That final boss, Trimming the Herbs, has definitely turned out to be a hacked (TAS) level, so The Last Dance was the last, already beaten level. This article is fairly outdated for a developing story.
That was always by far the most likely explanation, it was the general opinion of top-level SMM players. Something like 10 frame-perfect inputs with a lot of precise movement, it's just not plausible.
He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs. A lot of people were saying "there was no TAS in 2017", meaning I suppose there were no specific tools for emulator at the time, but that's just irrelevant when you can take a day or two to trial-and-error it.
The funny thing is if you watch the clear vid it actually looks really straightforward.
The original purpose of the video was to coyly announce the TAS tool the maker created, but the video was mostly ignored because it looks like a regular clear vid.
That’s how it so effectively accidentally flew under the radar. The level lacked a TAS label, and TASs are usually obvious and flashy.
But then you play it and realize those jumps are insanely precise.
Yes, frame perfect, but also mostly pixel perfect x,y precision.
There is even RNG manipulation necessary to ensure a bomb is spawned from a note block in a specific direction.
Streamers had already beaten it in chunks so it was theoretically possible for a human to do, but once people started offering monetary bounties the uploader felt it was time to let everyone in on the 7 year old joke.
> He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs.
The streamer featured in TFA, ThaBeast721, said that he and some other high profile streamers playing the level were contacted by the maker, whom many in the community knew prior and so there was chat history to authenticate the claim, and shown a video of the device breaking the level.
Thab described the device as a “raspberry pi or arduino type device hooked up to an actual controller somehow”
When the clear video failed to go viral the maker dropped the gag, and forgot about it until recently, because the device was a pain to use anyway.
The maker said it took 3 months to upload the level. Something about the device causing the console to crash when programming the inputs.
Even with a microcontroller, doing frame-perfect inputs is tricky because you don't have anything to sync off of - even tapping into the vsync signal from the video output is an imperfect reference because there's no guarantee that the game engine is actually synced with it (although I have no knowledge of SMM, maybe it does work better than I expect)
I get where you're going, but also consider the level is 17 seconds long. It's not unreasonable to think he just ran it a few times until the clocks decided to cooperate.
Except that many top players said it was very unlikely due the time it was uploaded and the availability of TAS methods at the time. The creator took a day to beat it, because not only couldn't sync inputs with the game engine current state, but also there's real rng in the trick.
I'm fairly sure the Wii U was already hacked by 2017, so he could've just played the inputs back on the console itself. Either that or just hack the game into thinking he cleared it when he didn't.
No need to hack anything, you just have to make a Bluetooth controller with the same characteristics than Nintendo’s controllers. They are pretty standard.
> That final boss, Trimming the Herbs, has definitely turned out to be a hacked (TAS) level
Has it? There's a confession, but this was an issue of major public significance (within a limited sphere). Do people never confess to things they didn't do?
According to a few high-profile members of the community (including people who previously insisted the level wasn't cheated), the level creator sent them a video of the TAS being used in practice.
It's my opinion that games as a service need to be forced to allow the community to resume hosting once the window of profitability has passed for a product.
We should definitely not rely on for profit businesses to preserve gaming history. They have repeatedly declined to do so in the past.
I was going to disagree on "We should definitely not rely on for profit businesses to preserve gaming history", but as I was trying to figure out how to argue against this, I remembered that the intention of copyright (sure, the tuning variables have gotten screwed up in the US thanks to Disney, but focus on the original intent and what we should aspire to) was a trade-off between limited monopoly on a creative work (to allow creators to profit on their work) and growing the cultural commons.
In line with the spirit of that, I think it's reasonable to require companies to release their source code and assets after the copyright duration expires (and I'm in full agreement that the current term is far too long).
I think that the hard part is assessing "profitability" though - Nintendo has shown that they're able to re-release games decades after initial release and turn a profit. Trying to legislate "profitability" could result in Nintendo (and other big game companies) holding on to their IP for longer, as opposed to just getting Congress to reduce copyright term back down to 15 years or something.
