![]() McClure was tickled her experiment had resulted in something extremely cool. What it doesn’t have is millions of views. One theory behind Nintendo’s copyright strikes has been using the term “kaizo” in a video title, but Quantum Mario influences a reference to kaizo. Quantum Mario is a random YouTube video with roughly 86,000 views, where someone used McClure’s hack to play Kaizo Mario World. And it worked out as a great reward for f-ing up.” I love that video and I was like ‘We should do that with Meat Boy and I can do it in real time.’ I just kind of coded it in over a weekend or something and perfected it as we were going through the development. It starts through this incredibly difficult level and just goes all the way through until it’s just one guy remaining. ![]() So this one video, it’s called Quantum Mario, it’s just one Mario jumping from platform to platform and he’ll fall off on the left, fall off on the right, or get hit with a bullet, or jump off of the bullet. They rigged the emulator so it would record every attempt and then overlay them and play them at the same time. It’s a modded Super NES emulator that’s rigged to play custom-made Super Mario World levels. “Basically, there’s a video that’s been floating around on the Internet for awhile. ![]() But an interview with designer Tommy Refenes revealed how McClure’s Mario hack came up: McClure, a self-professed fan of “punishment platformers,” played Super Meat Boy without realizing she’d influenced it. Super Meat Boy would enter the picture a few years later. When Nintendo issued its copyright strike, the video had roughly 2.3 million views, McClure told me. The YouTube video Nintendo would take down nearly a decade later is the result of that hack, and chronicles the 134 attempts it took McClure to make it through the first stage of Kaizo Mario World. Thinking became action, and action became hacking the popular SNES emulator, SNES9X, to pull off what McClure had been contemplating. “So I was thinking, what if you had a special tool that instead of erasing all the screwups, it saved all of them and made a video of all the screwups plus the one successful path superimposed?” McClure wrote in a blog post at the time. It was an era before streaming was available to the masses. Most kaizo videos on early YouTube and other services showed the “clean” run, when everything goes right, the result of saved states used to inch forward, jump by jump. McClure became fixated on a YouTube comment that ruminated on how the appeal of watching people play kaizo levels isn’t seeing a perfect run, but how long it takes for them to climb the mountain. The term “kaizo” has become pretty popular these days, but in 2008, it was genuinely new. In 2008, McClure became fascinated by kaizo levels, ROM hacks of Super Mario World that attempted to create incredibly tough levels that usually required pixel-perfect timing to solve. IN THE SAME GAME (mario maker) THEY TOOK DOWN MY VIDEO OVER.” “What *does* make me angry, actually really angry, is they copyright-takedown the video showing I had the idea first, and THEN they use the idea. “Now, I'm not angry Nintendo is using an idea similar to one I had first,” said McClure on Twitter earlier this week. It’s not hard to see the leap from McClure to Meat Boy to Mario Maker, and it’s also hard to imagine Mario Maker existing without kaizo hacks. Part of video game design has been, for better and worse, taking ideas from other games and building on them, legally and illegally. The company was reportedly telling creators these videos was an “unauthorized use of assets” and to not “post any videos using unauthorized software.” But kaizo was only possible by hacking digital copies of games ripped from Nintendo cartridges. Nintendo seemed to be specifically targeting ROM hack videos, including those by Alex “PangaeaPanga,” one of the most popular kaizo level makers and someone who, these days, is a very popular creator within Mario Maker. McClure wasn’t the only person hit with a copyright strike when Mario Maker launched, either.
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