Bizarre Super Mario World hack turns the game into Pong, Snake

Speed runner and YouTube user Masterjun3 posted of a video of what could be the strangest Super Mario World hack of all time. By exploiting in-game objects, he's able to turn Mario's head into a game of Pong or Snake.

The tool-assisted speed run debuted during Awesome Games Done Quick 2014, a series of speed demonstrations that took place Jan. 5 - 11 to raise money for charity. On TASVideos, Masterjun3 explains the bizarre glitch as a manipulation of either moving objects or where objects despawn.

"Then I swap the item in Yoshi's mouth with a flying ?-block (thus the yellow glitched shell) and using a glitch (stunning) to spawn a sprite which isn't used by SMW and since it tries to jump to the sprite routine location, it indexes everything wrong and jumps to a place I manipulated earlier with the sprites (OAM) and because of the P-Switch it jumps to controller registers and from there the arbitrary code execution is started," Masterjun wrote.

"Even shorter: Magic."

For a more detailed breakdown of how the exploit works, check out this Reddit thread on the speed run.