Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 30: Mysterious Mountainside

Welcome, everyone, to the 30th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone. 

Today, I will examine the Tall, Tall Mountain slide from Super Mario 64 and point out some little-known details about it.

Mysterious Mountainside

Super Mario 64, despite its status as one of the most famous video games of all time, still contains areas that the average player of the game would not have visited during their playthrough. Two of the game's courses, Shifting Sand Land and Snowman's Land, are entered by jumping into a wall that, from a distance, looks completely ordinary. Only by approaching the walls, and in the case of the latter, carefully looking at the wall's reflection in a mirror, can anything out of the ordinary be found.

Due to the game's open-ended nature, those players who have never found the courses in question could still obtain the requisite number of stars to fight Bowser and finish the game. Since finding these places is not mandatory, it is also easily given up on as the player moves on to another objective.

The same applies to today's topic. While skipping an entire course would at least make some players curious as to where the missing course may be, skipping a single star in a course is completely normal and happens in nearly everyone's playthrough. Thus, if the player is unable to find the star in the enigmatically named fourth mission of Tall, Tall Mountain, "Mysterious Mountainside", they would simply move on to another star.

This is the mysterious mountainside in question:

Just as the entrances to the courses I mentioned, it ripples when Mario draws near. Jumping inside reveals the Tall, Tall Mountain slide; an area of the game made only for the purpose of this one Power Star. In this article, I will showcase some hopefully interesting information about that slide, like, for example, the fact that there is a cube of solid-colored walls behind the entrance:

Mario's model is unloaded immediately upon touching the rippling wall, so the purpose of this room is unclear. Perhaps it exists as a failsafe to show a color roughly similar to the rock around it if the rippling wall is not loaded somehow.

The first thing that is noteworthy about the slide itself is that it is the biggest area in the game that purports to be contiguous. To understand this, we must understand how Super Mario 64 deals with large areas. For example, Wet-Dry World consists of an aboveground section and an underground section, which are actually two separate rooms: they do not exist in memory at the same time, as that would be too taxing on the hardware. 

They are connected by a tunnel that is long and completely empty. What happens when Mario passes the tunnel is that one room is unloaded and the other is loaded, but both rooms contain a copy of the tunnel and Mario is seamlessly transported to the spot in the other room corresponding to the spot he left in the first room. I would show footage of it, but it would show nothing out of the ordinary precisely because of the fact it was designed to be seamless. 

Let us look at a table that shows how many rooms each course in the game contains, seen in a level editor:

As you can see, Tall, Tall Mountain is the only course that contains four areas. Let me walk through each of the courses that contains two or more rooms and explain what they are.

Cool, Cool Mountain: one room for the main course and one for the slide.
Inside Castle: one room for the lobby, one room for the basement and one for the second floor (also includes the Tick-Tock Clock room and the endless stairs).
Shifting Sand Land: one room for the main course, one for the inside of the pyramid and one for Eyerok's tomb, which seamlessly transitions from the inside of the pyramid.
Snow Man's Land: one room for the main course and one for the inside of the igloo.
Wet-Dry World: discussed above.
Jolly Roger Bay: one room for the main course and one for the inside of the ship.
Tiny-Huge Island: one room for the tiny island, one for the huge island and one for Wiggler's cavern with the red coins.
Lethal Lava Land: one room for the main course and one for the inside of the volcano.
Dire, Dire Docks: one room for the beginning section and one for the submarine dock, using the same seamless trick as Wet-Dry World in the tunnel.

Finally, Tall, Tall Mountain has one room for the main course and three rooms for the slide. Nothing else in the game uses up three rooms with seamless transitions between them. Let us look at those rooms in a level viewer:

This is the first room; the straight slide in the beginning.

The second room contains the bulk of the slide and ends with the tunnel that has a bright wall indicating that Mario should keep to that side.

The last room has the final portion of the slide and the square room with the exit chute. 

Note that all the rooms include small segments of the other rooms that would be visible from them; this is to uphold the illusion of seamlessness. Modifying the code, I skipped the loading zone that would transport Mario from the first room to the second, landing in the "fake" end portion of the first room:

The end of the slide in this portion has an invisible wall which can be bypassed relatively easily, and if Mario falls, the iris-out death animation happens very quickly due to the death barrier being close to the bottom of this room. Transitioning to the second room properly also means the new death barrier would be much farther down compared to that point on the slide.

Since in almost all cases, no objects other than Mario are on screen whenever a room change happens, the illusion cannot be broken by those other objects disappearing - however, on this slide, we can do exactly that with the 1-Up Mushroom that tumbles down the first segment.

