Nova Daily - 30 April 2026: Out of bounds

Hi!

For my day-to-day activities I usually have to perform a lot of calls. Not all of them are equally fun, though, and a lot of how I feel about it depends on the person I'm talking to, and how I'm doing overall. There are days when I'm eager to just hang up, even though you can't always do that. And when I then hear "Dreadfully sorry, but I have to leave in five minutes" that there is really absolutely no need to apologise whatsoever.

Other people are really fun to hang out with. There is one guy with whom I speak on a very regular basis, and we often just keep the call on while we're each going about our own business. The other day he told me a joke that you can only understand if you know some videogame jargon:

An aeroplane filled with speedrunners crashed, and all of them die. When they arrive at the Gates of Heaven and want to move in, Peter orders them to stop.

"Speed runners are not allowed in," he says with a brisk voice.

"No problem," the speed runners reply brightly. "We'll just go out of bounds and clip ourselves in."

Out of bounds

In many older videogames, the storage capacity of the cartridges was very limited. The developers were faced with the task to deal with the hardware limitations in a clever way that would still enable the game to work. Almost by necessity, this caused some gaps in the programming. In Super Mario Bros., the background music is suspended while the jumping sound is played.

Speed runners are gamers who aim to complete their games in the shortest amount of time possible (or, in case of PacMan and Tetris, achieve the highest possible score). Some of them are actively looking for such gaps in the code, hoping to exploit them and set a faster time. Some go so far as to dissect the game code and see if there are things that can be exploited. It was discovered that in Super Mario 64, there is no cap to Mario's velocity when moving backwards, and the long jump increases Mario's speed. Combining these tricks can cause Mario to build up insane levels of speed.

The world of speed running is as competitive and professional as anything else. Some speed runners will spend thousands of hours on a single level in one game to shave off one frame worth of time and set a new world record. And if someone finds a new gap in the code, or comes up with a new method to exploit such a gap, very often it is a matter of days and sometimes even hours before an entirely new strategy is tried out.

What happened in the Link to the Past clip I inserted above is a good example. At around 1:37, Link jumps off a ledge in Hyrule Castle. The game expects him to land on the lower floor, but the player saves and quits while he's in mid-air. The game still expects Link to land on a lower floor, though.

After resuming the game, the system is left with a bit of unresolved tension. When at 2:15, Link is hit by the blue guard, he is airborne for a few frames. This triggers the "Link has to land on a lower floor" lingering tension, and the game effectively lands Link on a lower floor. This means that he ends up under the surface. He's now in a state of being outside the normal boundaries of the level, or "out of bounds". 

Being out of bounds allows Link to walk straight to the end of the game. This is possible because every room in every dungeon is placed on the same grid to save up data, and so every room is linked. And so he can "clip into the ending" in the same way as our speed runners went out of bounds and clipped themselves into Heaven.

A criminal victory

What's also out of bounds is how I won this blitz game:

I'll take those. It's almost as ugly and enjoyable to watch as seeing some people beat the games that you spent years trying to complete.