funny super mario 63 any% routes

weird flash fangame nonsense

The current Super Mario 63 Any% route uses the Level Designer Preserve to access an out-of-bounds warp pipe that takes the runner directly to Space, skipping Bowser’s Castle and the Clown Car Bowser fight, and then skips past every screen in the game. This route originally required playing the final Bowser fight without being able to see the gameplay, but I think a way around that might have been found? I’m not sure.

We will now be setting aside LDP and focusing on the No LDP category, which is usually what Super Mario 63 runners mean when they say “Any%” without any qualifiers.

The original bare-bones Super Mario 63 Any% route with no fancy speedrun techniques went as follows:

• Complete Tutorial 1

• Use the shortcut to do Bowser 1, in order to unlock Rocket and Turbo FLUDD

• Complete Tutorial 2

• Get Rocket and Turbo, then use the shortcut to enter Bowser’s Castle

• After skipping the big main lobby in Bowser’s Castle, go right to Turbo Room and complete it (unless you know how to Double Rocket, in which case you should do that)

• Play the rest of the game

We will now consider variations on this basic gameplan.

Basically Normal Routes

Basic Tutorial 2 Skip

Playing Tutorial 2 was slow back in the day, though people have gotten better at it—the really obnoxious RNG-based bird jump thing helps. But back in the day, or even still in the modern era if you aren't especially trying to break into the mid six minute times, it’s nice not to have to play Tutorial 2.

Rocket and turbo FLUDD are unlocked as soon as you touch the key at the end of Bowser 1—if you can get to the castle at that point, you’re good, you can go beat the game. The issue is that you can’t just exit level to get to the castle—the exit level functionality is disabled when you get the Bowser 1 key, and not reënabled until you finish Tutorial 2.

However, pausing and exiting level isn't the only way to get kicked out of a level—you can also game over. The lives mechanic isn’t enabled until you have at least one shine, but that’s fine, you can grab the shine from Eddie.

So the idea was to get Eddie’s shine, do Bowser 1, jump into a pit at the start of Tutorial 2 a bunch to game over, and then go finish the game from there.

Shortly after, people realized it was faster to take the first four deaths off the left edge of Bowser 1—the pit in Tutorial 2 was rather deep and took several seconds to die in—and then enter Tutorial 2 with no extra lives remaining.

Much later, probably after I found the Shine Cancel, I figured out you could cancel the animation that occurs when you grab the Bowser 1 key, and just jump off the edge in the Bowser fight arena, without entering Tutorial 2 at all.

Despite those optimizations, at the top level it’s still faster to just play Tutorial 2. But playing Tutorial 2 that fast is hard, so it’s only really at the very top level that it stops being worth it to skip.

Hover Only

What if you don’t want to bother with Bowser 1 at all? Well, technically you din’t really need rocket or turbo FLUDD. You can just finish out the game with only hover. This used to actually be fast, back when sub nine seemed like a really daunting goal and we had no idea how to double rocket or whatever.

One issue was that hover FLUDD is in a secret passageway that seems to require two shines to access. This isn’t too big a deal—after Eddie’s shine, you can grab Secret of the Mushroom, it’s only like a twenty second or so detour. You still enter the sling star to Bowser’s Castle much earlier than if you do all of Bowser 1—you’re just much less well-equipped for it, and bleed tons of time the whole rest of the run.

It turns out that with some clever out-of-bounds movement you don’t actually need any shines at all. You basically do a triple jump over a screen transition, so you can reach a lower screen transition from the other side. It’s actually not even a full minute slower than the normal route—the world record is better than my Any% PB.

Weird Shenanigans

Lag Glitch Hover Only

A forbidden technique we used to call “tab glitch” but which is now more often known as “lag glitch” could be used, among many other ridiculous clips and upwarps, to clip up and get hover FLUDD through the Bob-omb Battlefield room instead of the Shifting Sand Land room. This allows you to skip Secret of the Mushroom without knowing the out-of-bounds movement for SSL Early.

