A Super Mario 64 player discovered a sound effect that only plays if the game is left running continuously for over a year.
Questioning how anyone would stumble upon something so obscure is natural, but Mario’s first 3D outing has enjoyed an unending following since 1996. Speedrunners alone have pulled apart and pieced the Nintendo 64 classic back together more times than a Lego set to gain an edge of the competition
In this instance, however, Kaze Emanuar, a YouTuber who’s spent years modding and digging around in Mario 64’s code, has unearthed what could be its biggest secret yet.
Super Mario 64 sound effect takes 14 months to play
In a May 11 video, Emanuar detailed how many of Super Mario 64’s scripted animations rely on an internal timer to repeat, for all intents and purposes, indefinitely.
Although impossible through normal play, the game’s developer coded in fail-safes to account for these same scripted events breaking should they repeat continuously for too long, resetting them to maintain expected behaviour.
Not all of these fringe cases were accounted for, however. Emanuar discovered that Sushi the Shark, found in Dire Dire Docks, essentially breaks its swimming sound effect loop if an N64 running Super Mario 64 is left running long enough. 14 months, to be precise.
“Since usually every time Sushi plays the sound, he interrupts the previous playback, doing this is the only way to hear the full sound effect. So we’ve unlocked a secret sound effect nobody else has heard before in Mario 64,” Emanuar explained.
In another example, Emanuar discovered that the ship’s wings in Rainbow Ride, if left running for the same period of time, would stop flapping altogether, requiring a reset to make them function again.
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