Sequence Breaking / Super Mario 64

A famous example of a Mario 64 sequence break, allowing you to access the castle basement early.^explanation Normally, you have to collect 8 stars and beat Bowser in the Dark World to access the castle’s basement and drain the moat, allowing you to open the underwater door outside the castle. However, exploiting a very difficult "Parallel Universe" glitch (explained in detail here) allows the player to clip through the castle walls and enter the loading area behind the door, allowing Mario to enter the basement early.

A big part of the popularity of Super Mario 64 is that it's right alongside Super Metroid in how easily Sequence Breaking can be executed, making it very popular for speedrunning challenges.

The reason it’s so easy to do it in this game, besides the fact that the level progression is simply very non-linear and relaxed in terms of Railroading, is that there is an abundant number of glitches and design oversights as a result of it being such an early 3D game, which makes it very easy to break the game open and bypass its numerous challenges. Even the DS remake has its own glitches and tricks that can be exploited.

Examples in the original N64 game:

• The "Backwards Long Jump" glitch breaks the game wide open, since Mario can build up ludicrous speed and zip across the stage and through walls and doors in seconds. This is due to a discovery that Mario actually has no speed cap when moving backwards^note The game has a speed ceiling as in, you can only go forward so fast, but there is no limit to how low it can go. Since the game uses a negative number when you're moving backwards, this means that the small burst of speed you get when long jumping backwards in certain areas can just keep building and building with no way to stop it, meaning you can move at blinding speeds if you can do the right tricks. It famously allows players to completely bypass Dire, Dire Docks, the Star Doors, and the Endless Stairs, and it also makes it so that the player can beat the entire game without collecting a single star! Unfortunately, this glitch was fixed in the DS remake, the Japanese Shindou edition re-release and the Super Mario 3D All-Stars version (which is based off the Shindou version).
• You can skip the key for Bowser in the Dark World by using a combination of either the BLJ or the "Hyperspeed Walking" glitch with a "Parallel Universe" glitch, the latter being a glitch that allows Mario to access areas out of bounds. ^note The (very simplified) technical reason for this has to do with the fact that the variables in memory for Mario's positions are truncated after exceeding a certain value when the game uses the variables to check if Mario is above a floor tile, and therefore in bounds. The game will not allow Mario to be in a location without a floor below him (levels such as Whomp's Fortress have an invisible floor below the death barrier, allowing Mario to jump above pits). However, the game can think that Mario is above a floor even when his actual position is out of bounds, due to the way how the floor-checking variables loop. (This also saves time in “Bowser in the Fire Sea”.) You can see the "1 key" TAS here. Beating the game with 0 stars and 2 keys in real time has been achieved by several people; however, it's pretty safe to say no-one will ever beat the game with only one key in real time. To make matters worse, it’s seemingly impossible to sequence break past the foyer key door — while the BLJ can technically bypass the door, the area leading upstairs will only load if the door is opened properly.
  • There's another glitch that lets you bypass the Endless Stairs without the BLJ, but it’s a TAS-only trick that is impossible for humans to perform. It’s called the Hyper Speed Wall Kick.
  • The BLJ and tool-assisting also allows a player to beat "Mario Wings to the Sky" without the Cannon or the Wing Cap.
  • A skilled BLJ also lets a player reach the "Elevator Tour in the Volcano" star without using the floating platform to reach it.
  • The BLJ also allows you to get to the upper floors of Big Boo’s Haunt without killing any Boos, which is extremely helpful for a Pacifist Run of the game. If not that, then you can use a tricky wall kick in the piano room (and the lobby too) to get to the second floor.
• Each level's stars all have mild changes to the conditions of the level and the dialogue (you can't use the cannons while trying to obtain the first star of Bob-Omb Battlefield because there's a war going on, for example), but most levels are actually open enough to allow you to obtain most of their stars out of order (there's nothing to stop you from getting Bob-Omb Battlefield's sixth star by unleashing the Chain Chomp, and on top of that, you can use a glitch involving either a block or a Bob-Omb to clip through the cage with the star without freeing the Chomp, you can beat Mario Wings To The Sky without the Wing Cap, and you can reach the island without the cannon performing 2-3 precise long jumps from the mountaintop). In fact, choosing the incorrect star at the menu might produce more favorable conditions than what would be available if you chose the intended star (in Shifting Sand Land, Klepto the Vulture will try to dive-bomb you and take your hat... unless you chose the first star, in which case his talons will be full of a redundant Power Star and will leave you to your business).