Turbo Room Skip

Suppose that you’re me, and you haven't found the Pause Double Rocket yet—if you know how to Double Rocket at all, you only know how to do it when playing as Luigi. But you do know about the Rocket Capture glitch: a partially-charged rocket that you cancelled by switching nozzles resumes where it left off, even if you don’t have any FLUDD energy or water left¹¹ Nowadays, that glitch is used for a lot of minor movement optimizations, but most significantly it lets you get one very helpful rocket off in the middle of Lethal Lava Land’s volcano during 100%.. Well, you don’t actually need a full-on double rocket to skip the Turbo Room—as Luigi you can even make it with just a really well placed double jump and rocket! So doing a rocket capture, hovering, and then rocketing is plenty. This suggests a route where you bring, not just rocket and turbo, but also hover into Bowser’s Castle, so you can skip the Turbo Room.

Now, the dumb part is that we thought you needed two shines, like in the Hover Only routes from that time period—so we did Eddie’s shine, but also Tutorial 2. But in retrospect, we were being total idiots. You don’t need any fancy OOB thing—you can literally just rocket up from the Bob-omb Battlefield room and grab hover that way.

If we had noticed this, it would have definitely been the fastest Any% route at the time, and possibly have made sub nine viable considerably sooner than it was. Incredibly funny missed opportunity.

Null File

The file select screen for Super Mario 63 asks the player to choose between File A, File B, File C, and File D. There is a secret fifth option. If you select a file, click “cancel”, and then very quickly click “play” or “create” before that button disappears, then you launch the game without having any file selected. This puts the game in a weird state—collecting a shine does nothing, all the star coins are blued out as if you’d already collected them, and Eddie doesn't show up. But bizarrely, you still unlock rocket and turbo after collecting the Bowser 1 key, and the game is entirely completable. Maybe you won’t get a completed save file afterwards, but you do get to watch the credits.

Double Tutorial 1

When you load a file, the game checks whether it’s an empty file by checking whether the file has any shines collected—or maybe star coins count too, I’m not sure. This mostly works fine, but in fact it’s possible to start a file, grab the Bowser 1 key without getting any shines along the way, and then quit to the main menu.

If you do this, then when you load the file, it’ll put you in Tutorial 1, with the Bowser 1 key, and with FLUDDs unlocked. So instead of getting Eddie’s shine and doing a game over, you can just play Tutorial 1 a second time! This isn’t faster, but it’s definitely funnier.

Level Designer Abuse

There are a couple ways the level designer can be abused that aren’t the full on Level Designer Preserve. Way back in the day, I used to do this weird 2012 version-exclusive thing where I popped into the level designer immediately at the start of the run, grabbed rocket and turbo in a custom level, and then started a file. This lets you bring rocket and turbo into Tutorial 1, which… makes it easier, but doesn't actually save enough time to be worth it if you’re good at normal Tutorial 1.

I had to actually make the community change the timing rules about that, because the original rules didn’t start time until you closed the sign at the start of Tutorial 1, which would've made the level designer detour not lose any time²² I think if it weren’t for this weird thing, I’d still want to start time on file select, not the sign—what if you do weird bird shenanigans and skip the sign, would your run have a time of zero? What if you wait for good goomba positioning before you close the sign?

But the bizarre level designer FLUDD thing is why the menuing all the way from clicking start has to be included, rather than time starting on clicking “create” for your file.. I was prescient enough to also change the time to end at the screen transition in the last room of Escape instead of on launching out of the sling star—now, most high-level runs skip the sling star, which was where time originally ended! So we would've had to change the timing rules eventually anyways.

The other level designer abuse thing you can do is more of a full-on Any% route, though. On the 2009 version of the game, you’d be dropped in the level designer room if you exited the level designer, instead of the game’s main menu. This means you can do Tutorial 2 skip without needing a game over by quitting game and reëntering your file through the level designer, which evades the check that throws you into Tutorial 2 upon launching a file the normal way if you’re supposed to be playing Tutorial 2. But if you want to do that, you need to first get five star coins and unlock the level designer… which is slower than just doing the game over.

This does, however, actually give you a faster Any% route for a hypothetical New Game+ category where you’re allowed to take advantage of starting the run with a second file that already has five star coins.