It Would Take 416 Years To Pull Off This Paper Mario Glitch

Recently a new world record was set for fastest completion of the original Super Mario Bros game, from beginning to end with no assistance. It’s assumed now that it will take a long time for anyone to best this man’s time, if it’s even possible, since tool-assisted speedruns have only achieved a faster time by milliseconds. Getting a time of just under four minutes in SMB requires an absolutely flawless playthrough, as well as the successful execution of a tricky Bullet Bill glitch in level 8-2. This glitch bypasses the pole-slide animation and makes a time under five minutes possible.

Glitches come in all sizes. Some glitches, like this one, are useful. And some WOULD be useful if they weren’t utterly impossible to pull off. The latter category surely belongs to a bug recently discovered in 2001’s Paper Mario, which can get you extra items — but it would take you over 400 years to fully exploit it.

As explained in the below video, there’s a hidden secret in Paper Mario involving a yellow block. Hitting it with your hammer makes a Mushroom Block appear, and most players would stop there (if they found the first secret at all). But if the same block is hit ten times, another Mushroom Block appears, and a hundred hits generates a third. Very few people ever found that third ‘shroom.

There’s a way to get a fourth mushroom, in fact, and it involves rolling the data counter around. Each time Mario hits the block, the game is programmed to count up, and if this is done enough times (approximately 4,294,967,295 times), the counter will roll around and the first Mushroom Block will refresh with a new mushroom. Ten hits after that, and ninety more after, and you have six.

Could you do it indefinitely? No….there’s an eventual point where the game locks up. Check the video to find out the full story…