Blink 🗞️ Slow News Day #84

Hey,

Want to know a burgeoning interest of mine that I’m a bit embarrassed about? It’s speedrunning. No, I’m not becoming a 100m sprinter, this is something entirely different.

This is the dominion of elite nerds who complete video games as fast as possible.

When people start ‘running’ a game, it’s basically about skill, learning patterns and the scripting of events, and optimising the routes taken. Then, it gets messier. Pushing games to glitch in beneficial ways. Beyond that, it gets into insane stuff like interpreting the game’s code and chaining unconnected events together to skip entire sections of the game. People can complete GTA Vice City in eight minutes, ffs.

It’s basically about pouring a ridiculous amount of time into pushing a complex computer programme to its absolute limit. Going super slow to eventually go super fast. Intentional and focused. A classic ‘waste of time’ that is anything but. Pure Slow News Day.

So, there’s an amazing story I heard the other day about an old Mario game.

Speedrunning is competitive – people vie for world records in games – so, inevitably, people try to cheat.

One of the most common ways to cheat is to edit clips of different attempts together, pretending like it was all done in one sitting. Usually done in cutscenes or black screens, to make the edit imperceptible. It’s called ‘splicing’.

There are a few reliable ways to check if somebody’s spliced a run together:

• Continuity errors - e.g. an in-game clock changing between cutscenes.

• Peaks and troughs in the audio – e.g. when looking in the right software, you can see irregularities and jumps in the audio levels.

But with this old Mario game, both of those failsafes… failed. The editing was too good or, with the videos being so old, the audio quality wasn’t clear enough to analyse. Old runs looked legit, but couldn’t really be confirmed. These communities are serious – they hold high standards for evidence and regularly reassess historic records.

Here comes the good stuff. They finally found a new level of detail to check for splicing.

Some majestic, excellent, overcommitted nerd calculated that Mario is programmed to blink on every 64th frame. (Pretty much every two seconds.)

In an unedited run, you’ll be able to see Mario blink on frames 64, 128, 192, etc., all the way through. If a run is spliced, that counter will end up being a little bit off – incontrovertibly proving their misdeed.

So, the top dogs watched back world record runs with a frame counter to check if Mario was blinking ‘in time’.

Lo and behold, some of the world record holders were FREAKING CHEATING! Blinking on frame 2,568 instead of 2,560 and so on. Brazen!

And that, right there, is why I’m falling in love with this silly little part of the internet.

What do you mean there are people checking whether Mario is blinking in the correct metronomic pattern? What do you mean people are cheating so effectively that it’s taken over a decade to catch them out? What do you mean, world?!

Slow down guide

Need a little help moving slower?

Ease your way out of Friday afternoon with this newsletter, a nice cup of something, and a little background music. Steal my setup if you aren't sure where to start.

After I press send, I’m probably going to wind my way up to Magdalen Road’s mainstay The Common Beaver. Fingers crossed they’ve some Fire and Flow batch brew left. You’re in for a good time if you do the same.

Remember Sports’ Leap Day should go nicely with whatever you’re doing or drinking. It’s a little angsty, it’s a little reflective, it’s a little Americana and punk and grunge. it’s not quite as in-your-face as some of their earlier tracks. It’s only 2:16, so you might as well turn the volume up and give yourself those few minutes of feeling.

I’m sure I’ve shared them with you before. I’ll do it again.

Take it easy,