The Complete History of the A Button Challenge on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2023–2024.
documentary · evergreen
A five-hour documentary history of the Super Mario 64 A button challenge, which aims to beat the game with as few A presses as possible. It covers the bugs and exploits discovered over the years.
Recommended as a deep-dive rabbit hole showing extraordinary knowledge of game internals.
“The amount of knowledge and abuse of bugs these guys are performing is insane.”
5 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
For over a decade, the author of this video has been leading an effort to complete Super Mario 64 with the smallest amount of A presses, often using extremely complex strategies. Here's a 5h video with the history. Bismuth says the history video took roughly 1500-2000 hours. ▶ this video
in “Super Mario 64's invisible walls explained [video]” · View on HN
Langlangs program (The Dream: Riemann Hypothesis and F1 (RH Saga S1E1)) [link] History Dose (The Mongol vs. Order of Assassins War) [link] Beat Mario64 without hitting the A-Button (5h22m long!) ▶ this video
in “Ask HN: What niche YouTube rabbit hole do you recommend?” · View on HN
Complete History of the A Button Challenge ▶ this video It's over five hours long. I put it on in the background or to pass the time. The amount of knowledge and abuse of bugs these guys are performing is insane.
in “Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]” · View on HN
That was Bismuth, not pannenkoek2012 ▶ this video Though Bismuth does spend some time explaining why pannen took a break from making videos, which I'm very glad to see was temporary.
in “Super Mario 64's unopenable door has been opened [video]” · View on HN
> Games only hold a challenge until the game-writer's secrets are broken. Games ultimately are code themselves, and you can manipulate it to some extent, creating other infinitely complex interactions (source: advancements in speedrunning or various game challenges like the A press challenge [1]) [1] ▶ this video
in “Programming Is Hard” · View on HN