SM64’s Unopenable Door Has Finally Been Opened!
Summary
TLDRIn a fascinating exploration of Super Mario 64, a video script details the discovery of a long-unsolved mystery: opening the seemingly unopenable door in Cool, Cool Mountain. The video explains the game mechanics behind doors that lead to new areas and how a player, Alex Palix, finally managed to open this particular door using a clever trick involving the mother penguin's hitbox and Mario's turning action. This discovery, while not providing a time-saving strategy in gameplay, marks a significant achievement in the game's community. The video also features a member event, where subscribers participate in a unique race as 3D marbles, adding a personal touch and interactive element to the content.
Takeaways
- 🎮 In Super Mario 64, a star in Cool, Cool Mountain can be collected by exiting the cabin at the bottom of the mountain after going down the slide.
- 🚪 Players have long tried to re-enter the cabin from the bottom, but it was believed to be impossible due to the door's design and the cabin wall blocking access.
- 🔍 The door in question is a special type that unloads the current area and warps to a new one, unlike regular doors which simply open to the other side.
- 🕹️ Clipping through doors can bypass them, but not with special doors that require opening to transition areas, which is the case with the Cool, Cool Mountain door.
- 🏠 The door is fully functional but designed without a doorknob on the outside, and the cabin wall prevents players from getting close enough to open it.
- 🤔 The challenge remained until April 22nd, 2024, when a player named Alex Palix discovered a method to open the door using a combination of actions and game mechanics.
- 🐧 The mother penguin's hitbox can be used to push Mario through the cabin wall, but the challenge was to do so while in a walking action, not in freefall.
- 🛫 By exploiting the game's code, where turning around leads to a brief walking action even in midair, Alex Palix managed to open the door with a single frame of walking action.
- 🕰️ Despite the discovery, the technique of opening the door does not save time in gameplay, as the slide still needs to be descended and additional steps taken.
- 📺 The video also features a member event where subscribers are involved in a race scenario within the game, showcasing a unique way for the creator to engage with the audience.
- 💰 The creator prefers member events as an alternative to sponsorships, allowing them to maintain authenticity and avoid promoting products they are not passionate about.
Q & A
In Super Mario 64, what is the purpose of the star in Cool, Cool Mountain?
-The star in Cool, Cool Mountain is collected by entering the cabin at the top of the mountain, going down the slide, and exiting the cabin at the bottom, which then spawns the star for the player to collect.
Why can't players re-enter the cabin from the bottom of Cool, Cool Mountain?
-Players cannot re-enter the cabin from the bottom because the cabin wall blocks them from getting close enough to the door to open it, and the door model lacks a doorknob on the outside.
How does the door in Cool, Cool Mountain function within the game's mechanics?
-The door in Cool, Cool Mountain is a special type that unloads the current slide area and warps the player to the outside area when opened from the inside.
What is the significance of the door's hitbox in relation to the cabin wall?
-The door's hitbox has two parts, the south part which is inside the wall hitbox and the north part which is in the air. The south part cannot be accessed due to the wall pushing the player away, and the north part, while reachable, does not allow the door to be opened because the player is in freefall, not walking.
How did Alex Palix manage to open the previously unopenable door in Cool, Cool Mountain?
-Alex Palix used a combination of the mother penguin's hitbox to push Mario through the cabin wall and into the door's hitbox, and a turn-around action that briefly put Mario in a walking action midair, allowing him to open the door.
Does the technique discovered by Alex Palix to open the door save time in speedruns?
-Despite the ability to skip the slide by entering the cabin from the bottom and using the technique to open the door, it does not save any time due to the necessity of still reaching the bottom of the course and interacting with the mother penguin.
What is the role of the turning around action in enabling Mario to open the door?
-The turning around action allows Mario to transition into a walking action even after leaving the ground, which is an unexpected behavior in the game's programming. This one-frame walking action in midair is exploited to open the door.
What happens to Mario when he opens the door using the discovered technique?
