Mods that swap out parts of games for external replacements – like stepping into Iron Man’s Hulkbuster suit in GTA 5 (opens in new tab) – are cool, but they’re a known quantity. Using nothing but a standard SNES console and accessories to recreate Flappy Bird inside of a regular copy of Super Mario World, on the other hand, that is something else.
Starting with a few tricks to dupe Mario into a glitchy power-up state, game botherer extraordinaire SethBling proceeded to use a very specific series of actions to overwrite parts of Super Mario World’s running code with an on-the-fly version of Flappy Bird. No external tools were used, just an hour’s worth of spitting fire and doing spin jumps at pixel-perfect locations. Watch with wonder and fear as Mario’s world is torn apart and rebuilt under his palette-swapping feet.
Lucky that it already had giant green pipes. Super Mario World has been turned into other games using tricks like this before, but SethBling reckons this is the first time it’s ever been done exclusively by human hands. In fact, if you have a copy of Super Mario World, an SNES, a multitap, and three controllers, you could follow the instructions (opens in new tab) and start playing Flappy Plumber right now. But… maybe don’t call it that.
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