I agree with the intent, I just think that it'd be extremely hard to legally implement and a fixed term would work almost as well.
IMO the parent comment shouldn't even have mentioned profitability. Profitability is only indirectly relevant. What matters is if the game is available or not. Profitability might drive that availability but that's the publisher's problem.
With trademark we have the "use it or lose it" clause, we could have the same with copyright, "publish or lose it". If it's not available for purchase or free consumption for some duration (6-12 months seems reasonable) anyone can publish it. This should also extend to other works of art like books and movies. I'm uncertain if you should get the copyright back if you go back to publishing later. Probably not since that will deter anyone else from making the work available.
There's a problem with this: What if the work is 'available', but only for an outrageous fee? It wouldn't even be that hard to make a legal argument that a $100,000 fee for a single copy is 'justified', since some people have been willing to pay that much for copies of mass-market media (on the secondary market) in the past. Or distribute them via a group-buy system, saying it's only available via commercially pressed BDs, so it's not worth spinning up the presses again unless 2000 people commit to buying a copy in a given timeframe (and then still charging something like $200 per copy with some nonsense about it being a 'premium' edition), delivery then takes 50 weeks. Niche commercial software (industrial control, telecoms, that sort of thing) can costs millions for a copy, so maybe you could 'genuinely' believe that your game's server code costs a million dollars per unit, even for non-commercial use.
Now, all these arguments are pretty poor, and wouldn't stand much chance of winning in court, but the fact that there's a bunch of arguments that could be made makes stalling a lawsuit out until the defendants run out of money a much more dangerous possibility.
I think this law world get us a substantial amount of the way. There are so many seemingly abandoned works, sometimes even ownership rights aren't clear. Many of those would likely just end in the public domain.
I think a bigger issue is that video games and movies frequently have licensed other media like music in it. The musician might be very actively selling and licensing their music but now I can just get this abandoned video game and extract the song?
>I think it's reasonable to require companies to release their source code and assets
A company may not have the rights to give away all their source code and assets. For source code, this is probably less of an issue than it once was because open source libraries are used so widely. But I can tell you from first hand experience, if a company buys another company with a proprietary product and wants to open source it, that can actually be a pretty big project. (As is then building working product outside of a company's build system.)
Years and years ago, I took ages to open source a shareware product I was no longer developing. Not because I thought the code had any real value or because I was a meanie. But it had assembly code from a commercial library I had purchased. I eventually did release it--not that anyone cared at that point--only because the company that wrote the libraries was out of business and their product seemed to have passed to the other side as well.
Oh, I didn't think about that, but in retrospect it seems obvious. That makes the problem harder - how do you honor the "IP release" part of copyright (and enable game preservation) while respecting the copyrights that still are in place but that are required for the game to work?
Video games have become an important part of our culture. We do need more focus on preservation of that culture. We currently have archives of books, music, and movies that have been published. We have no archive, and no way to feasibly archive, all of the levels created in Super Mario Maker. There's currently no obligation for Nintendo to keep the source code/assets, much less all of the user generated content.
If I buy an album or a book I can be reasonably certain I can enjoy that content in 25 years. If I buy an online service video game I can be reasonably certain I cannot enjoy that content in 25 years.
This is a very good point about UGC and how it's not really present for most other types of media (like you described) and unaddressed by existing copyright law. So - additional legislation is necessary. Maybe something where the platform host has to either make the UGC available for direct download immediately, or preserve it on their own servers at their own expense until the copyright expires?
> I think that the hard part is assessing "profitability" though - Nintendo has shown that they're able to re-release games decades after initial release and turn a profit. Trying to legislate "profitability" could result in Nintendo (and other big game companies) holding on to their IP for longer, as opposed to just getting Congress to reduce copyright term back down to 15 years or something.
The simple solution seems to be tying the copyright to the duration something is available for.
If they shut down the servers, they aren't planning on profiting on that specific game anymore, and cede the monopoly on running those servers.
