Contains Super Mario Bros. blocks. Get more coins than you think

Without really thinking about it, what is the maximum number of coins you can take out of multiple coin blocks originally Super Mario Bros.? Did you say 10? Well, you are wrong, but it is not your fault. You didn’t dive as deep into the 37-year-old game icon as a complete eccentric.

We now know that Super Mario Bros. The blocks have a time limit instead of a coin limit, allowing players to repeatedly hit Mario’s head on their bottom sides within a few seconds to grab as many coins as possible. But this was not always public knowledge. Usually using the buttons under these blocks is equivalent to 10 coins, even the official strategy guides of the era Referred to as blocks of 10 coins.

High level cosmic Super Mario Bros. The player who currently holds 10 times higher In the most popular sprint category of the classic Nintendo game, recently shared an amazing video all about blocks of coins. It seems that it is possible to get up to 16 coins from these blocks, but of course, like this The feat required a complex knowledge of game programming and several ideal inputs to the framework.

If you are at all accustomed Super Mario Bros. Running fast, you’ve probably heard of the “frame rule”, which is a mathematical constant ubiquitous in game code that also affects coin blocks.

Frame base is a repeating cycle of 21 frames Super Mario Bros. It is used to dictate different aspects of the game. For example, level transitions do not occur until the frame base counter has rolled more than six times, but the current frame base when the stage is completed should not be fully counted. It can be anywhere from its first frame to its 21st frame, which means that level transitions range from 106 frames (~1.8 seconds) to 126 frames (~2.1 seconds).

Learn more about frame rules and how they affect Super Mario Bros. World records, be sure to check out the video below by Bismuth, another sprinter. He is much smarter than me.

Coin blocks can only be hit, Kosmic explains, within 11 ticks of the frame base counter right after Mario’s first interaction with said block. Thus, improving the coins that you can squeeze out of the block, it follows the opposite principle such as reducing the time between level transitions. Instead of trying to complete a stage in End From the base of the frame to save the frames, you want to multiply the coin block by beginning From the base of the frame to give Mario more time to jump.

Cosmic calculates that the maximum time to hit a coin is 230 frames (about 3.8 seconds) after the first hit. swears who – which With 16 frames, Mario needs to wait for the block animation to run before it gets hit again, and you get 14 hits. Add who – which The free coin you get at the beginning and end of this entire sequence (the block remains active until you tap it again after its counter expires), the result is a total of 16 coins.

Go ahead and take a break if you find all this math overwhelming. The rest of this blog will be waiting for you when you return.

Perhaps the most incredible is the fact that skilled Super Mario Bros. Players can sometimes do this without the visible frame rules counter. An example is Kosmic himself getting a block of 16 coins in the middle of a Super Mario Bros. 35 The ‘Rest in Peace’ match and legendary sprinter AndrewG does it while run high score Back in 2016.

Super Mario Bros. A great example of how seemingly simple and old-fashioned games can hide incredibly technical secrets under their pixelated interfaces. It may be the most famous game in history, but its three decades and countless times of play have yet to reveal all its intricacies to the common player. We are very fortunate that knowledgeable people like Kosmic are here to provide these fun and informative lessons on how Nintendo developed one of the greatest video games of all time.