Super Metroid · Super Nintendo · Out-of-bounds vertical traversal · Saves: Enables entire glitched categories, skipping most of the game · Documented: 2000
By getting Samus stuck inside a wall and repeatedly toggling the X-Ray Scope, runners force the game to shunt her upward five pixels at a time — climbing out of bounds and skipping vast swathes of the game.
The X-Ray Climb is the foundational out-of-bounds technique in Super Metroid speedrunning, and it exploits a conflict between two of the game's systems. Samus can occupy two vertical states, crouching and standing, and the game will resolve a conflict between them by forcing her into the standing position — moving her up by five pixels in the process. Ordinarily this never matters. Inside a wall, it becomes a ladder. Executing it requires the X-Ray Scope. The runner gets Samus stuck in a wall — most commonly by exploiting a door transition — while standing, then crouches. Using the X-Ray Scope, they face the opposite direction and immediately cancel the scope. The game, resolving the resulting state conflict, forces Samus back to standing and lifts her five pixels. Repeat this, and she ascends through solid terrain into the space above and beyond the level as designed. The execution is punishing and frame-precise. The optimal cycle, starting from a crouch, is to hold run for eleven frames, press backward for one, press down for one, and wait four — repeated over and over, sometimes for a very long time, to gain meaningful height. Runners must also be careful not to morph into a ball partway through, which softlocks the game entirely; many pause and unassign the Morph Ball beforehand purely to remove the risk. The payoff is enormous. Once Samus is out of bounds, the ordinary structure of Planet Zebes ceases to constrain her, and she can drop into rooms she has no business reaching — bypassing bosses, items, and entire regions. Most out-of-bounds categories in Super Metroid speedrunning, including Any% Glitched, depend on X-Ray Climbing to function, making it the single technique that unlocked the game's most extreme routes. It is a perfect example of speedrunners weaponising an incidental engine behaviour into a tool that dismantles a game's entire architecture.
Super Metroid resolves a conflict between Samus's crouching and standing states by forcing her upright — and lifting her five pixels to make room. Harmless in open space, this becomes a means of ascent when she is embedded in a wall. The runner wedges Samus into terrain, typically through a door transition, crouches, then uses the X-Ray Scope while turning to face the opposite direction and cancels it immediately. The game resolves the confusion by standing her up, and she rises five pixels into the wall. Repeated with frame-perfect timing — eleven frames of run, one backward, one down, four of waiting — this inches her up through solid rock and out of the level entirely.
Once Samus is out of bounds, Zebes stops being a designed space and becomes a set of rooms she can enter in any order. Bosses, items, and whole regions can simply be skipped, and the intended progression collapses. Nearly every out-of-bounds category in Super Metroid speedrunning, Any% Glitched among them, is built on X-Ray Climbing, which makes it the technique that unlocked the game's most radical routes. The danger is real — morphing into a ball mid-climb softlocks the game outright, so runners often unassign the Morph Ball beforehand — but the reward is nothing less than the dismantling of the game's entire architecture.