If that causes Nintendo to keep the servers up, that's a fine outcome too. I'm less interested in forcibly wrangling Nintendos IP away from them than making sure their cultural contributions are still available.
I agree; I think it should apply even more strictly for user-provided content.
Assuming there's no third-party backup of these levels somewhere, they're destroying countless people's creative work. I don't care what the terms of service say. Companies shouldn't have the legal authority to delete the only copy of third parties' copyrightable work.
I never understood this line of reasoning. You are not "entitled" to Super Mario Maker. Nintendo made it, they hosted the servers, they let you build stuff within their platform, and you were fully aware of all of it. You weren't forced to contribute, you weren't forced to play. How can you then turn around and cry about censorship?
If Nintendo decides tomorrow to shut it down, tough luck! These servers cost money, and it's even more work to responsibly open it up to the community.
Key point: Nintendo is also not inherently entitled to copyright protections. We grant it the ability to exercise violence on people who copy Super Mario Maker. It's a perfectly reasonable compromise to require that people who want the protections of copyright also make that protected asset accessible.
Right, but that was Nintendo's business decision, and it's really up to society to decide if that's acceptable or not.
A hypothetical book publisher could adopt a similar models for books - if you're an author, you have to use the publisher's app to write your novel, and anyone who wants to read it has to access it from the publisher's servers via the publisher's app. For whatever reason, said publisher could corner the market on some niche, culturally-important genre of book. Would be a bummer if they decided server maintenance was no longer worthwhile and just deleted all the books as per the license terms.
And I've never understood this line of reasoning. Nintendo made it and sold it to people. They didn't rent it. There was no lease with a defined expiration. None of that was ever presented to the user when they bought the game. It's tucked away in some TOS users are asked to click through post-sale where they essentially say "yeah you gave us money to access this but we can permanently revoke your access at any time for any reason git wrekt".
I don't care if the servers cost money. Boo hoo. Nintendo sold access to people. They should be held responsible for upholding their end of the deal. At the very least they should stop being able to use misleading terms like "buy", the terms of the deal should be much more strictly defined instead of this "we can do whatever" nonsense, and the relevant parts of that deal should be made clear and apparent to consumers prior to any exchange of money.
I don't think it's "censorship", but I do think the way it currently works is unethical and should be illegal.
It's why we need self hosted servers. If not at launch then at some point during its life cycle so that buying a game means it's playable indefinitely.
If you have levels uploaded on the official servers it's a straightforward process to get them copied over (and that step can be done with an unmodified game+console).
Honestly I think they just don’t want to deal with it especially since those endpoints are a massive security flaw in their network.
In practice this is another “abandonment off to the community” moment like when Rebble spun off of Pebble the last week of the Pebble online services existing as Pretendo already has working replacement online services for the Wii U. After April 8th the only remaining Nintendo service for the Wii U will be redownloading already purchased games so if you own a Wii U it will pretty much make sense to set it up to handle all online through Pretendo, especially since a bunch of the existing Wii U online services have been broken for a long time like Miiverse and WaraWara plaza.
Similarly if you jump through a bunch of hoops you can still play Mario Kart Wii online even though the game has been offline for a decade.
You're assuming Nintendo used AWS instead of colocating their own servers, but even if they did, "just firewall it" doesn't cut the mustard. The service itself is getting shittons of user data. If you manage to compromise the old servers, it doesn't matter if you can't get to newer stuff, you can still attack a bunch of people playing old systems[0].
You might not personally think your Wii U play data is worth securing, but the GDPR does.
Smash Bros. Ultimate custom stages are deleted after a month or so. You can find hundreds of beautiful screenshots of custom stages you can never play.
In Mario Maker 1 you can download and enter the editor for any level in-game, so yeah in practice the only thing you can do to make an "unbeatable" level is to rely on randomness (the Lucky Draw level from a sibling comment has a 1 in 7 million chance of being cleared). The RNG isn't seeded from player input so there's nothing you can do to affect the outcome.
