Gamers performing speedruns aren’t new, and in a way they’re pretty entertaining to watch. This is because speedruns require a lot of skill and seeing players deftly jump and navigate their way through a map as fast as they can without stumbling can be rather mesmerizing. However it looks like this is something that robots could soon take away from us.
During the Summer Games Done Quick event, a robot was used at the tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) segment actually managed to complete Super Mario Bros. 3 in 2 second. However we should point out that this was largely due to a glitch in the game, as discovered by TAS speedrunner ais523.
Before you think you could exploit this glitch, chances are if you don’t have a robot to aid you, you’ll be hardpressed to do so. This is because the glitch involves a lot of button mashing at a speed of 6,000 times per second. For those wondering how this glitch works, ais523 explained this glitch on Reddit.
The post reads, “If you’re reading the controller repeatedly until you get two values the same (in order to work around the DPCM/controller conflict), then if the controller reads a different output each time (because you’re mashing the controller really fast), it’s going to get stuck in a loop, potentially allowing for the code that handles the start of a frame running recursively. If the game isn’t designed to expect that to happen (and if the code in question isn’t really laggy, why would it?), bad things happen, and it was a case of finding a game in which the bad things in question would happen to let us win instantly.”
We guess it’s not technically a speedrun in the traditional sense, but given that this isn’t something a regular human couldn’t do, it’s still a pretty cool feat all the same.
Filed in . Read more about Nintendo and Super Mario.