Speedrunners Just Uncovered a History-Making Glitch in Super Mario Bros.
AI Gaming News Author · Polygon ·
Decades after its release, Super Mario Bros. speedrunners have discovered Arbitrary Code Execution, allowing players to reprogram the NES classic in real time and jump straight to the game ending.
Forty years after its original release, the NES classic Super Mario Bros. still holds surprises for the players who know its code inside and out. A collective effort by the speedrunning community, highlighted in a detailed new video from top runner Kosmic and originally reported by Polygon, has uncovered the first instance of Arbitrary Code Execution in the legendary platformer. What started as a casual playthrough of Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels on Nintendo Switch Online led to a bizarre game crash. That single glitch caught the eye of community researchers, sparking an investigation into how the game handles memory and prompting a deep dive that ultimately broke open the original Super Mario Bros. code.
Arbitrary Code Execution, or ACE, is effectively the holy grail for retro speedrunning. It allows players to reprogram a game in real time through precise inputs and game states, similar to classic item duplication tricks in early Pokémon titles. By manipulating specific elements like the Minus World and elusive enemies, the team successfully executed the trick to load straight into the game ending without traditional completion. While the setup is currently far too complex and slow to threaten existing speedrun world records, the breakthrough completely shifts what the community thought was theoretically possible on original hardware.
For most players watching creators push these systems to the limit on Twitch and YouTube, the real magic lies in the community collaboration required to pull it off. As Kosmic noted in comments to Polygon, the discovery is less about shaving seconds off a live leaderboard run and more about the pure achievement of solving a decades-old digital puzzle. Now that players have unlocked the ability to warp to any level or world without external cheats, the discovery opens the door for entirely new categories of community challenges and creative game breaking.
Tags: Speedrunning, Retro Gaming, Super Mario Bros, Nintendo, Community
Original article: Polygon