Cosmic Rays and Super Mario 64
- Edzel Sutanto
- Jan 13, 2024
- 3 min read
In 2013, during a speedrunning competition for the video game Super Mario Bros. 64, something remarkable happened. In what would have otherwise been an ordinary speedrun, the player DOTA_Teabag encountered a glitch that teleported his character up into the air, allowing him to skip a large portion of the level he was playing. This seemingly random occurrence gave him a significant advantage over other speedrunners and almost immediately, others too started to try and recreate this glitch. If successfully replicated, it would innovate the field of Mario 64 speedruns, changing the field completely.
But in the 10 years since DOTA_Teabag’s now mythical speedrun, nobody else has managed to recreate the glitch he encountered. So what really happened?
The answer: cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that enter Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. We can’t directly see them or feel them, but through a number of experiments (the first one being conducted by Victor Hess in 1912), we know that they definitely exist. As these rays enter the Earth, they create a wide range of particles, mostly pions, which then further decay and emit muons.
Muons are a type of atomic particle which are heavier than electrons and negatively charged. But it has one particular quality which is important to explain how it relates to DOTA_Teabag’s Mario 64 speedrun: muons can penetrate matter relatively well. Crucially, they can penetrate matter better than other, lighter fundamental particles because they are not as easily stopped by the electromagnetic forces between charged particles in matter.
The muon’s ability to penetrate matter makes it the perfect suspect in the mystery of the Mario 64 speedrun glitch. It’s crime? Passing through a Nintendo 64 and flipping a byte. Being charged, the muon that likely penetrated DOTA_Teabag’s N64 turned either a 0 to a 1 or a 1 to a 0. And this caused his in-game position to suddenly move vertically upwards, skipping a huge portion of a level, putting him ahead of his speedrunning competitors and baffling the speedrunning community for years to come.
But it turns out, this isn’t the first time cosmic rays have messed with computer hardware. In fact, there’s a name for when things like this happen. A single-event upset. In most cases, these single-event upsets aren’t a good thing. A single-event upset was the reason for a malfunction in the flight control systems of Qantas Flight 72 that severely injured the plane’s passengers and crew, almost leading to a crash. The single-event upset that saved time on DOTA_Teabag’s speedrun is a rare instance of a single-event upset being a good thing. And it may be the only case of a single-event upset having a positive effect that we will see in our lifetimes.
Because despite the high frequency at which cosmic rays enter earth (about 1 cosmic ray per square centimeter per second), the chance of a single atomic particle striking a specific part of an N64 chip, at the perfect moment for someone to shave time of their Super Mario 64 speedrun, is effectively 0.
This all points to one simple fact: DOTA_Teabag was a very, very lucky guy. He happened to be at the right place, at the right time, playing the right game. And that day in 2013, through no choice of his own, he made speedrunning history. A glitch that happened once to him and will likely never happen again to anyone else. When you strip the science away, it starts to look like nothing short of divine intervention.
References:
Comments