A bizarre glitch in Super Mario World, and an incredible amount of patience, and the SNES classic is transformed into Flappy Bird.

It's incredible to watch SethBling in action. Once the glitch (triggered by giving Mario too many power-ups) is active, machine code can be arbitrary rewritten in memory by carefully moving Mario around. This code can, ultimately, be executed. The process takes an hour of careful pixel-perfect actions in the game world, which becomes stranger and more nightmarish as Mario's universe-editing rituals proceed.

Welcome to the weirdest, most painful, most existentially-nightmarish IDE—and a reminder that our own reality is probably an abandoned simulation waiting for someone to take too many power-ups and turn it all into a sadistic casual game. Read the rest

Researchers at the ETH Game Technology Center of the Swiss national technical institute in Zürich, have applied their considerable talents to the critical problem of immersion in 2D side-scrolling, 8-bit era games. Witness in this video the splendor of a 360° projected Mario world that unrolls across the walls as players reveal each subsequent tile of the game map.

Robert Sumner, founder of the GTC explains:

 ...we observed that the 8-bit era of gaming had a huge collective influence on so many people, but the actual gaming experience was typically an individual one. We wanted to turn this idea upside down, and elevate the NES console experience into a group experience where the game surrounds a large event, allowing multiple people to play in a collaborative setting. The panoramic stitching and 8-way controller multiplexing hardware were the main ways we accomplished this task.

The group submitted the paper "Unfolding the 8-bit Era" to the European Conference on Visual Media Production, and then built the system to unveil at the Eurographics Conference. Utilizing a vintage 8-bit Famicom/NES system and a PC with a point-correspondence vision tracking algorithm, the researchers developed methods to detect the edge of each screen segment, adding it to a continuously expanding texture map in real-time. This panoramic texture is then seamlessly displayed on eight aligned projectors. The vision algorithm requires no prior knowledge about the game, so it is possible to play any side-scroller on this system, such as Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, Metroid, and the like. Read the rest

In Josh Millard's excellent "game" Ennuigi, you are invited to "spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made." Read the rest

Approximate translation: "It's the Family Computer's Dream Adventure Game, "Super Mario Bros."! With a mysterious power, he gains a great transformation! Explore the earth, underground, the sea, the sky, and much more to see in this complete world." Read the rest

A front-runner for People’s Choice Award at this year's AI Video Competition is Mario Lives! The University of Tübingen project is working to make video game character Mario self-aware. He's not there yet, but they are taking tiny steps. Read the rest

The Stabyourself folks have created a brilliant Mario/Portal mashup as free/open software for Linux/Mac/Windows. Check out the trailer and be amazed, then play the game and watch your free time vanish!

Two genre defining games from completely different eras: Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. and Valve's Portal. These two games managed to give Platformers and First-Person Puzzle Games a solid place in the video game world. But what if Nintendo teamed up with Valve and recreated the famous Mario game with Portal gun mechanics?

A complete from scratch recreation of Super Mario Bros. with a focus on perfectly imitating the feel the 1985 classic gave us. Then give Mario a portal gun, add puzzle game mechanics from Portal and there you go. And if that wasn't crazy enough, play 4-player coop, with everyone having their own Portal gun!

About Mari0 Read the rest

A trio of Ur-nerds have recreated the Game Boy's Super Mario Land using Minecraft. They laid 18 million blocks to accomplish the feat. It took 500 hours.

Each image is a masterpiece in block placement, dropping dyed wool blocks in the game's creative mode within the frame of a massive Game Boy created in the virtual world. The Game Boy's screen is 160 blocks across and 144 blocks tall. That means it takes 23,040 blocks to fill the screen, each representing a single pixel in the game.

James Wright, a 21-year-old British carpenter who lives in England, and Joe Ciappa, an unemployed 29-year-old living in the U.S...

About that time another player, 29-year-old Tempusmori, who lives in the Netherlands, had the idea to make a full-sized, 1:1 Game Boy in Minecraft.

"The Game Boy allowed us to pretty much recreate any original Game Boy game," he said...

"What you see is 100 percent Minecraft," Wright said. "Every pixel on the screen is one wool block. The screen itself is on a giant Game Boy. We build each screen take a screenshot from above. After the picture we move everything that needs moving for the next screen and repeat."

Three Guys, 18 Million Blocks, One Unbelievable Minecraft Video Read the rest

Darick Maasen (facebook) made this unique ornament from an antique taxidermied turtle and a pair of chicken wings. [Darick Maasen Art via Kotaku] Read the rest