Super Mario World Rube Goldberg

Video games are hard. That’s why it’s so much easier to use that invincibility cheat to remove a pesky health bar or a weapons cheat to complete an early DOOM level with the infamous BFG.

Sometimes though, having to actually play the levels gets frustrating – and it would be much easier to not have to play at all.

Thanks to one Super Mario World amateur programmer, you can now watch the game play itself. The reprogrammed level, videotaped in the clip, acts like a virtualized Rube Goldberg machine.

Named after an American cartoonist with a penchant for drawing overcomplicated devices to complete the most basic actions, these machines use one action to trigger another with many such triggers in a row.

Mario’s world provides plenty of fodder for bizarre and often unbelievable chain reactions. At times, Mario jumps on 10 koopas in a row, followed by a narrow slide into an alley of bricks and jumps. At one point, he gets on Yoshi, is knocked off of Yoshi, and then gets on him again.

Following a green shell down a twisting hill, he comes within inches of its business end many times but remains within safety. As Mario jumps around the screen, hitting every music note brick in just the right place, he manages to hit the edge of the next walkway dead on.

It’s hard to imagine the amount of effort that went into programming this level, not just in insuring that the tracks work, but in the creativity while initially designing them.

There is one area where Mario takes a back seat as the machine’s focus and rides a line of skulls at the bottom of the screen as the shell navigates an impossible maze. It rides along, killing koopas and collecting coins, until it removes the exact block that would have knocked Mario off of his trusty ride.

The only way you could mess up this intricate ballet is to actually pick up the controller.

– Eric Meyers, asst. copy editor

Published on September 26, 2007 at 12:00 pm