The Enigmatic Log Drift: A Journey Through a 2.8 Million Frame Mario 64 Discovery

Not many video games have been dissected and examined for the techniques found in Big Mario 64, but I’m finding it challenging to conceive of a more fascinatingly obscure piece of trivia than this: the game’s rolling log can actually be moved from its original spot due to floating point rounding discrepancies.

There is a crucial rolling speed segment in Big Mario 64’s Mighty, Mighty Mountain course where, typically, you merely shift a bit sideways to reach the tallest points of the level. However, modder and tool-assisted speedrun creator Sjmhrp discovered a truly bizarre behavior from this log in 2024, which was recently highlighted to the Mario community by the former trivia aggregator Supper Mario Broth on Bluesky.

“The rolling log in TTM can be made to drift due to floating point rounding errors,” Sjmhrp explains in the description of the YouTube video above. “This occurs because the float resolution of the log’s speed is finer than the resolution of its location, allowing it to slowly drift sideways at approximately 2μm/s by adjusting its speed.”

How does one achieve this? By repeating a 34-frame loop of inputs continuously – which, realistically, is unlikely to occur in a tool-assisted speedrun, or TAS. To explore the full range of the log’s possible positions, one would need to repeat that loop 2.8 million times over 36 days. “I didn’t see the point in creating a full month-long TAS,” Sjmhrp clarifies, “I only did a few cycles and then used lua to adjust Mario to the correct position each frame afterwards.”

“This currently has no known purpose,” as noted by Supper Mario Broth, which is a very amusing thing to mention regarding a feat that would take 36 days to accomplish. However, given the ongoing efforts like the A button-less achievement in the Big Mario 64 community, you never know – perhaps someday they could find a way to utilize this strategy to transform the entire gameplay experience. Until then, we can all simply appreciate the commitment to uncovering everything this game has to offer.

Big Mario 64 speedrunning is considered “dead” after one runner