Bloody Hell, Mate! A Mario Speedrunner Just Blew a Hole in Reality (and Found 20 New Levels)
AI Gaming News Author · IGN South Africa ·
A curious speedrunner just cracked open *Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels* after 39 years, unearthing over 20 bizarre, previously hidden levels through a combination of meticulous experimentation and clever glitch exploitation, proving that even classic games hold secret digital treasures.
Right, so apparently, the digital wizards at Nintendo have been holding out on us for nearly four decades. Or, more accurately, the code in *Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels* has been keeping a rather magnificent secret, just waiting for the right digital archaeologist to come along and dig it up. And fair dinkum, someone finally did!
I've been tinkering with this story all morning, and bloody hell, it’s wilder than it first appeared. You know that feeling when you cast a spell and it works a bit too well? That's what happened when speedrunner Kosmic, with a fair bit of community-led experimentation and sheer, unadulterated persistence, managed to unearth over 20 previously unseen – and at times, delightfully broken – playable levels in a game that debuted in 1986. Yes, 1986! That's older than most of my socks, mate, and we're still finding new stuff.
Now, before your brain starts doing backflips trying to figure out how one 'finds' new levels in a game that’s been picked apart frame-by-frame for decades, let's dive into the glorious, glitchy mechanics of it all. It all boils down to how the original *Super Mario Bros.* and its infamous sequel, *The Lost Levels*, decide where to shunt Mario at the end of each stage. Think of it like a digital choose-your-own-adventure, but with less talking and more jumping on Goombas.
Basically, if you grab the flagpole at the end of a level, the game nudges your 'Area' number up by one (that's the '2' in '1-2', for the uninitiated). If you're a castle-conquering legend and axe the bridge, you increment the 'World' number (sending you from, say, '1-4' to '2-1'). Simple enough, right? Like following a recipe, if the recipe was written by a slightly confused wizard.
But then there are Warp Pipes. Ah, the Warp Pipes. These innocent-looking green tubes have been the source of some of Mario's most legendary shenanigans. For eons, the community has known about the 'Minus World' glitch in the original *Super Mario Bros.* – that endlessly looping water level. You'd poke your head into a Warp Zone in 1-2 just wrong, and boom, the game's little brain would get scrambled, sending you to 'World -1'. A classic bit of digital chaos, that.
Now, in *The Lost Levels*, Nintendo (bless their pointy-hatted heads) thought they'd patched out that particular bit of wizardry. Enter the pipes too soon, and you'd just get sent wherever the game's memory happened to be pointing. But here's the kicker, the truly clever bit of observation: if you enter that pipe *while still moving*, before the Warp Zone fully loads, you can essentially trick the game into loading the zone *after* you've already committed to the pipe. It's like slipping past a bouncer just as they’re putting up the velvet rope, mate. This allows you to force the game to send you to the very beginning of the Area that the pipe *intended* to send you to, but with all the underlying jankiness of a partially loaded zone.
Sounds complicated? Yeah, my head's doing a bit of a pirouette just writing it down. If you want the full, glorious deep dive, Kosmic's 40-minute video (which I highly recommend, it’s a masterclass in digital archaeology) lays it all out. But the even shorter version? By combining flagpole/axe tricks with these ridiculously precise pipe entries, you can nudge the game into loading progressively more unhinged areas. Worlds like 2-5, 2-9… places that the game designers probably thought no one would ever see, like forgotten spellbooks tucked away in a dusty corner of the digital library.
And here’s where things get really spicy, like a potion with too much chilli. In the *Super Mario All-Stars* edition of *The Lost Levels*, this weirdness is supercharged by the inclusion of save states. You can access these bizarre, glitched-out worlds, save your progress, and then – crucially – reload them from the menu. Reloading from the menu, rather than continuing from the previous world, causes the game to load them *differently*. It’s like opening the same enchanted book but finding a completely different story each time.
Kosmic, armed with this knowledge and an apparently endless supply of patience, started pushing the boundaries. From B-4, he ventured into B-5, then B-6, 7, and 8. Initially, these were largely repeats, mirror images of existing levels, albeit with a subtle hum of wrongness beneath the surface. But after reaching B-D, the unknown truly began. What would load next?
B-E, apparently. And this is where Mario briefly went to digital jail! Imagine the absurdity – the only way out was to save and quit, a digital parole if you will.
He pressed on, past B-F (a series of repeat normal levels), all the way to B-L. At this point, a cheeky spring and an impassable giant pit halted his direct progress. But remember those save states? Loading B-H from the menu resulted in a chaotic landscape of floating blocks and misplaced pipes – a level that looked like it had been designed by a particularly mischievous goblin after a heavy night.
Things only spiralled from there, morphing into total messes, abstract art pieces of what *could* have been a Mario level. Imagine walking through a level that's just... stairs leading to nowhere, blocks forming impossible structures, and enemies spawning in the void. Pure, unadulterated digital anarchy. In total, Kosmic uncovered over 20 of these 'new levels', ranging from familiar-but-off to utterly abstract. Eventually, the game itself couldn’t handle the madness and simply crashed. And let's be fair, while incredible to witness, these aren’t exactly prime platforming material. More like a peek behind the wizard's curtain, revealing the chaotic spell ingredients rather than the polished illusion.
So, the million-dollar question: why did it take a whopping 39 years for someone to find these digital ghosts? Kosmic has a few theories, and they make a fair bit of sense. For starters, *The Lost Levels* never achieved the same global fame as the original *Super Mario Bros.* Fewer eyeballs, fewer chances for discovery. Secondly, this particular trick is buried deep within the game's bonus worlds, not easily stumbled upon in the main quest. And finally, to truly witness the full extent of this glitchy majesty, you need the *All-Stars* version, adding another layer of specificity.
But the main reason, as Kosmic puts it, is simply: 'it's actually really hard.' And fair play to him, it looks it. Entering those Warp Pipes at precisely the right nanosecond, with the camera in just the right position, requires a level of precision that would make a brain surgeon sweat. There's one particularly tricky Warp Zone that demanded some truly arcane input to master.
This whole escapade isn't just about finding some broken levels; it's a testament to the enduring power of gaming communities and the hidden depths that even the most meticulously explored titles can hold. It reminds us that sometimes, the true magic lies not just in the spells we're *meant* to cast, but in the glorious, unexpected things that happen when we try to bend reality just a little.
Huge props to Kosmic and the entire *Super Mario Bros.* community. You've given us a fresh bag of digital oddities to marvel at and a potent reminder that in the vast, ever-evolving world of gaming, there's always, always more to discover, even after 39 years. Keep tinkering, mates, you never know what digital wonders you might accidentally conjure next!
Tags: Super Mario Bros, Speedrunning, Gaming History, Game Glitches, Nintendo Classics
Original article: IGN South Africa