Using only glitches, somebody made Super Mario World into Flappy Bird

By taking advantage of glitches in the SNES classic Super Mario World, YouTube user SethBling managed to re-create mobile sensation Flappy Bird without the use of modified hardware.

The feat was accomplished in collaboration with user “p4plus2” who wrote the code. Using unmodified SNES hardware, SethBling completed a sequence of complex actions to “inject” new code into the game in a live Twitch broadcast. He says this is the “first time a human has ever completed this kind of exploit”. 

You can see the creation of the modification in the video above, where SethBling explains the step-by-step process of how the code is being injected, and how it’s affecting the game. You can see how the game reacts to the tampering — with color palettes changing drastically and character sprite animations glitching out. 

This is not the first impressive Super Mario World feat SethBling has achieved. Last year he managed to exploit a “credits warp” glitch in the game, which allowed him to technically complete the title in just under six minutes.