To the attentive reader who keeps up with their Super Mario 64 news, this headline might seem a bit dated: In 2002, it was discovered that in the course called Tiny-Huge Island, there is a coin that was literally impossible to get because it’s under the ground of the stage, an area inaccessible by normal means. However, in 2014, one player took advantage of a one-frame window in which you can jump while exiting water from the side to clip through the stage’s normal boundaries and get the coin.
Mystery solved, right? That mystery, yes, but despite the fact that Super Mario 64 came out 20 years ago, there’s apparently still more to discover about the classic game, as it turns out there’s yet another “impossible coin,” and it’s a real doozy.
Oddly enough, this coin is also in Tiny-Huge Island, and Scott âpannenkoek2012″ Buchanan explains the mechanics of this one in his latest video (above). There are only so many arrangements that coins can spawn in, such as a ring of eight or a line of five. However, Tiny-Huge Island features a line of four coins, not one of the possible configurations, and that’s because the fifth coin is under the ground. The trouble with that, from the programming side of things, is that it leaves the coin in an invalid position, so it despawns, leaving just the line of four.
Still, the coin exists, albeit very briefly. It spawns when Mario is a certain distance away from it, but once the game goes though the aforementioned despawning process, about a single frame of gameplay has occurred. This coin does truly seem impossible to collect, but then again, that’s what they thought about the original impossible coin, so who knows?
Watch the video explaining this newly discovered coin below, and if you have 18 years to kill, maybe you can figure out how to be the one to nab this one!
Featured image: Nintendo