Web Video / pannenkoek2012

"But to answer that, we need to talk about 'parallel universes'."

— pannenkoek2012 introducing a very infamous glitch

pannenkoek2012 (known in real life as Scott Buchanan) is a YouTube gamer who specializes in creating videos revolving around Super Mario 64. His videos immediately began to grow in popularity due to the variety of gameplay videos and wealth of information that they provide around the technical workings of various mechanics in the game.

One of his biggest projects is searching for ways to complete Super Mario 64 by pressing the A button as few times as possible. As the A button is used very often in the game, particularly to make Mario jump, this leads to very creative and hilariously complex solutions of making Mario get past an otherwise simple and mundane obstacle without being able to jump.

His channel and videos would amass even more popularity in August 2015 when, upon witnessing a random glitch during a Twitch stream involving Mario suddenly teleporting upwards in the level Tick-Tock Clock and realizing the potential of using such a glitch in furthering the development of the A Button Challenge, offered a staggering $1,000 bounty to anybody who could discover a way to replicate the glitch; as of today, this bounty still remains unclaimed. His videos would only become more popular as his voice commentary demonstrating his elaborate method of reaching the "Watch for Rolling Rocks" star in "0.5" A button presses^note i.e. entering the level with the A-button held—to beat the level in isolation requires one press, but when doing a full-game run, one can keep holding an A-press from a jump required to complete a previous level; since the A-button was only pressed once, this does not contribute an additional press for the purposes of the run, and "0.5 Presses" is the shorthand to refer to strategies that only require a hold and not a new press. reached Memetic Mutation status in January 2016.

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pannenkoek's videos contain examples of the following tropes:

