10 GENIUS Ways People Beat Video Games

Video games faced a significant problem when they grew popular with consoles like the NES: The games were too short. And since renting was the primary way people played back then, not having enough content for someone to rent the game multiple times could result in a financial loss for the developers.

So, what was the solution?

Make the games so astronomically difficult, it was impossible to beat by renting just once.

This game development philosophy started to die down in the 90s when game developers realized people like winning. But its legacy didn’t die there.

In the early 2010s, old-school difficulty resurfaced in games like Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy. Showing that demanding games could still be successful and find an audience in our modern age.

But even these games underestimated the skill and dedication of hardcore gamers as people beat them with relative ease. After so much time without challenges, gamers were craving something new. They wanted a real challenge.

So, they made their own way of playing games. Self-imposed challenges that upped the difficulty of popular games immensely. Whether by handicapping themselves to specific rules or finding new and obscure controllers, these gamers wanted an actual challenge, so they came up with genius ways of accomplishing that.

Super Mario 64 is one of the most revolutionary games of all time. In part due to the star collectibles that dominate the game.

Each level has approximately seven stars; to progress through Peach’s castle, you need to obtain an ever-increasing amount of them. There are 120 stars total, but you can reach the final level with only 70.

However, even though stars are the meat and bones of Mario 64, clever speedrunners have discovered that it’s possible to beat the game without collecting a single star.

As it turns out, the classic title has a lot of unintended bugs and glitches, particularly in Peach’s castle, where various corners and doors will cause Mario to clip through and go out of bounds if approached just right. From here, it’s just a matter of clipping through each Bowser level to obtain the key necessary to advance through the castle properly. Then, you can reach the final level and promptly beat the game without collecting a single star.

A lot of time and dedication went into discovering these glitches, and even more, time was put into practice to execute them. Making something that was once thought to be impossible into reality.