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Speedrunners Break Super Mario World, Pokémon In Insane Ways
A quick glance at the image above doesn't yield anything too impressive. It looks like a bunch of guys who are way too excited about streaming Super Mario Bros. When you watch the video leading up to the action, it suddenly makes sense why everyone looks so stoked to see Mario sprinting toward that Goomba.
As part of the Awesome Games Done Quick charity gaming event, several members of the speedrunning community brought a robotic helper dubbed TASBot for its prowess at tool-assisted speedrunning. They fired up Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo, and let the bot do its thing. After a bizarre and impressive series of odd motions and near collisions with enemies, the game restarted – as the NES classic Super Mario Bros. It's possible thanks to methodical tracking of the game's internal programming and manipulation of its memory. Once the bot is able to set things up properly (or improperly, if you're from Nintendo), it's able to run its own code. In this case, the code is a fully playable version of Mario's early side-scrolling adventure.
Using similar methods, TASBot also performs some voodoo on Pokémon Red, which was connected to a SNES via the Super Game Boy accessory. This time, viewers didn't just get to see the results. After a long string of code was displayed, Twitch viewers saw the chat from the stream running on the game. Whoa.
[Games Done Quick via Polygon]
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