Mario Maker 2 is different, it seeds its RNG from the player's input. If you press the same inputs with the same timings, the same "random" events will happen every time. This makes it much easier in theory to make a level that can never be beaten unless you know the secret code. Though it does require frame-perfect inputs.
> Mario Maker 2 is different, it seeds its RNG from the player's input. If you press the same inputs with the same timings, the same "random" events will happen every time.
RNG seeding happens once. Player input during the level would all be occurring after the RNG was seeded. What did you mean?
Player inputs are constantly fed into the RNG. Seed probably isn’t the right word. Maybe a better way would be to say it uses a fixed seed, and the player inputs are used as the sole source of entropy.
I wonder if anyone has used cryptography for this. It’s easy to create a cryptographic puzzle that can only be solved by the creator (e.g. require an input to hash to a specified value), and perhaps someone could code this into Super Mario Maker.
I recommend checking the Mario Twitch community too. I'd say watching the SMM stuff is interesting, but the real meat is with the smwcentral mods, especially the ones done for Super Mario World. Lots of great games in there.
One of the rules of Mario Maker is that in order to post a level, the creator has to clear it, to make sure that all posted levels are possible. But the creator of this level admitted recently that their clear of the level was tool-assisted. The team that was working on beating all the levels don't consider such "hacked" levels in scope.
"Trimming the Herbs" was disqualified after it became clear that the original author of the level hadn't cleared it honestly (i.e. they abused glitches to upload the level without clearing it, or hacked the console to cheat through the level). Other levels had been disqualified for similar reasons; this one just took longer to confirm.
Imagine a world where the statutory damages for destroying all legal copies of a copyrighted work was set to be 1000x the statutory damages for making an unauthorized copy.
Surely, deleting the last copy of a thing deprives more people of the work (and does more damage to the original author) than failing to pay for a copy of the thing.
Destroying all copies of a work (aside from the masters) benefits the owner, because now people have to pay the owner for more copies. This is why the publishers at the top of the creative class hierarchy regularly cycle things in and out of print.
Note that this may screw over individual authors, but the copyright system was not built to benefit them. Otherwise we wouldn't allow copyright assignment, we'd have "inalienable" copyright instead.
Nintendo has some of the stuff most worth preserving (not that we should have to pick and choose—it’s all art and should all be enjoyable long into the future). Makes it all the more galling how actively hostile they are towards preservation.
Copyright owners being anti-preservation are literally stealing from the public. If a work cannot be preserved to independently ensure it exists long-term, then it has effectively been stolen from the public domain. This is theft in a way that normal copyright infringement can never be.
Yes, but imagine, after like 50 years how much effort will go to maintain these ghost towns no one visits vs creating new games? Selfhostable archives would help that but that would be again a major effort to create.
I'm fairly sure a small amount of effort from Nintendo combined with community volunteers would be enough. At the very least Nintendo should pledge to not block preservation efforts or use legal threats.
This is a lost cause because of MMOs. Once the community is gone, it essentially ceases to exist, even if the servers are still running. Recorded gameplay and written accounts are more valuable.
Until the next bean counter at a different game company entirely decides an online product burns too much to be profitable. Or maybe the store for all those digital goods isn’t quite making its quarterly targets.
Right now, I can head down to my basement, jack two AAs into my Game Boy, and play Pokémon Red, a 28 year-old game. I have zero confidence that will be possible with any of today’s games in 28 years.
Yeah but all it takes is a soldering iron, a Philips head, and 2 minutes to put a new one in.
Quite different to a modern game where what’s on the physical cartridge/disc may not even be playable without a day one patch from a long-decommissioned server.
This seems a bit misleading, since for many of these games they work fine without downloading the updates. If you don't connect Super Mario Bros Wonder or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to the internet, then version 1.0 is a perfectly playable, full version of the game.
And from my experience, I can just refuse the update every time. Heck, from a speedrunning perspective it's probably better not to update them, since the updates patch out a bunch of tech that makes them more fun to mess around with (easy item dupes in Tears of the Kingdom, easy out of bounds in Mario Wonder).
