Get extra coins in the NES Super Mario

Get extra coins in the NES Super Mario

Can you discover something new from a game that was released 37 years ago and has been played by virtually everyone? It seems that if. The original Super Mario is one of the highest rated classic games ever. And oddly enough, it still has a huge player base. Many of them do speedruns – have a quick time, come on – and that forces them to look for shortcuts where there are practically none. Recently, one of these players proved all of humanity wrong about the game’s multi-currency blocks .

They discover this NES Super Mario trick 37 years later

Super Mario en versión Paper.

Almost everyone has played the original Super Mario Bros, also known as Super Mario Bros Classic . In fact, until a few months ago, there was a version on Nintendo Switch Online called Super Mario Bros 35 , which was an online multiplayer in which we competed with other players to see who could go the furthest.

If you’ve ever paid close attention to playing this title, you’ll know that the blocks you can hit repeatedly to get coins total 10 units . Well, according to Kosmic, one of the best-known speedrunners in this video game, you’re wrong.

The frame rule is the key

Super Mario Bros. speedrunners take into account a factor that normal gamers have never considered: the frame rule . Basically, all of the game’s mechanics are arranged in a repeating 21-frame loop . For example, level transitions do not occur until the frame ruler counter has been reset a total of six times. Those who play Mario at full throttle always do so with this rule in mind. If the player knows the cycle, he can save a lot of time. The curious thing is that the cycle can also be used to lengthen what interests the player.

According to Kosmic, coin blocks can only be hit for 11 ticks after Mario’s first interaction with the object. But, if instead of starting to hit the block at the end of a frame rule, you start hitting the block at the beginning of the rule, you gain quite a bit of time. The player has calculated that you have 3.8 seconds to extract all possible coins from a block, about 230 frames . Between jump and jump, the game forces us to wait 16 frames. That gives 14 hits. If we add the extra coin they give us at the beginning and the other one they give us at the end, that makes a total of 16 coins. Come on, professional speedrunners get 60% more out of coin blocks than casual players.

The funny thing about all of this is that most people who use this trick do so completely blind . They do not have a visible counter on the screen that tells them the pace of the game. Simply, they are guided by the context of the game itself to know the exact moment in which they have to make the Italian plumber jump.