Movies/ObsoletelyFabulous

Obsoletely Fabulous is a page for obsolete movies that are still interesting, whether it be for historical reasons, cool but obsolete exploits, or many other reasons.

Please feel free to suggest other movies in the forum topic.

For interesting movies that didn't make it to publication, check out Gruefood Delight.

These movies were significant milestones in the TAS community:

	[13] NES Super Mario Bros. "warpless" by Yy in 19:26.60
	The oldest movie archived and published by this website, predating Morimoto's Super Mario Bros. 3 TAS by over three years. It may be greatly outdated by today's standards, but it serves as a time capsule preserving an image of what tool-assisted speedrunning was like at the time.

	[668] NES Super Mario Bros. 3 "warps" by Morimoto in 11:03.95
	It's 2003. George W. Bush and John Kerry are campaigning for the U.S. presidency, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is cleaning up at the Oscars, and nobody has heard of a tool-assisted speedrun. This was the movie where it all started – without it, there would be no TASVideos. This movie was painstakingly put together over two years, and it shows: even without frame advance, memory watch, and other tools that modern TASers take for granted, it's still less than forty seconds slower than today's best effort.

[668] NES Super Mario Bros. 3 "warps" by Morimoto in 11:03.95

It's 2003. George W. Bush and John Kerry are campaigning for the U.S. presidency, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is cleaning up at the Oscars, and nobody has heard of a tool-assisted speedrun. This was the movie where it all started – without it, there would be no TASVideos. This movie was painstakingly put together over two years, and it shows: even without frame advance, memory watch, and other tools that modern TASers take for granted, it's still less than forty seconds slower than today's best effort.

	[436] N64 Super Mario 64 "16 stars" by spezzafer in 16:26.77
	This is a classic. The first Nintendo 64 submission to this site, and the first run of one of the most competed and popular games in tool-assisted history. Of particular interest is the MIPS sequence break, whereby Mario can clip through a supposedly impassable door while holding the NPC MIPS. In conjunction with the infamous Backwards Long Jump (BLJ), this enabled completion of the game with just 16 stars, rather than 70 as the designers intended. Nowadays the BLJ alone is sufficient to destroy the game without getting a single star, but, for fans of the rabbit, MIPS abuse lives on in TASes of the DS remake.

[436] N64 Super Mario 64 "16 stars" by spezzafer in 16:26.77

This is a classic. The first Nintendo 64 submission to this site, and the first run of one of the most competed and popular games in tool-assisted history. Of particular interest is the MIPS sequence break, whereby Mario can clip through a supposedly impassable door while holding the NPC MIPS. In conjunction with the infamous Backwards Long Jump (BLJ), this enabled completion of the game with just 16 stars, rather than 70 as the designers intended. Nowadays the BLJ alone is sufficient to destroy the game without getting a single star, but, for fans of the rabbit, MIPS abuse lives on in TASes of the DS remake.

	[1285] SNES Chrono Trigger "save glitch" by inichi in 21:23.98
	The godfather of all obsoleted movies, this even won TAS of 2009. The author kept very quiet about this movie, saying only that he was working on a Chrono Trigger improvement, so when it turned out to obsolete its predecessor by four hours (which has since been made its own branch and further optimized to under two and a half hours), and demonstrate memory corruption techniques that were then unheard of, the community was stunned. Sadly, the tricks used in this TAS have been shown to be the result of poor emulation. There is an improvement that further optimized the save glitch in a more hardware-accurate fashion.

[1285] SNES Chrono Trigger "save glitch" by inichi in 21:23.98

The godfather of all obsoleted movies, this even won TAS of 2009. The author kept very quiet about this movie, saying only that he was working on a Chrono Trigger improvement, so when it turned out to obsolete its predecessor by four hours (which has since been made its own branch and further optimized to under two and a half hours), and demonstrate memory corruption techniques that were then unheard of, the community was stunned. Sadly, the tricks used in this TAS have been shown to be the result of poor emulation. There is an improvement that further optimized the save glitch in a more hardware-accurate fashion.

	[2187] GBC Pokémon: Yellow Version "arbitrary code execution" by bortreb in 12:51.87
	Another movie that shook the community, and was a runner-up for TAS of 2012. This movie demonstrated the possibility for a player to corrupt the game to the point where he could inject and run his own code using just the controller buttons. This movie was obsoleted by this one, which corrupts the game far more quickly, but the code that was injected is very different, and both are worth watching.

	[2341] GBC Pokémon: Yellow Version "arbitrary code execution" by FractalFusion in 03:14.15
	... And surprisingly, in 2017 this movie got obsoleted as well, by an incredible run featuring an extensive use of a payload.

	[4032] NES Super Mario Bros. 3 "game end glitch" by Masterjun & ais523 in 00:00.78
	The first TAS created that beats the game less than a second after system startup. It's so quick, the first thing shown in the gameplay besides the glitched curtains is the cutscene that's played right after you defeat Bowser.

	[4092] SMS Zool: Ninja of the "Nth" Dimension "game end glitch" by The8bitbeast in 03:10.05
	Winner of the Glitchy TAS of 2019 award, this movie was obsoleted by a very short movie that beats the game right after that it barely starts.