• It's possible to bypass steep slopes (such as the two slopes in Bob-Omb Battlefield) by using a chain of extremely well-timed jump kicks, but this is much harder to pull off on a real console than it is in a tool-assisted run.
• Using a carefully timed triple jump and jump off of a slope, you can access the castle's roof without getting 120 stars and unlocking the cannon, but Yoshi won't be there to give you a reward.
• In Bob-Omb Battlefield, there are several ways you can reach the floating island without the cannon or Wing Cap by using a very carefully timed long jump (alternatively, chaining two well timed long jumps will help build up the proper momentum as well) or a frame-perfect wall kick into a well-timed dive (known as the "Island Hop" by speedrunners).
• In the Castle Secret Slide, if you jump to the left of the slide just as you exit the tunnel, Mario can leap all the way down near the finish line, saving a lot of time and making it easier to get the slide's secret star.
• In Whomp's Fortress, four stars can be acquired by nonstandard means.
  • "Shoot Into The Wild Blue" can be beaten without the cannon by using a wall jump from below or a long jump from above. It's actually much easier to do this than the intended method of using the cannon, since the player runs no risk of shooting themselves off the stage.
  • "Fall Into The Caged Island" can be beaten without the owl by either using the cannon, long jumping off the level’s tower, or getting on top of the Whomp King and tricking him into walking towards the cage so you can jump off to it (the latter can't be pulled off in the DS remake due to the Whomp King's tweaked collision detection). Speedrunners use a method called "Owl-less", which gets you into the cage by going to the floating platform that's closest to the cage, doing a well-executed triple jump, then doing a Wall Kick while facing opposite the cage to get in.
  • "Red Coins On The Floating Isle" can be finished before you even fight the Whomp King by simply long jumping to the floating platforms nearby, or by doing a triple jump and wall kick/dive combo near the second Piranha Plant (likewise, this can't be pulled off in the DS remake due to the platforms being much farther away now).
  • "Blast Away The Wall" can be acquired without the cannon by exploiting a collision detection glitch by having Mario jump near the ledge that the star is hidden under in a certain way. This is impossible in the DS remake as the star only spawns when the wall has been destroyed.
  • You can use a carefully timed triple jump or long jump near the area with the Thwomps to bypass a big chunk of the course and get to the Whomp King faster (or just use a secret warp shortcut near the first Thwomp).
• In Jolly Roger Bay, you can reach the "Shoot to the Stone Pillar" star without the cannon by performing a very difficult long jump and kick off of a nearby wall. You can also beat "Through The Jet Stream" without using the Metal Cap by perfectly swimming at a precise angle through the jet stream (the same trick works for the jet stream star in Dire, Dire Docks).
• Cool Cool Mountain:
  • You can get to the "Wall Kicks Will Work" star without even using the cannon, by bouncing off a Spindrift enemy that triggers Mario's spin jump, allowing him to float to the area below the mountain that is otherwise out of reach. Another method has Mario do a precise backflip off the edge of the outer mountain slope to reach the area. You can also jump very precisely into a seam in the level geometry near the start of the course to immediately fall down to the star. RTA speedruns do not go for this, but it is possible for a human to do with enough attempts.
  • During "Lil Penguin Lost", you have the option of either trekking all the way down the mountain...or Mario can just leap all the way down to where the mother penguin is (thanks to the snow, he won't get hurt, just stuck for a moment). A similar trick works for "Snowman's Lost His Head", though you do have to be wary of the checkpoint placed on the outer mountain slide for this mission, as the snowman won't find its head if you don't pass it.
  • You can't cheat at all during the penguin race, since you'll be disqualified if you take the shortcut, or fall off the slide to a lower part of it... right? It turns out that the penguin will only register that you've cheated in the latter case if you stay airborne for 2 seconds. Modern speedrunners have found sneaky ways to cut the track in ways where Mario doesn't fall down for long, saving them quite a bit of time, while the penguin remains none the wiser.
• In Big Boo's Haunt, "Secret of the Haunted Books" can be collected by just triple jumping from a lower platform in the same room, bypassing the need to do the puzzle. This also allows you to get most of the other stars before you fight the first Big Boo. The DS remake added a glass barrier around the star platform to prevent this from happening.
