SNES Code Injection -- Flappy Bird in SMW

What people said

qwertox · 2020-11 · Strong recommendation

This reminds me of the incredible Flappy Birds SNES Code Injection into Super Mario World. A must-see video. [VIDEO]

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BuildTheRobots · 2025-09 · Recommendation

My understanding is that they're glitching the game to inject data into memory, in this case processor instructions. And then they use another glitch to jump to and execute that code. No modifications needed to the hardware or ROM, you're just being extremely selective about how to play the game to cause memory to get flipped. This video is done by hand and explains a bit more about how and why it works: [VIDEO]

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tbalsam · 2025-03 · Recommendation

I'm a speedrunner, and I'm pretty sure this is well known -- and accepted as standard in some categories! It's a pretty well accepted standard (to the point of the headline being almost a mild offense!). In the gaming world, undefined software behavior is critical to this sort of thing, we see this especially in some games like the legendary exploits found in the Ocarina of Time speedruns for example. I mean, in Super Mario World, SethBling did code injection to manually run a version of Flappy Bird (how ironic given the origin of the pipes!) in the game. By hand. No savestates. It took forever and the run through is really and truly fascinating: [VIDEO] I speedrun things other than games as well -- and so the generalization is not just that we are security researchers, we are people who fundamentally learn the "shape" of a thing very, very well, and ways that this shape can be used to get from one state on that shape to another. In conclusion -- yes, it can be something as simple as security research! But the joy and the beauty of speedrunning is something so much bigger and beautiful than that -- though it certainly is one outcome that can be had!

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