• Awesome, but Impractical: Pretty much the entire A Button Challenge. Many of the strategies used to minimize the A press count are humanly impossible due to the pixel-perfect precision (and sometimes even perfect RNG manipulation) needed to set everything up in just the right way. Most of them are really cool strategies, though, and it's amazing (especially as a first-time viewer) seeing how creative the solutions can get when restricted to just a few A presses.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: The way Pannen investigates and documents various mechanics and glitches in the game and exploits them to save A presses, most notably his mastery of the cloning glitch and its applications. Special mention also goes to his three-part videos series on how walls, ceilings, and floors work within the game, having a combined runtime of 1 hour and 45 minutes.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • "Pannenkoek" is Dutch for "pancake."
  • For those aware of the tools used to assist Mario 64 TASers, Pannen was the person who coded STROOP (the "SuperMario64 Technical Run-time Observer and Object Processor"), which is "syrup" in Dutch.
• Butt-Monkey: Koopas are a common target for pannenkoek's more light-hearted antics. Koopa the Quick gets it the worst; he's been trapped (then glitched) behind Pannen's cloned bowling balls, and banished to the PU Shadow Realms, for seemingly no reason other than For the Evulz. Regular Koopas don't have it much better; Pannen once took one's shell just to watch it run around helplessly for 4 hours.
• Character Signature Song:
  • Super Mario 64's menu theme, which plays whenever Pannen cuts away from gameplay footage to explain a glitch or concept.
  • sword lord's William Tell Overture remix, which he plays in videos with repeated actions. Examples include the 100 Lap Race and his Goomba cloning shenanigans in Bowser in the Sky.
• Deadpan Snarker: pannenkoek himself at times, though there's much less of it in his recent content.
  • The Super Mario 64 TAS competition once retroactively disqualified Pannen's entry over a misunderstanding about whether preset HOLPs were allowed. Much to the chagrin of the organizers, Pannen spent the majority of the rest of the season making joke entries that "followed" the requirements under Insane Troll Logic (for example, going to several different courses to collect red coins when the prompt didn't specify to stay within the starting level).
  • The entire video he made about the Metal Cap is a good example. Pannen examines the most fringe cases possible where the Metal Cap fails to protect Mario, some of which would never happen in regular gameplay, then ends the video threatening to file a "false advertising lawsuit" against the creators of the Metal Cap.
  • Pannen's reaction to getting Koopa the Quick stuck jumping endlessly in front of a bowling ball? "Actually, that looks kind of fun. I want in."
  • While outlining the rules for the CCC (coinless, capless, cannonless) challenge: "(And before you ask, Mario is allowed to wear his default cap.)"
  • After releasing a video showing what enemy paths looked like over a long period of time if left unprovoked, people were asking repeatedly about the scuttlebug enemy. In response, he released a short showing their path, which is just a circle while also playing circus music.
• Good Bad Bugs: A vast array of these have been exploited by pannenkoek: invoked
  • The ability to clone objects in the game, by grabbing one as it is about to disappear within a very specific timeframe and releasing it in another location. This allows for Mario to clear large gaps without having to jump, by using cloned Goombas as platforms.
  • Backwards Hyperspeed Walking is a glitch involving Mario suspending himself behind the wire gate on a slope in Hazy Maze Cave to gradually build unlimited speed. This is useful in order to activate...
  • ...the parallel universe glitch, where if Mario uses the backward long jump glitch or the hyperspeed walking glitch to amass a large amount of speed, he will be able to access copies of the map 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 in how the floor-checking variables loop.
  • Scuttlebug Transportation and Raising, which essentially allows the player to put a Scuttlebug enemy (and thus a bounce for height) wherever they want.^note Scuttlebugs patrol a certain radius around its "home," but this "home" updates when Mario collides with them; with careful collisions, Mario can move them anywhere in the room laterally. Scuttlebugs also lunge at Mario when he's close enough, which causes them to gain a small amount of height. By leaving the Scuttlebug's room and moving far enough away from it, it deactivates, causing it to be frozen in place. These two mechanics can be abused by constantly entering and exiting the Scuttlebug's activation zone, causing it to be frozen at the peak of its lunge before it makes another one, thus allowing it to slowly gain height and, consequently, be able to move to any height. This technique is so useful that it single-handedly removed all remaining A presses from Big Boo's Haunt and reduced Hazy Maze Cave down to only requiring 0.5 A presses for Watch for Rolling Rocks.
• Homage: bad_boot, a notable Mario 64 TAS creator, made a commentated video going over the Secret Aquarium 0xA strategy. The thumbnail, wording used (starting the video off with "In this video.."), and explanations used all pay homage to Pannen's style. Some casual viewers even thought it was a Pannen parody at first glance before realizing that bad_boot was in the ABC crew.
• Invisible Wall: Pannen has a three-hour-long video analyzing this glitchy phenomenon in Super Mario 64. Long story short, it's caused by ceilings and out-of-bounds areas "leaking" into vertical columns above holes in level geometry. These columns prevent Mario from moving through them in a way similar to normal walls.
• It Makes Sense in Context: As goofy as "flinging Mario into a parallel universe" sounds, that's... more or less an accurate, if adjacent to Buffy Speak, way of describing what's going on.
• Mundane Made Awesome: While many do find technical explanations behind glitches to be quite intriguing, there are still others who probably would not have expected such explanations to be as interesting as they turn out to be in his videos.
  • Notably, he has a three-part video series literally titled "Walls, Floors and Ceilings'"(part 1, part 2, part 3), going into extremely specific details about how the geometry of solid objects within the game engine works, including combined hitbox interactions, axis alignments, minor angle changes, etc. The combined runtime of these videos is 106 minutes.
• Running Gagged: The Watch for Rolling Rocks "0.5x A Press" joke came to an end when the star was finally obtained with 0 A Presses on October 1, 2023, over seven years after the original commentated video.
• Sibling Team: With Borp, an infamous Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament player. Borp is known for not using any of the game's myriad advanced techniques, but still manages to defeat state-ranked players. A common observation is that they're a dedicated Challenge Gamer family that places stringent button restrictions on themselves to push their respective games. And when they decide to team up, the results can be truly frightening.
  • Word of God states that Pannen actually does play Melee from time to time, and plays exactly the same way Borp does. Now imagine if these two entered a tournament together...
• Tough Act to Follow: invoked According to the now-inaccessible UncommentatedPannen FAQ, this was the primary reason why no main-channel videos had come out ever since the Watch for Rolling Rocks in 0.5 A Presses video; he felt like every commentated video needed to be better than the last, and the Watch for Rolling Rocks video was so successful he felt like couldn't beat it. It took seven years for him to release another commentated video.
• Wrongfully Attributed: Many people who don't closely follow other areas of the Mario 64 TAS community believe that Pannenkoek was the one who discovered all of the glitches that he uses in the A-Button Challenge, most notably Parallel Universes, which is not true. All of the tricks used in the ABC are collaborative discoveries, some of which were first documented (but not fully understood) by old-school Mario 64 theorists such as Dom Dunc and Brightguy all the way back in the mid-2000s.
  • Cloning was first documented on GameFAQs in 2004-2005, though Pannen was indeed the main contributor to its later understanding and practical usage.
  • Tyler Kehne was actually the first person responsible for explaining how Parallel Universes worked and theorizing applications for them. He assisted other TAS creators in performing the first ever Moat Door Skip, which first exposed the concept to a small subset of the Mario 64 community. The Rolling Rocks video, and its explosive growth, gave the glitch a much larger platform, inadvertently attributing it to Pannen instead of Tyler in the process.