished, that music plays. FOREVER: the game has to be reset right after. Mario hits the flagpole; the music becomes strange and dischordant; he walks on his own accord into the castle; the time runs down; and then, the music plays eternally, insanely, its piping horribly suggestive of Mario's unknown fate within the utter blackness of the archway. Obviously, the castle door is a portal to Azathoth's court.

By: JHarris

JHarris — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:09:25 -0800

Ah, one I missed. I wanted to include this one in the FPP but couldn't find it.