New Super Mario 64 Impossible Coin Discovered
By John Jacques 25 October 2016
A YouTuber named Pannenkoek2012 discovers a brand new impossible coin in Super Mario 64 – one that has laid dormant for the past 20 years, and has only just been found.
It’s been over twenty years since the release of Super Mario 64, but the game is still finding ways to surprise gamers. This week brought the discovery of a new impossible coin, a property of the game that many gamers may not have even realized existed. Unlike the rumor that gamers can actually play as Luigi, impossible coins actually exist in Super Mario 64. As the name implies, these coins spawn in such a way that they’re actually impossible to collect, though it hasn’t been for a lack of trying over the last several years.
A YouTuber named Pannenkoek2012 discovered this new impossible coin in the huge version of Tiny-Huge Island after realizing that a string of 4 coins in a row seemed awfully out of place. Within Super Mario 64, straight horizontal lines of coins always spawn in groups of 5, so the YouTuber hypothesized that something must be happening to make the fifth and final coin despawn shortly after the level loads, thus making it impossible for everyone’s favorite plumber to collect the goods.
In the video below, Pannenkoek2012 explained how he discovered the newly minted impossible coin, and digs deep into how the coin came to be on his secondary ‘uncommented’ YouTube channel:
As the video explains, it’s likely that the developers originally placed the coins on what was a flat plain. At some point during development, the level designers adjusted the map to include a large slope where the coins spawned. Someone on the team then forgot to adjust the spawn marker for the coins, and by sheer chance only the fifth and final coin spawned too deep into the slope, causing a failsafe in the game’s programming to despawn the coin before it caused an error.
The coin can be picked up when using hacks, but it seems like anyone attempting a vanilla playthrough will never be able to obtain the impossible coin. To make matters even more confusing, the first impossible coin – which was eventually collected – was also discovered on Tiny-Huge Island, meaning the same map has held two different impossible coins.
While discovering that a 20 year old game is still hiding secrets from gaming might be a little off-putting for some, this discovery has nothing on how weird the hacked version of the game is. Those looking for a more modern return to Peach’s Castle can venture to the location in Halo 5, but they’ll find no impossible coins there: just swinging gravity hammers and the same amount of surprise Luigi appearances.
Source: EuroGamer
