In its 40-year lifespan, Super Mario Bros. has been dissected to bits. Players from the game’s avid speedrunning community seemingly know every exploit, bug, and secret the game has to offer, and they’ve used these to pull off near-perfect speedruns. However, a recent discovery might just push the future of the game’s speedruns to the next level.
On Tuesday, speedrunner Kosmic posted a YouTube video detailing a massive new glitch discovered by the game’s speedrunning community (thanks, Polygon). While it isn’t quite a game-changing speedrunning tool yet, it opens some pretty big doors for the community’s future.
The glitch uses arbitrary code execution, or ACE. ACE is essentially an exploit that allows users to input custom code through the game itself. It’s been used to skip large portions of content in speedruns of other games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Final Fantasy, and a whole bunch of Pokémon games. ACE has also been utilized in plenty of other Mario games, but never the original itself.
According to Kosmic, the glitch’s existence was initially hypothesized when Twitter/X user @TheLuigiSidekick’s playthrough of The Lost Levels via Nintendo Switch Online crashed. When the Mario speedrunning community found the footage, members immediately began trying to understand the crash and to figure out if it could be replicated in the original game. After a lot of guesswork, they discovered a loophole.
Long story short: ACE is officially possible in SMB1, and it lets players skip right to the game’s ending!
However, this likely won’t lead to a drastic change in speedrunning techniques—not for now, at least. Kosmic told Polygon that the trick is pretty limited, and currently, using it requires a lot of pixel-perfect inputs that are difficult to execute. Even then, using it to skip to the ending is still slower than beating the game naturally. And even if players did figure out a way to speed things up, it would likely be considered its own speedrunning category rather than a way to break current records due to being a pretty significant exploit.
Kosmic told Polygon that the discovery is “more so about the achievement of making it possible and solving it.” It’s definitely an impressive find, especially considering the fact that SMB1 in an extremely iconic game that’s been pored over for decades. But Kosmic hinted that it might also change the future of speedrunning.
“If you want, you can now access not just the Minus World, but any world or level you want,” Kosmic told Polygon. “With no hacks or cheats. It’s a glitch that makes anything possible.”
The Super Mario Bros. speedrunning community has had its fair share of drama recently, so it’s neat to see something positive come out of collaboration for once. I’m also eager to see how far ACE can be pushed here and what it leads to. What other secrets might pop up now that we know there’s apparently more to this 40-year-old game than we thought?