-When Mario opens the door, he downwarps to the death barrier, but he is not killed because the death barrier has no effect when Mario is in a cutscene action, such as opening a door.
What is the purpose of the member events at the end of the video?
-Member events are a way for the content creator to involve their paying subscribers in the video. It's an alternative to sponsorships and allows the creator to express creativity by placing members in interesting scenarios within the game.
How does the member event in this video work?
-The member event involves all the members being turned into 3D marbles and rolling down a slide in a race. The first to cross the finish line without falling off the slide wins.
What does the content creator prefer about member events compared to sponsorships?
-The content creator prefers member events because they allow for direct support from the audience without having to promote or endorse products they may not be passionate about or that could potentially engage in unethical business practices.
How does the content creator address the issue of not wanting to associate with companies that might engage in shady practices?
-The content creator avoids this issue by not accepting sponsorships and instead opting for member events, which allows them to maintain control over the content and not risk their reputation based on the actions of a sponsored company.
Outlines
🕹️ The Mystery of the Unopenable Door in Super Mario 64
This paragraph delves into the peculiarity of a door in the Cool, Cool Mountain level of Super Mario 64 that players have long attempted to open from the outside, to no avail. The narrator explains the mechanics of how doors function in the game, distinguishing between regular doors that simply move the character from one side to the other and special doors that trigger area transitions. The Cool, Cool Mountain door is of the latter type, and the reason it cannot be opened from the outside is due to the cabin wall that blocks access. However, using game manipulation, it's shown that the door could theoretically be opened if the wall wasn't in the way. The paragraph concludes with the revelation that, despite the door being fully functional, it cannot be opened through normal gameplay due to the game's mechanics and the physical barriers within the level design.
🐧 Innovative Strategy to Open the 'Unopenable' Door
The second paragraph narrates the surprising discovery made by a player named Alex Palix, who found a way to open the previously unopenable door in Super Mario 64. The summary explains how the mother penguin's hitbox can be used to push Mario into the door's hitbox, but the challenge is that Mario cannot open doors while in freefall. Alex Palix's innovative solution involves using the turning around action in the game to transition from a freefall state to a walking state within a single frame, which allows Mario to open the door. The paragraph also discusses the implications of this discovery for speedrunning the game and concludes with the outcome that, while the technique is impressive, it does not save time in completing the level.
🏆 Member Event: A Competitive Slide Down in Super Mario 64
The final paragraph describes a unique member event held for the channel's supporters. The event involves transforming members into 3D marbles and having them participate in a race down the slide from the Cool, Cool Mountain level. The rules are simple: avoid falling off the slide, and the first to cross the finish line wins. The race is intense, with many participants getting eliminated at various turns and straightaways. The narrative playfully describes the competition, highlighting the strategies and mayhem of the race. Ultimately, Midnight posting is declared the winner, with a few other members also making it to the end. The paragraph concludes with an invitation for viewers to become members to participate in future events and an expression of the content creator's preference for member support over sponsorships.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Super Mario 64
💡Cool, Cool Mountain
💡Door Hitbox
💡Mother Penguin
💡Freefall Action
💡Turning Around Action
💡Door-Opening Action
💡Death Barrier
💡Member Event
💡Cutscene Action
💡Glitch Exploitation
Highlights
In Super Mario 64, a star in Cool, Cool Mountain can be obtained by entering the cabin at the top, sliding down, and exiting at the bottom.
Players have long tried to re-enter the cabin from the bottom, but the door appears to be non-functional from that side.
Most doors in the game simply transition between areas, but some special doors unload the current area and load a new one upon opening.
The door in Cool, Cool Mountain is a special type that requires opening to trigger the transition to a new area.
The door from the slide area to the outside is functional, but the reverse door has never been opened by players.
The reason the door can't be opened from the outside is due to the cabin wall blocking access, not because the door is broken.
If the cabin walls were removed, the door could be accessed and opened normally.
The door's hitbox is divided into two parts, one of which is blocked by the cabin wall.
