Marcel Winatschek

The Cartridge as Raw Material

There’s a version of Super Mario World where, if you input exactly the right sequence of wrong commands, the game forgets what it is. The SNES starts executing arbitrary code from RAM, and then—without loading anything, without any external device—you’re playing Pong. Inside Mario.

This is what Masterjun does. He runs TAS—tool-assisted speedruns, where every frame is pre-planned and assembled into something that looks like play but is closer to vivisection—and the Super Mario World run is the famous one. A specific chain of glitches injects his own code into the game’s memory mid-run, then executes it through the controller ports to boot entirely separate programs. Pong. Snake. Running inside the engine of a 1990 Nintendo platformer.

I spent months as a kid trying to find all 96 exits. Masterjun took the whole thing apart in under four minutes and turned it into a development environment.