Typically, speedruns involve players perfecting moves and exploiting
glitches to warp through the game world, skipping huge segments of
gameplay in a race against the clock. But what you’re about to see is a
speedrun of a much different color. This is the “credits warp” glitch:
That’s the popular streamer SethBling. Though best known for making Minecraft videos, he’s playing Super Mario World for the SNES — or
rather, he’s doing something no one has ever done before with it:
recoding the game while playing it. Using a variety of seemingly
innocuous moves, SethBling is essentially inserting tiny changes into
the system’s memory that, when properly executed, jump SethBling past
the final boss and directly to the game’s credits in about six minutes. I
could try to explain how it all works, but I’d have to take a few
programming classes first. And use about 5 percent more of my brain.
The glitch was initially discovered by fellow speedrunner Jeffw356,
who performed it using an SNES emulator. SethBling, however, did it
using an old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill Super Nintendo. He has since
followed up this performance with a sub-five minute run, setting a new world record. Incredible.
