The Complete History of the A Button Challenge
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a deep-dive rabbit hole showing extraordinary knowledge of game internals.
What it is
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 by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends pests · 2023-07 · on “Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]”
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.
Recommends houseatrielah · 2024-02 · on “Ask HN: What niche YouTube rabbit hole do you recommend?”
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]
Recommends g___ · 2024-04 · on “Super Mario 64's invisible walls explained [video]”
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]
Cites TheRoque · 2023-09 · on “Programming Is Hard”
> 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]
Cites fl0ki · 2024-05 · on “Super Mario 64's unopenable door has been opened [video]”
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.