These TASes show neat tricks and glitches that are not present in their current equivalents:

	[1946] SNES EarthBound "check glitch" by pirohiko & MUGG in 09:01.77
	Since the publication of this movie, it has been discovered that Ness can defeat this game without leaving his room by corrupting the save file. However, this movie does not corrupt the save file, and thus Ness has to journey all the way to the outskirts of Onett before skipping to the ending in quite a bizarre fashion.

	[567] SNES EarthBound "in bounds" by Halamantariel & Nitrodon in 3:26:09.18
	On the other hand, here's an Earthbound movie that plays through the game mostly as the developers intended. Much of the game's story remains intact and the added condition by the author to not use death warps by the author added some extra tension. This has since been obsoleted by an in-bounds publication that utilizes time saving techniques that skip parts of the plot.

	[2434] GB Pokémon: Blue Version "warp glitch" by MrWint in 37:10.53
	The first generation of Pokémon games have reached an almost unparalleled level of brokenness – they are amongst the only games where multiple ways of corrupting the memory to glitch to the end exist. The game is beaten faster in the SRAM glitch movie, but this uses an entirely different glitch. It was done entirely by a bot, which performed over 63 million rerecords to create the movie; no other run has even approached this figure without botting, and very few botted runs have approached and/or surpassed this figure.

[2434] GB Pokémon: Blue Version "warp glitch" by MrWint in 37:10.53

The first generation of Pokémon games have reached an almost unparalleled level of brokenness – they are amongst the only games where multiple ways of corrupting the memory to glitch to the end exist. The game is beaten faster in the SRAM glitch movie, but this uses an entirely different glitch. It was done entirely by a bot, which performed over 63 million rerecords to create the movie; no other run has even approached this figure without botting, and very few botted runs have approached and/or surpassed this figure.

	[2457] GB Pokémon: Blue Version "warp glitch" by MrWint in 28:07.28
	How about something even more unique? This improvement to the above run uses a completely different glitch used in no other Gen I submission. Without spoiling anything, it executes some very precisely arranged arbitrary code without ever needing to jump to controller input.

	[2504] GBC Pokémon: Gold Version "save glitch" by Bobmario511 in 54:24.96
	This was the first Gen II Pokémon run to corrupt memory and save data, which made it much faster than the only other TAS at that time. One of the main bugs abused lets the author bring up the Pokémon menu to distort map tiles into garbage blocks that are sometimes possible to walk on and get to places he normally can't.

	[1437] DS Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin by arukAdo & gocha in 10:14.85
	Zipping all over the place with little regard for the game's intended route is nothing new for Castlevania TASes, but this movie features a quite unique trick: constantly switching characters to allow the player to move around faster. The characters shout their names every time they are switched, creating an incessant noise that is either entertaining or very annoying, depending on your point of view. A new, faster gliding motion was subsequently discovered, which allowed fans of Castlevania TASes to give their ears a break.

[1437] DS Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin by arukAdo & gocha in 10:14.85

Zipping all over the place with little regard for the game's intended route is nothing new for Castlevania TASes, but this movie features a quite unique trick: constantly switching characters to allow the player to move around faster. The characters shout their names every time they are switched, creating an incessant noise that is either entertaining or very annoying, depending on your point of view. A new, faster gliding motion was subsequently discovered, which allowed fans of Castlevania TASes to give their ears a break.

	[1886] GB Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins "game end glitch" by andymac & MUGG in 02:08.98
	This TAS does something no other (exempting the slightly slower one it obsoleted) has done: it plays through a level made entirely of actual memory blocks. What's better is that Mario can actually interact with these tiles as he moves through them, which has the added benefit of corrupting individual blocks of memory however the authors wish.

These TASes feature a unique form of entertainment:

	[817] SNES Super Metroid "100%" by JXQ in 1:10:45.02
	Super Metroid has been through many iterations in many different categories. This one won TAS of 2007, partially because the author went the extra mile with entertainment. Even during cutscenes and scripted sequences, where the player has no control over the game, the author decided to play around with the input such that, when displayed on the screen, it formed amusing animations. This input is visible in the YouTube encode.

[817] SNES Super Metroid "100%" by JXQ in 1:10:45.02

Super Metroid has been through many iterations in many different categories. This one won TAS of 2007, partially because the author went the extra mile with entertainment. Even during cutscenes and scripted sequences, where the player has no control over the game, the author decided to play around with the input such that, when displayed on the screen, it formed amusing animations. This input is visible in the YouTube encode.

	[1569] DS Brain Age "playaround" by Ryuto in 04:08.10
	This TAS has the distinction of being the first playaround TAS ever to be obsoleted. It makes an utter mockery of the game's input recognition system, forcing it to accept meaningless doodles as correct answers to mental arithmetic questions. The author's second version draws more elaborate pictures, but some felt that this made the TAS drag on a little, and the pictures were so well-drawn themselves that they distracted from the point of the run: that the game was recognizing them as numeric characters.

[1569] DS Brain Age "playaround" by Ryuto in 04:08.10

This TAS has the distinction of being the first playaround TAS ever to be obsoleted. It makes an utter mockery of the game's input recognition system, forcing it to accept meaningless doodles as correct answers to mental arithmetic questions. The author's second version draws more elaborate pictures, but some felt that this made the TAS drag on a little, and the pictures were so well-drawn themselves that they distracted from the point of the run: that the game was recognizing them as numeric characters.

Movies Obsoletely Fabulous

Movies

Obsoletely Fabulous