• Hazy Maze Cave:
  • There are no ceilings in Hazy Maze Cave, allowing Mario to skip large chunks of platforming if he can find enough height. Conveniently, there's a yellow box in the rolling rocks room that Mario can triple jump off of, bringing him directly down to all of the stars in the deeper parts of the cave.
  • You could go through the toxic maze like the developers intended you to for the aptly named "Navigating the Toxic Maze" star, or you can just spam Backwards Long Jumps off some random elevator and clip through a wall. So much for the maze.
  • You can bypass the long route and tedious climb to the "A-Maze-Ing Emergency Exit" star by doing an extremely well timed triple jump and wall kick off a rock platform near the pit.
  • "Metal-Head Mario Can Move!" can be completed without the Metal Cap by several methods, all of which stem from the fact that the water above the grate switch is just shallow enough to allow them. All of these strategies do not work in the DS remake, where the developers raised the water level further.
    • It is possible to hit the switch using a precisely timed and spaced ground pound; however, without a proper setup, this strategy is very inconsistent.
    • A much more consistent method is to perform a double jump next to the grate but in front of the switch, then perform a kick at the peak of Mario's double jump and immediately hold backwards. Mario will hit the grate, and the recoil and momentum from the collision will cause him to fall at a high speed onto the switch behind him, subsequently activating it.
    • Speedrunners use a trick known as the "Christmas Miracle,"^note It was coined this because when speedrunners first discovered the strategy, no one could execute it consistently due to a lack of understanding of the setup, and as such it was a "Christmas miracle" if they managed to get it during a run. which involves wall kicking over one of the elevator rooms to make Mario fall into the lower level of the cave, then precisely timing a dive to hit the switch.
  • Speaking of the Metal Cap, you don't need to even press the switch at all for a 120-star run of the game. The Metal Cap power itself is only used to collect the Red Coin star in the green switch area, which can easily be collected with just the cap effect you get from entering the area. Other stars intended for the Metal Cap can be collected with just optimal swimming, or exploiting certain mechanics of the game (as mentioned above).
• Lethal Lava Land:
  • Inside the volcano, there is the magmatic waterfall. Jumping into it will get Mario's butt burned as usual, but with some precise jumping, Mario will somehow stick to it and continue going upwards. Doing it just right can save a big part of the track upward to the star. Doing it deliberately wrong can end up catapulting Mario towards the very top of the level, which looks hilarious.
  • "Red-Hot Log Rolling" can be completely bypassed by using a skilled triple jump and wall kick manuever.
    • Another ridiculous sequence break for this star is to do a pause-buffered BLJ off the bridge and clip through the grate. And no, this isn't TAS; people are actually good enough to do this, at least on a single-star basis.
  • The Wing Cap utterly trivializes half of this course's stars, as it is rather flat and compact, with no verticality whatsoever (aside from the aforementioned volcano sublevel), meaning you can get to star locations with just a few Triple Jumps.
• Shifting Sand Land:
  • Normally, to unlock the secret entrance at the top of the pyramid, you have to stand on the four pillars that surround it. "Pillarless" (or "P-less") has Mario instead use the hitbox of a bloated Bob-Omb to push himself backwards and clip through the pyramid top, completely bypassing that requirement.
  • The developers intended for the player to enter the pyramid from the bottom for "Inside the Ancient Pyramid" and "Pyramid Puzzle", and to enter from the top for the Eyerok boss fight. It turns out that it's much faster (and in the case of the stars at the pyramid top, easier) to do the exact opposite.
    • The entirety of the inner pyramid level can be skipped by using the platform that takes you to Eyerok, as it comes down adjacent to the platforms next to the star near its top, making them easy to jump over to.
    • You can reach Eyerok early without opening the top of the pyramid with a careful jump and positioning Mario in a way that lets him grab on to the opening to his lair.
• Dire, Dire Docks:
  • The intended way to board Bowser's submarine is to press a switch to spawn a bridge of blocks leading to the ship deck. It's also possible to climb up the ship from the tail, skipping the swim to the switch altogether. However, the fastest way to get the star is neither of these methods. "Front Sub" has the player swim up to the front of the ship at a very precise angle, to then scale it with two perfectly-timed jumps and a jump dive. Failing this will result in Mario inevitably sliding down the extremely steep slope back into the water, which can result in huge time loss if his angle becomes messed up.
