nectarine 👽💚

In Super Mario World, whenever Mario completes a level, the path to the next level is revealed in a rather slow tile-by-tile manner. It is easy to assume that the effect is deliberate, to lend cinematic weight to the achievement of having beaten the level.

However, it turns out that the game is actually trying to perform the animation as fast as possible but is legitimately encountering slowdown due to the console not being able to process that many operations on each frame. The footage compares the speed of the original game's animation on the left and the speed after letting the game make use of a co-processor chip (not included in the original release) to achieve the speed the game is trying to display the animation at on the right.

Please note that this post is merely making a statement about the game from a programming perspective (the code is trying to execute faster than the game displays it) rather than an artistic perspective. We do not know if the slowdown was merely tolerated by the designers who would wish for the animation to be faster, or whether they actually wanted it to be this speed and the slowdown came in handy in that regard.

Source: kaptajnen, luansoliveira