Guy Hacks Super Mario World Using Glitches to Inject Flappy Bird

March 29, 2016 09:01 EST • Alexandre Vallières-Lagacé • 2 minute read

I’ve seen my fair share of hacks over the years, ranging from the modified games running on emulations to full on game glitches that causes all sort of weird things to happen. Don’t forget the Game Genie that gave me and my friends tons of fun on both the NES and SNES.

But this is going further than no man ever gone before. Hacking Super Mario World using only legit hardware and loading a 331 bytes game of Flappy Bird using Mario’s graphic elements. No computers, no modified hardware. Simply amazing!

SethBling attempted the hack while streaming it live. He was able to user discoveries made by other like MrCheeze and p4plus2 that discovered a way to inject code into Super Mario World and wrote the assembly code that represent the Flappy Bird hack.

It him 53 minutes of power-ups, jumping and writing to registers using in game mechanics that had to be pixel perfect to work. He loaded the game by jumping at certain spots in a specific level to “insert” commands in memory and then did a final jump that loaded the written instructions.

This is great because it was achieve without any computer assisted techniques. Simply good old Nintendo hardware.

You can view the whole thing on his Twitch channel if you are curious. And you like this technical feat, look into the instructions right here.