  • It's possible (and actually faster) to get both the Red Coin star and the 100-coin star without the poles that spawn after you get the Star for "Board Bowser's Sub." When done this way, however, grabbing these two coin stars becomes one of the hardest missions in the entire game, if not the hardest.
    • To put into perspective how difficult the optimal route is, first consider that this is already considered That One Level for a normal playthrough just from the swimming alone, so you'd assume speedrunners would have found an easier way to do this mission. Not only does the player have to execute incredibly precise triple jumps, wall kicks, jump kicks, and jump dives to just barely touch the floating Red Coins, but they also have to do the aforementioned Front Sub (which is already very difficult), just to get back on the ship quickly, after inevitably falling into the water from collecting certain coins. If they're playing on the N64 version of the game, they also have to deal with the ridiculous amount of lag that comes from the game just rendering the ship. Speedrunners don't have a choice but to learn this strategy if they don't want to incur a huge time loss from slowly riding the poles, but even after practice, it's still the most common run killer and the most dreaded mission in the 100% category.
    • You still have to collect the star atop the sub in order to properly access Bowser in the Fire Sea; this isn't too big of a deal, though, considering you can even abuse this to enter the level faster and grab as many stars as possible before unlocking Fire Sea.
  • You're supposed to use both the Metal Cap and the Vanish Cap together to get the star for "Collect The Caps...", but with a well-timed long jump, Mario can reach the star behind the grate by swimming to it with the Vanish Cap alone.
• In Snowman's Land, you can reach the Igloo early without using the Spindrift to reach the Koopa Shell or the cannon, simply by leaping down to it from the bridge in front of the snowman (tricky to do, and risks getting you blown away and losing your cap) or by simply triple jumping past the rock blocking your path to it.
  • By extension, going into the Igloo early and talking to the Bob-Omb Buddy to open up the cannon before getting the “Snowman’s Big Head” star allows you to use the cannon to shoot to the top of the snowman’s head.
• Wet-Dry World:
  • A surprising exception to this, given the open nature of the game, is the "Shocking Arrow Lifts!" star. Even if you jump high into the painting and raise the water level high enough, Mario can't open the Item Block holding the star, even if he slams on it from above — the block is programmed to not open up underwater. Fortunately, there's a hidden warp on the lowest water level that brings Mario all the way up to the cannon at the top of the level... which is conveniently located right above the Arrow Lifts star box.
  • You can get to the Downtown section without raising the water level by doing precise jump dives on the slope at the edge of the stage leading up to it, using the speed gained by sliding to get right over the barrier.
• Tall, Tall Mountain:
  • Right at the start of the level, by doing a long jump into the base of the mountain and a precise series of inputs, you can clip right through the mountain into a body of water. A bit of swimming later and Mario will be upwarped to another body of water further up the mountain near the log, bypassing nearly half of the climb.
  • One star initially seems like it can only be accessed by the slide inside the mountain, but if you take advantage of the shortcut right behind where you start (a gust of wind near a 1-up that will blow you higher up the level if you take a leap of faith) you can see that the Star is hidden in a little alcove right below the cliff top. A carefully timed kick-jump will give Mario just enough backward momentum to land inside of the alcove, completely bypassing the slide! (This was fixed in the DS remake, as the alcove is now covered by a grate...though that doesn't stop Vanish Luigi from backflipping down through it.)
    • For the adventurous player, there's even a way to get this star not only without using the slide, but without even climbing the mountain. Aptly named "Breezeless" (as the player skips riding the gust of wind that would normally give them enough height), it's one of the most precise tricks that high-level Mario 64 players use in speedruns.
  • There are also three ways to beat "Blast to the Lonely Mushroom" without the cannon; you can bounce off a Fly Guy and float over to it, use a Long Jump off a ledge near the rolling log to reach it, or use a conveniently-placed Crazed Crate near the start of the level to do a bounce of faith up to the mushroom.
• Tiny-Huge Island features more clipping, most notably in the Huge Island where Mario can clip right into the base of Wiggler's Cave and swim his way into the loading zone without having to first drain it.
• Rainbow Ride is a tough, long level filled with some of the most dangerous and (for casual players) slowest stars to get in the game, courtesy of the tedious, obstacle-ridden carpet rides. However, players have found ways to abuse the course's layout and make the stars here significantly faster to obtain.
