Super Mario World · SNES · 1990 · Arbitrary Code Execution · Discovered by SNES speedrun/TAS community
A jaw-dropping exploit that lets players "program" the SNES from inside Super Mario World, tricking the game into running memory as code and warping straight to the credits — or even booting entirely new games.
Super Mario World’s credits warp is the most celebrated example of in-game arbitrary code execution (ACE). By arranging sprites at precise coordinates and then getting Yoshi to eat a Chargin’ Chuck — something the game never anticipates — runners send the CPU jumping into "open bus" memory that has no legitimate instructions. Because the values in that region can be set by placing specific objects on screen, the player is effectively writing machine code by hand using shells, sprites, and item positions. Feeding it the right values makes the game set its mode to "credits," ending a full playthrough in under a minute. Runners perform this with extra controllers held down by rubber bands to supply precise input values. The same principle, taken to its extreme, has been used live to reprogram Super Mario World into playable versions of Pong, Snake, and Flappy Bird during charity marathons — an astonishing demonstration that a finished game cartridge is really just a computer waiting for instructions.
ACE is the logical endpoint of glitch hunting. Where most exploits bend a game’s rules, arbitrary code execution abandons them entirely: the player stops playing the game and starts programming the console that runs it. Super Mario World became the canonical demonstration because its physics and sprite systems leave just enough unguarded memory to hijack, and because its speedrun community was willing to map that memory instruction by instruction.
The cultural high point came at charity speedrun marathons, where performers used the exploit not merely to skip to the credits but to inject whole new programs — a working game of Snake, a Flappy Bird clone — into a 1990 cartridge, live, without any hardware modification. It reframed how people think about old games: not as fixed products but as general-purpose machines whose behaviour is limited only by how cleverly their memory can be manipulated from the controller.