Mario must be walking to open the door; other actions do not trigger the door's opening.
Using the mother penguin's hitbox, a player can push Mario into the door's hitbox, but the door won't open if he's in freefall.
For 28 years, the door was considered impossible to open until Alex Palix discovered a method on April 22nd, 2024.
The turning around action in Mario's code allows for a brief frame of walking in midair, which can be used to open the door.
This discovery does not save time in gameplay, as the slide must still be traversed to reach the door.
The video includes a member event where subscribers are turned into 3D marbles and participate in a race down the slide.
The member event is an alternative to sponsorships, allowing subscribers to be part of the video and support the content creator.
The race concludes with Midnight posting as the winner, followed by a ranking of all participants.
The video emphasizes the importance of creativity and community involvement over traditional monetization methods.
The content creator expresses gratitude for the support and explains the appeal of member events for both the audience and themselves.
Transcripts
In Super Mario 64, there’s a star in Cool, Cool Mountain that goes as follows. You enter the cabin
at the top of the mountain, go all the way down the slide, and then exit from the cabin at the
bottom of the mountain. And that spawns the star for you to collect. But something everyone always
tries is going back into the door. Though as you find out, that doesn’t work. And let me tell you,
as a kid, I really wanted to get back in there. I mean, we were just in there, but the idea of
a door that you can’t open from this side just made me want to open that much more.
And let me clarify something. For most doors in the game, opening them just takes you from one
side of the door to the other. And so if you clip through the door, like by getting pushed
by an object, then you can bypass the door. But some doors are special, because opening
them unloads the current area and warps you to a new area. If you clip through this kind of door,
you don’t actually go to the new area. Instead, you just end up in a sort of fake area behind the
door. In other words, the only way to load the new area is to literally open the door, because
that triggers the transition between areas. Now the door in Cool, Cool Mountain is the kind that
loads a new area. See, opening it unloads the slide area and loads the outside area.
Now, since there are two different areas involved, there are two different door objects involved.
There’s one door in the slide area that warps you outside. Everyone’s opened that door before. And
there’s one door that’s outside that warps you back into the slide. But no one’s ever
opened that door before. So to emphasize, this is actually a fully functional door,
despite that it was given a special model that doesn’t have a doorknob on the outside.
So the reason you can’t open the door from the outside is NOT because the door doesn’t work,
but simply because the cabin wall blocks you from getting close enough to the door to open
it. As you can see on the right, the wall triangles cover the whole side of the cabin,
without any opening for the door. But if the walls were gone, as I’ve done here with hacks, then we
could get close enough to the door to open it and re-enter the cabin. That raises the question,
can we open the door without any hacks? Well, going back to the door, let’s look
at it from above. Here are the floor triangles around the cabin. Note that there are no floor
triangles inside the cabin. Here’s the door’s hitbox. So if Mario walks into that hitbox,
he opens the door. And to emphasize, he must be walking to open the door. No other action works.
And then here’s the cabin wall, and its hitbox. If Mario enters that hitbox, he gets pushed south.
So the door’s hitbox basically has 2 parts to it. The south part,
that’s inside the wall hitbox. And the north part, that’s not inside the wall hitbox,
but it’s in the air. Remember, for Mario to open the door, he has to walk into the
door hitbox. But that’s seemingly impossible for both parts of the hitbox, for different reasons.
For the south part of the hitbox, if Mario tries to walk into it,
the wall pushes him away to the south. This wall push happens every time he moves forwards,
and so he’s not able to be inside the door’s hitbox when the game checks if he’s touching it.
And for the north part of the hitbox, it is possible to get there. See,
we can deliver the baby penguin to the mother penguin, and then regrab the baby penguin to
make the mother penguin get mad at us and follow us around. And the mother penguin has a hitbox
that pushes Mario outwards. So we can use the mother penguin’s hitbox to push Mario through
the cabin wall and into the door hitbox. But even though he touches the north part of the hitbox,
he still doesn’t open the door, because he’s in freefall, not in the walking action.