Here, I deliberately slow Mario down by jumping. Then, we can see the 1-Up Mushroom entering the fake-out part of the first room. The moment Mario passes the loading zone and is transported to the identical-looking second room, the 1-Up Mushroom disappears - but this is a trick of perspective; it is Mario who is transported somewhere else while the 1-Up Mushroom is left exactly where it is, in the first room.

There exists a physics glitch in Super Mario 64 that can be used to great effect on this slide specifically. If Mario starts sliding at the exact time between C-Up being pressed and the camera assuming the over-the-shoulder view, he will enter a unique state where he will slide while turned sideways. He will not be able to turn left or right, but he will steadily gain speed until he runs out of ground to slide on. Here is what happens if this is used in the beginning of the slide:

Note Mario's unique pose and the steady acceleration. Mario will clip through the wall at the beginning of the second room and continue in a trajectory that will allow the player to take a shortcut if they initiate a Ground Pound as in the footage, though the speed makes the timing difficult.

If the angle is slightly different, the momentum can be reversed, to another interesting effect:

When Mario passes backwards over the first/second room boundary, the first room is not loaded. This is because the boundaries being only designed to work one-way since the developers did not anticipate anyone being able to slide backwards up the slide.

On the topic of shortcuts, here is the most efficient shortcut possible to take on the slide, as it skips from the beginning of the second room to the end of that room:

Attempting to fall to any portion of the third room would be impossible due to the third room needing to load by passing through the end of the second room.

And while we are talking about the third room, there is a wall at the very end of the slide that has peculiar properties:

Although the wall is completely vertical, it does not behave as any other vertical walls in the game. From certain angles, it appears to have no collision, but from others, Mario will slide down it instead of impacting (or, as it is commonly known, "bonking") into it. From what I can tell, this wall has the property of a very steep slide instead of the one it should have given its visual appearance.

There are some aspects of the slide that can be better explored in the Super Mario 64 DS remake, so let us switch to that. The first thing to note is that one of the decorations around the slide was changed in that version for no apparent reason:

In the original, there is a yellow face, a blue face, a star, and a moon.

In the remake, the first three were simply redrawn, while the moon was replaced with a blue star. Here are the textures for comparison, with the originals on top and the remake on the bottom:

However, this change is only cosmetic. The big mechanical difference between the two versions in that in Super Mario 64 DS, the slide is now one big room instead of three.

This is what it appears like in a level editor. Obviously, this raises one question: with the room boundaries now removed, is it finally possible to take a more drastic shortcut than the one from Super Mario 64?

Luckily, Super Mario 64 DS provides maps of all rooms on its bottom screen. Here is the one for the slide:

Note how the dead end in the top middle is very close to the goal on the map. Could it be possible to fall down from the dead end, hold Left, and fall to the goal?

Unfortunately, the game stops Luigi just short of achieving this. Even though the room is clearly completely loaded and Luigi is about to fall onto the slide, the death barrier activates. This is due to this game, despite not having room transitions, implementing segmentation in a different way: by setting the death barrier lower. Here is an example.

I jump off near the beginning of what was originally the second room and land on the lower portion without a problem. But the spot I jumped from was actually the very first spot where the death barrier was moved down. Here is what happens when I just off just slightly earlier:

The track appears from the darkness for a split second, but Luigi still dies due to the death barrier being higher up, as I had not passed the invisible checkpoint.

Finally, let us return to the Nintendo 64 version for some facts that do not involve sliding.

The room at the top of the slide contains a very obscure hidden 1-Up Mushroom. Mario must touch all four corners of the room to make it appear:

There is another 1-Up Mushroom that is less hidden but still missable, right behind the starting gate to the right:

Of course, slides are not something everyone enjoys. If you would like to still obtain the star without having to go through the slide, there is one trick you may have seen if you watch Super Mario 64 speedruns. It involves a hidden wind spot next to the exit of the slide.

All you have to do is run left from the starting spot, long jump off the cliff, get picked up by the wind and fall onto the higher ledge. From there, jumping and kicking in mid-air will land Mario next to the exit chute from the slide, with the total time since starting the course being less than 15 seconds.

If you wish to see other facts about the slide I have covered before on my public blogs, here is one regarding the pre-release version and one regarding an oversight of the slide's entrance displaying as pure white in the Tall, Tall Mountain painting in Super Mario 64 DS.

This concludes today's animated showcase, which I hope could be informative.

Thank you very much for reading.