Player Pierces 36-Year-Old Super Mario Bros. Secret
The speedrunner known as Kosmic recently posted a video to YouTube which details how players can get up to 16 coins out of the multi-coin blocks in Super Mario Bros. despite everyone assuming this number to have been ten for most of the last 36 years. The multi-coin blocks apparently have a time limit rather than a coin limit, so with enough skill and some good luck, players can earn Mario a bit more cash.
“Before we can talk about multi-coin blocks, we need to talk about frame rules,” Kosmic explains. “Super Mario Bros. uses a lot of different timers to regulate things like level transitions, enemy behavior, and so on. That’s usually achieved by the game waiting an arbitrary number of frame rules or 0.35 second chunks of time before something happens.”
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Kosmic describes how a frame rule is basically a repeating cycle of 21 frames that Super Mario Bros. uses to determine when events take place. The game is in other words constantly counting down from 21. When a stage is completed for example, the current cycle can be anywhere between 21 and 1, meaning that level transitions are between 106 and 126 frames. Kosmic notes how “at the end of stages, it waits six frame rules after the flag appears before transitioning to the next level.”
Kosmic points out that “multi-coin blocks in the original Super Mario Bros. don’t have a fixed amount of coins you can get from them. The maximum number you can get depends on how many times you can jump into the block within a certain amount of time.” Kosmic goes on to say that “as you may have guessed, the game uses frame rules to determine that amount of time.” The trick is that players are actually given “11 ticks of the frame rule
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