Have you ever played Super Mario 64? Was it your favorite Nintendo 64 game? Your best 3D platformer? After watching this video, you will never look at it in the same way again.
TAS gamer and YouTuber pannenkoek2012 is going viral on Tumblr for a Super Mario 64 gameplay video called SM64- Watch For Rolling Rocks – 0.5x A Presses (Commentated). The video explains how to get the Watch For Rolling Rocks Level (Star 6) in the Hazy Maze Cave. To be more specific, it explains how you can do it with only half a button press.
At first glance, it may seem to be an unremarkable video. pannenkoek2012 explains how to make use of several glitches in the game to do something the developers didn’t intend. If you were an average gamer, you wouldn’t try this, and you wouldn’t want to, since the normal way of doing it is way easier.
However, fans found something else in this video, that’s incidental to the achievement itself. pannenkoek2012 may not have realized it when he made this video, but his ‘simple’ explanation of how to perform this trick is an increasingly elaborate Rube Goldbergian series of explanations on physics, programming mechanics, and gaming skills. Between hyper speed walking, parallel universes, and moving a scuttlebug's home, this video takes increasingly incredible twists and turns, explained in a matter of fact, even pleasant, manner.
That screenshot above is just the beginning when it comes to Rolling Rocks memes. You can look up Tumblr posts for ‘half a press’, ‘qpu’, ‘scuttlebug’ and of course, ‘pannenkoek2012' to see more such memes, and as you can see, they also get increasingly elaborate.
Did you enjoy watching this video? Why do you think it went viral? Tell us what you think in the comments.
