This level in the original Super Mario Bros doesn’t even take half a minute to beat. That said, there are about half a billion optimizations and skips for this level. Essentially, you want to be able to get to to this secret area above the level, and get warped to world 8. Now, you would think this would be the end of it – just whack the vine block and go to the warp zone. However, that isn’t quite it. An example of this takes advantage of broken warping. Basically, what you want to do is cause a pipe that appears later in the stage to take you to the area where the vine takes you. This saves time because the vine cut-scene is skipped. However, the pipe normally takes Mario to a different area. what has to happen is the game mistakes the pipe warp for the vine climb, by being far to the right.
Below is the full video and explanation.
Here is the link to the article where I found this.
This connects to engineering because you don’t reinvent the wheel every time. With each optimization/skip discovered, everyone finds a way to make it better. The timeline in the video portrays perfectly how knowledge is stacked, and that it eventually lead to record breaking times.