  • You can easily long jump to a part of the course directly behind where you start, allowing you to bypass the opening carpet ride.
  • More advanced players can perform a triple jump wall kick right at the start of the course to get onto the rotating stone platforms and skip half the course, which also gives them direct access to the Red Coins area. But apparently that wasn't enough for speedrunners, as they developed another trick to skip even more of the carpet ride and get up to the flying ship in seconds. Known as the Lakitu Bounce, it involves a delayed triple jump into a wall kick off a steep slope, where Mario then bounces off Lakitu to get onto the slope and navigate onto a pole.
  • Unfortunately, even with all the movement tricks you can do in Rainbow Ride to save time, there isn't a humanly possible trick that lets Mario get up on top of the house, so you still have no choice but to ride the carpet to grab the Big House in the Sky star. ...Or so people thought, until one of the best Mario 64 runners Xiah pulled off an insane "Carpetless" strategy to obtain it in a single-star run, without the use of savestates. If you're interested in learning how Carpetless works, this video does a great job of explaining everything.
  • Player pannenkoek2012 also managed to beat "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" without the cannon by exploiting a glitch involving a Fly Guy.

Examples exclusive to the DS remake:

• Broadly speaking, Luigi's backflip in the DS version allows him to skip many of the challenges to get stars and even get several stars meant for other characters, since the level design never accounted for his backflip, which is not only higher but allows him to enter the spinning glide at will.
• Turns out that removing most of the sequence break strategies in the original game doesn't matter if you allow players to have an absolutely broken triple jump in return. Said triple jump goes higher than in the N64 version, and unlike in the original, players can change their triple jump direction at any point during the three jumps, regardless of where they were originally facing. Aerial dives also give the player a small vertical boost as well, and when done at the peak of a triple jump, allows the player to reach ridiculous heights that N64 Mario could only dream of doing. You can get stars such as "Fall onto the Caged Island" in Whomp's Fortress and "Blast to the Lonely Mushroom" in Tall, Tall Mountain with just a triple jump dive alone, to say nothing of the strategies from the original such as the Lakitu Bounce that are completely unnecessary due to the ridiculous triple jump height.
• Even the DS remake has a few useful Sequence Breaking glitches. For starters, there’s a new glitch called the Dive Reset, which lets you bypass the Endless Stairs. And then another glitch was found to bypass the stairs without the Dive Reset. There's also a trick called "Frame Walking"/"Frame Sliding" ^note While walking up a slope, you'll notice that your speed decreases every frame. To avoid this, simply press backwards and no-direction every other frame to keep the speed you had. If you don't have enough space to do a slidekick recover (or a kick in a case of a not-quite-flat slope), then this can be useful. It can also be used to preserve a little Y run for each time you do it, and as entertainment for a run (e.g. using it during Moat Skip since there is a lot of straight running), which allows you to walk underneath the castle moat’s water and access the basement without any stars.
• As this speedrun shows, it's possible to exploit collision detection glitches to pass through certain walls. For example, Yoshi can skip directly to the level Mario is trapped in by sliding and kicking near the entrance of the character select area after only collecting a couple stars. Mario can likewise use a similar trick in the Jolly Roger Bay room to bypass the foyer key — unlike the original game, the upper floor does load if you bypass the door. The rabbit near the 50 star door can also be used to push Mario into a wall, allowing him to bypass it. Another jump in the out of bounds area then lets Mario skip to the endless stairs, with the aforementioned Dive Reset letting you bypass it.
• There is a clever exploit that allows players to collect main mission stars without leaving the level. By grabbing stars with Yoshi's tongue, then immediately entering character states where it is impossible for Yoshi to enter the star dance animation, players can trick the game into allowing Yoshi to keep the star in his mouth. Then, if Yoshi spits the star out while inside a loading zone, he will collect it while the game loads the next area, allowing the player to continue with the level at will. This is particularly useful in Shifting Sand Land, where players can collect "Shining Atop the Pyramid" and "Inside the Ancient Pyramid" in one go.
  • Related to this is dying while collecting a star or key, which can actually save time in certain situations. In boss fight worlds, this is extremely useful as dying in the boss room will eject the player back into the main level, allowing them to finish up stars that they missed, or pause-exit out of the stage (which is faster than allowing the usual mission clear animation).