Random: A Newly Found Super Mario 64 Glitch Takes Three Whole Days To Pull Off

The world of speedrunning and limited challenge runs is a crazy, crazy place; just last week we stumbled across players completing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in record time by flying around on trees, and now we're taking a journey to the opposite side of the spectrum - the much slower side.

When attempting to complete the Super Mario 64 'A Button Challenge', which tasks players with collecting stars found in the game without ever pressing the 'A' button - and therefore never being able to jump - players tend to make use of any tricks and glitches they can find. A recently discovered glitch has allowed for the game to be completed in this way, but you have to wait three whole days for the glitch to actually work.

As explained in the video below, shared by bad_boot, this particular glitch was discovered by a player called Andru who left a Wii Virtual Console copy of the game running idle over night. In what can only be described as fate (and also coding), Andru returned to the game the following day, still sitting in the 'Bowser in the Fire Sea' level, to discover that some platforms had risen in the air over night, allowing him to run along them to reach an essential pole that you would usually need to jump to.

As bad_boot mentions, the potential theory behind this is Super Mario 64's use of floating point numbers. These track the position of in-game objects in real time, accounting for things such as player interaction, and the Nintendo 64 version of the game will round any value found from this to a valid number. In what appears to be an error in the Wii Virtual Console version, these numbers seem to round towards zero, meaning that an error can occur whereby an object will forever move in a particular direction - just very, very slowly.

Since the discovery of the glitch, players have been attempting to finally complete the game without jumping. The video below shows one such attempt by ethanwhitesm64, in which he waited the whole three days, before messing up the slide kick needed to cross the smaller gap. The music that plays as he falls to the floor, in what must be one of the saddest anti-climaxes we've ever seen, is almost comically patronising. We feel for you Ethan, we really do.

Do you enjoy weird tricks and glitches discovered in games? Do you ever spend time trying to pull off incredible in-game achievements? Let us know with a comment below.