So the door seems impossible to open. And that’s what everyone believed for
28 years. Until April 22nd, 2024, when Alex Palix posted this video on discord.
He had found a way to do it! But how does it work? Well, we already knew you could use
the mother penguin to clip behind the wall. But of course, since there’s no floor there,
that puts Mario into freefall, and you can’t open doors in freefall, only when walking.
So to solve this, Alex Palix did a turn around. See, there’s an interesting thing
about the turning around action, which I’ve explained in a previous video, and that’s
what actually gave Alex the idea to use it to open the cabin door. But I’ll explain it again
now. So when Mario turns around, he goes into the turning around action. And then a bit later,
he transitions into the walking action, because he finished turning around.
Here’s the code for the turning around action, and here’s the relevant logic. So when Mario finishes
turning around, he goes into the walking action. But a bit earlier, we have the code that handles
his movement. This one says, if Mario leaves the ground, put him into the freefall action. So
the issue is that the programmers never expected these two conditions to happen on the same frame.
If they do, then the logic goes like this. First, Mario left the ground,
so he goes into the freefall action. And then second, Mario finished turning around,
and so he goes into the walking action. So that first action change gets overwritten
by the second action change. And so even though Mario left the ground, he still ends up in the
walking action. Now this exploit by itself just results in one frame of walking in midair before
transitioning to freefall on the next frame. But that one frame of walking in the air is all
we needed, and that was enough to open the door. Let’s play it again. On this frame,
the mother penguin’s hitbox pushes Mario through the wall and into the air. And also on that frame,
Mario finished turning around. So first his action got set to freefall, and then his action
got set to walking. And since he’s now walking inside the door’s hitbox, he opens the door.
And you’ll notice that Mario downwarps to the death barrier when he opens the door,
because Mario’s programmed to snap to the floor every frame when he’s in the door-opening action.
But fortunately, the death barrier doesn’t kill him, because it has no effect when Mario’s in
a cutscene action, like opening a door. Now one question that this brings up is
does this technique save time in a run? After all, if we can enter the cabin at the bottom,
then we can just exit from there and get the star, skipping the whole slide.
So let’s do a side-by-side comparison. On the left, I’m showing the current strat for the star,
which involves entering the cabin at the top of the level, going all the way down,
and then exiting from the cabin at the bottom of the level to get the star. And on the right,
I’m showing the potential new strat for the star, which involves going into the cabin at the bottom
of the level, and then immediately exiting to get the star. But even in this new strat,
we still have to spend time going to the bottom of the course. And then there’s the whole process
of interacting with the mother penguin and luring her into place. And interestingly,
triggering the star this way actually messes up the camera during the star’s cutscene,
though that doesn’t cause any trouble. And so in conclusion, even though we can
use this technique to skip the whole slide, it doesn’t actually save any time. But regardless,
it is pretty cool that Super Mario 64’s unopenable door has now finally been opened!
And now, for this video’s member event. In case you missed it from my last video,
all my regular videos from now on are gonna have a member event at the end, where all the
member names participate in the event Now last time, there were only 13 members. But this time,
let’s just say we have quite a few more. Over 200! So thanks everyone, it really does mean a
lot to me that you guys are so willing to support me! And if all goes well, this can become my full
time job! So if you’re not a member and you want to get in on the action, you can click on
the join button below the video or the link in the description. It’s sort of like subscribing
to someone on Twitch, where you pay them a little money each month. The lowest tier is $5,
but you can pay a little more to get more perks, like a colored name, a gradient name, a moving
gradient name, or for me to call out your name. And like I said, each member event will be
different. This time, I turned everyone into 3D marbles. So welcome everyone. Glad you
could make it. Haven’t seen you in a while. Hey, nice to meet you. Yo what’s up? How’s
your life been going? Long time no see. Now the rules are simple. You guys are
all gonna be rolling down the slide. If you fall off the slide, you die. Also,
the shortcut is off limits. And so basically, the first person to cross the finish line wins. So,
does everybody understand the rules? You my good sir. Mr. uh Lunarcomplex. May
I call you Lunar? Errr! Okay, Mr. Complex. Do you understand the rules? Yeah sorry,
I was just still thinkin’ about the door, it was pretty cool. Oh okay, I’ll keep that in
mind. But let’s try our best in the race, okay? And so without any further ado, let’s begin!
