A mathematical problem that took more than thirty years to solve.
Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. is a household name, and people know that Mario has to jump up to the top of the bricks and get gold coins and props to help you play through the level. Most question mark bricks will give Mario 1 gold coin, while some bricks in certain locations do not have a question mark and give more coins.
Such bricks are called "Coin blocks" and require the player to manipulate Mario to crash into them as fast as possible for a short period of time, and the faster they hit, the more coins they will get. If the player gets 1 gold coin after the first time to top the brick, and then it takes a long time to top the second time, only 2 gold coins will be obtained.
Players know the lower limit of gold coins that can be obtained from gold bricks, but if you change the gold coin upper limit, few people can give an accurate answer. At least in 1985, when Super Mario Bros. was released, players felt that putting up 10 coins was the limit.
In 1987, an English version of Nintendo's official Guidebook was published. The guide book draws the scene design of each level, annotates all the hidden bricks in the game, and directly uses the T letter to represent "Ten-coin blocks".
During the actual gameplay, some players are able to knock out more coins from gold bricks. After the popularization of the controller with the variable speed and connecting point functions, players can make faster jumps and top bricks, and it is no longer difficult to top more than 10 gold coins from the gold bricks, but the limit is still no one can hammer.
The gold cap for gold bricks, the final answer to this question will surely be hidden in the source code of the game. Nowadays, when it comes to people who are still working on the source code of the game, we will most likely think of the fast-track players who are pursuing the ultimate speed of the level.
On April 10, a fast-track player named Kosmic announced the answer to the question. Kosmic, a former world record holder for several speed-through projects in the original Super Mario Bros., released the answer for a simple reason: No one had done a similar study before, but the actual answer was close to common sense for top speed-through players.
"Why hasn't anyone ever gotten this coin before?"
If you want to understand the speed of Super Mario Bros., and even understand The results of Kosmic's research, you must first understand the "21-frame rule" used by the game.
A Frame Rule is similar to some kind of counter or timer, but not in seconds, but in frames. Most of the mechanics in the game are calculated and determined in a period of 21 frames (about 0.35 seconds), and every 21 frames is called a "Frame Rule".
For example, this rule works when Mario passes through a level, i.e. lowers the flag at the end of the level and enters the castle. No matter which frame mario enters the castle in 21 frames, he has to wait for 6 "frame rules" to officially pass this level and then see the next scene.
However, the game code will count the currently running "frame rule" as the first "frame rule", wait until the number of frames remaining in this "frame rule" is complete, and then calculate the remaining 5 "frame rules" (105 frames, about 1.8 seconds). Assuming that the current "frame rule" has n frames left, the total time the player needs to wait is actually n+105 frames, that is, between 106 frames and 126 frames (1.8 seconds to 2.1 seconds).
As players have speculated for more than thirty years, the number of gold coins in gold bricks is not a fixed amount, and it does require players to hit as many times as possible in a limited time, and this limited time is undoubtedly affected by the "frame rule".
Kosmic released the game's source code associated with the gold bricks, which showed that the time limit was "0b" in hexadecimal, which was replaced by decimal, which was 11 "frame rules".
The first "frame rule" may be between 1 frame and 21 frames, and the remaining number of frames is still set to n; the next 10 frame rules are all full 21 frames, for a total of 210 frames. It follows from this that the total time to hit the gold bricks is n+210 frames, that is, 211 frames to 231 frames.
Obviously, when the game's "Frame Rules" timer is in frame 1, letting Mario hit the gold bricks can get the longest 230 frames (shaved off frame 1, about 3.8 seconds) and eat the most gold coins.
However, on this basis, the gold bricks have a 16-frame cooldown to refresh the gold coins, and hitting the bricks during this cooldown time will not get extra coins.
Too fast is not necessarily a good thing
Take the most famous gold brick in the 1-1 level, for example, most players have generally eaten mushrooms that can become larger, and Mario's head is only one brick away from the gold brick, and the two consecutive jumps are separated by 15 frames. If you change to the small Mario who does not eat mushrooms, the distance is extended to two bricks, and this time will be changed to 23 frames.
Therefore, suppose that in the best case scenario, the large Mario pauses for 1 frame after each landing, that is, jumps every 16 frames. In this way, he can get up to 14 coins in 230 frames, and the last 6 frames remain.
Pause at frame 10
When the 11 "frame rules" have passed, the last gold coin will remain in the bricks. Counting the gold coins in frame 1, it can be added up to show that the theoretical maximum gold coin for gold bricks is 16 coins.
Of course, the theoretical upper limit is only the theoretical upper limit, and taking out all 16 gold coins from the gold bricks is to operate frame by frame like Speedpass, which is a way to challenge the limits of human beings. Letting Mario take off perfectly in the first few frames of a certain "frame rule" and make a precise jump every 16 frames is definitely not an operation that ordinary players can easily achieve.
But speed-through players have always been pushing the limits of humanity. As far as Kosmic knows, at least two people in the original Super Mario Bros. Express community managed to top 16 gold coins without the help of auxiliary tools such as the Frame Rules counter, and one of them was himself.
On October 1, 2020, Nintendo launched the battle royale game Super Mario Bros. 35. The game fully follows the level and "frame rules" design of the original works, and Kosmic is also easy to play. In an attempt on October 7, Kosmic pushed out 16 gold coins from the gold bricks of the 1-1 level, and in a gleeful way, he uploaded footage of the game to Twitter.
Another speedpass player is Andrew G, who set a world record for completing the level with the highest score on October 18, 2016: 3663400 points. In the video, AndrewG tops 16 coins from the gold bricks of levels 8-3.
AndrewG uses a modified version of the game capable of recording more than 1 million scores
We previously wrote an article for the original Mario Speed, which mentioned that the world record of the Speed Pass project is approaching the theoretical human limit.
Now it seems that even if we really reach the theoretical limit, we don't have to worry about speed players losing their jobs. At that point, they who know more about games than the developers will probably dig out interesting secrets from the game that no one has ever discovered, just like Kosmic found the 16th gold coin in the brick.