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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

There is something amazing about artforms when the performers and spectators have an appreciation for the subtlest details. Mario speedruns are an oddball artform surely, but right now it has enough of a community to appreciate those details. For example, from the article I gather to "clip the wall to warp into the first level of world four" is a well-known and discussed precision move in the genre.

It reminds me a lot of classical ballet. There the moves and forms have been developed over centuries. As a non-expert I can go to a show and see they dance beautifully. An expert may be disappointed by the same performance -- were the hands poised just so; were the movements optimally precise?

It takes a lot of feedback between knowledgeable fans and expert performers to push an artform to its highest levels of excellence.

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Your observation of hyper-focus upon the tiniest nuances of two different art forms reminded me of the obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/915/

Naw, clipping the wall is taking advantage of a well known intentionally created bug where you walk through a wall to get to an area to skip levels. Every kid playing the game back in the 80s knew about it.

How is this different from what the previous post said?

i think you're referring simply to the warp zones, which are accessible with normal jumps. With wall clipping you don't go on top the wall, you go through it. See 1:10 and 2:04 on his video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gum4GI2Jr0s

No, I think he's referring to the technique of wall clipping you can use toward the end of 1-2 before you take the pipe back out to the flag.

Back in the 80s/90s kids would show how you could clip through the wall to the warp zone for two purposes:

1. as an alternative to jumping from the platform to the top of the screen.

2. More importantly, to get to level -1. You can do this because clipping through the wall Mario can arrive at the first warp zone pipe before the game registers that pipe as one of the labeled warp zone pipes. If you instead walk to the warp zone from the top of the screen Mario has to go all the way to the left before dropping down. And that would trigger the normal warp zones everyone is familiar with.

What the speed runners are doing is understanding the mechanics of wall clipping on a much deeper level. Rather than doing it to make Mario "moonwalk" or reach a special warp zone, they do it to push Mario forward on the screen. This allows them to do stuff like "wrong warp" and shave some frames off of their time to beat the game faster.

I think you're talking about the warping to the negative worlds. In the 80's we found out about a wall clipping method to get to the first warp tubes, but you ended up going to negative world numbers which never have an ending.

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