Okay, off to a good start. In the back, there’s a mad dash to get out of the cabin,
and squeeze through that tiny opening. But it looks like everybody made it onto the slide. Oof,
we already lost our first person, OwlBag. And there goes another one! Man, you guys
are ruthless! Is winning really worth pushing your fellow competitors off the edge? Yes, yes it is.
And now the first turn of the slide. You guys are doing pretty good so far, no casualties. Uh! There
they go. We lost Shanna, Eric Vilas, Mangomens. It’s just pure mayhem on this turn! We also lost
Chrixiam1998 and hollow220. And remember, that was just the first turn, there’s way more turns to
come on the slide. Now we’ve lost Kyle Fluharty, Kaydax, Cubik, Hannah, Chillaxel, Shaun Glaze,
Lugmillord, Rage Man, SomeKindOfTaco, and Fat Goomba. Man, there is some aggression going
on at the back of the group. I mean I know you guys want to win, but can’t you have a little
more decorum like the front of the group? It’s like ripples of collision propagating backwards.
Now we’ve lost thebroz. I guess you guys weren’t his bro. And there goes Chase T. Now a couple more
turns coming up. Can you guys handle it? Let’s see. Uh! Pushing each other off on the far side
of the slide. And now we’ve lost Valton Zenola. Gone, but not forgotten. But forget about them,
we’re on the final stretch of the slide. Down to the elite few. And now the even eliter few.
Now this part of the slide is pretty straight, so it seems like you guys are maintaining an
uneasy truce to not push each other off, despite ramming into each other at every opportunity. Uh!
We’re losing some more people at this little turn. And we’re even losing some people on the straight
part. Come on guys, just last a little bit longer and you’ll make it into the tunnel. Just a few
more turns. And now we’ve lost Hot Joe! Not Hot Joe! He was so hot, he melted the ice and slipped
off. A few more casualties on that last turn, but we’re finally in the tunnel. So congrats to our 6
finalists: Cameron Cookl, Hum4n1ty, Midnight posting, movezig5, Protectator, Scarristo.
And lastly, the ice bridge. Can they all make it across? Uh! We lost Hum4n1ty. And for the other 5,
they all made it! But who got first? Well, if we check the instant replay, we can see that Midnight
posting was the first to cross the finish line! So, congrats to our first place finisher,
Midnight posting. And good job to the other people who also made it to the end. And everyone else
will be ranked by how long they lasted in the race before dying. So yeah, that’s what a member event
is like. So if you want to get in on the next one, consider becoming a member of my channel. Like,
I know other YouTubers will take sponsorships and talk about how a company’s product revolutionized
their life, or something like that. And I’m not hating on them, but that just doesn’t feel like
me. Like, I don’t use many products, and of the ones I do use, I’m not like super passionate
about them. So I really don’t want to have to pretend to like some product to get you to buy
it just so I can make money. Plus, what if I did back a company, and then it turned out they were
doing some shady business practices or something? I don’t want to be associated with that. I don’t
wanna stake my reputation on some thing that I have no control over. And so that’s why I
like these member events. It’s like the perfect alternative that feels right for me. You guys
get to pay to be in the video and participate in the event. And I get to express my creativity by
putting you guys into interesting scenarios in the game. So yeah, that’s why I’m glad I
came up with this idea of member events. But let me know what you think in the comments.
And one more thing. Mr. Lunarcomplex, I’ve been thinking about what you said, and you did try your
best in the race, so I have an idea that I think you’ll adore! Yo, I’m the doorknob on the door!
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