My switch is (and will remain) offline. I wasn't aware some games may not play - even some first-party games like super mario 3d allstars needs updating, according to this.
In a month from now Splatoon 1 will basically be unplayable on an original unhacked Wii U. Sure you can do the single player story mode, but the main multiplayer mode is going to be gone by then unless you use Pretendo. I think the Switch is actually in a better situation because it has paid online so as long as enough people pay for online for Nintendo to keep up the budget for server maintenance it could potentially last decades while Nintendo has an incentive to cut online for their older platforms that they are basically paying to keep up for free.
This payment only funds the console's matchmaking services. The cost of maintaining dedicated servers falls on the devs for third party games, and presumably a different budget for first party ones. So the, admittedly few, games with dedicated servers (e.g. Splatoon 1) can't survive in this payment model either.
You're right, my bad: a quick search lead me to think that it had some server dependency that had been shut down prematurely, before the console's own online services.
I'm guessing the matchmaking is part of the Wii U's shared online services and not game-specific.
In order to get Celebi legitimately in the Japanese version of Crystal, you have to connect your GBC to a phone and use an online service that hasn’t worked for decades. In the VC version they patched the game so that you can get it with a different method but the physical GBC game does not have all of the features it used to once upon a time.
We have this thing called a "society" which is empowered to make rules collectively. One way it is empowered to make rules.is through "laws" and "regulations". Amazingly, these things can and do work, often much better than free market capitalism.
Stepping in with regulation doesn't necessarily imply forced support. It could be more like "though shalt not claim copyright over a game thou hast ceased to support, and thou shalt remove all security barriers from thine code when thou chooseth to cease supporting it".
And? I'm sure Right-to-repair has far more costs and that got passed.
When you buy something, you own it. If nintendo doesn't want to pay for hosting anymore, the ethical thing would be to dump the server code and the levels so that players can host the servers themselves.
Given how nintendo, activision, and other publishers have been acting the past decade, I really think its time for a Right-to-play law.
I agree, though I don't understand what this has to do with capitalism. Copyright and DRM is supported by laws themselves. And archivist efforts are often voluntary.
And it's a poorly thought out idea. It's not like it was a secret that Nintendo was hosting the servers. Everyone knew it had a short shelf life, and then decided to create on the platform anyways. This is why I never got it.
Future people, after seeing what is important to them. It must be available for them to save though.
If Hitler stayed in art school we probably wouldn't have cared much about him. But he didn't, so now we think his life or belongings and events are significant. But it might have been insignificant too.
Meh, online gaming and culture exists in the moment. Even if you perfectly archived and kept hosting everything, it wouldn’t be the same as being there when it was new and lively. There will always be plenty of new, and similar games in the future to play.
Theaters are probably not in a big hurry to do recordings that compete with live performances. I've been told a lot of it is rights issues associated with the performers, playwright, etc. though.
Personally I find it a pity we don't have quality recordings of most theater. How many great performances are lost to time? If you're into opera, the Met's Live in HD are great.
ADDED: A fairly small local theater I have a subscription to did make some digital recordings during COVID. But they were only available for a limited lime and weren't free.
Does it matter though? Did we really need to archive everything ever created forever? People made such a big deal out of things like geocities being shut down, but does anyone actually ever look through what was archived?
Sure, saving some of it is useful so we can look back and reflect. But we don’t need all of it. It’s mostly junk.
I mostly favor what archivists and preservationists do. But I don't really disagree. Some things are important (and you may not know what ahead of time). But there's nearly an infinite amount of paper with black characters on it. A nearly infinite number of photos. How much video of conference presentations do people watch a month after the fact? A day?
Some stuff is interesting to preserve. I scanned a Year in Life of Development book from a long-ago company and it's a neat look into mid-1980s computer development.
But you can't save everything and you probably just need to let go sometimes.
I mean yes that would work but that kind of goes against the spirit of the whole thing
The point is that a real human has actually gone through the level and beat it. If a run an AI against a gameboy game and it wins I wouldn’t consider it me beating the game
