But First, We Need to Talk About Parallel Universes
The greatest video games ever made are low-dimensional shadows of something much, much greater
Why would a programmer start a Substack?
I write code all day. I have my creative outlet, I have my career. I’m really going to write essays on top of that? What, for money?
I’m beginning this blog not because I want to, but because I need to. There is a revolutionary truth I’ve been cursed with knowledge of, and every day its mystery weighs on me more:
“The greatest video games ever made are low-dimensional shadows of something much, much greater.”
My torment began in 1998.
The games industry is in no position to accomplish what I’m about to describe to you. Super Mario Bros. is nearly 40 years old, the innovations it pioneered in communication through gameplay are common knowledge now, and yet the biggest developers in the world still aren’t capable of reliably implementing them.
“Often our experiences are pierced by disruptive, dissonant elements: overlong and condescending tutorials, over-explained idiotic stories and a million other stupidities. These kinds of things stir our intellect, forcing us to switch gears and pay attention, but what they have to offer generally isn't worthy of our attention. To me these kinds of things are repulsive, evidence of a deficient imagination or a lack of videogame literacy on the part of the creator, or simply evidence of a committee. These things break the spell, they're an invitation to quit, and they exist in 99% of the videogames I've played.” —Superbrothers
The greatest design evolution that the industry has produced since the 80s is, in my eyes, the sandbox game. Minecraft, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom reveal their secrets not through exposing you to a linear sequence of challenges, but by inviting you to occupy their worlds and see what happens. But this isn’t a recent innovation either. There are only a handful of modern games that give the player a true sandbox experience (as opposed to a linear experience with the façade of open-world freedom tacked on), and they’re still only small iterations away from the turn of the century’s Super Mario 64 and Grand Theft Auto III.
Until the industry has mastered its existing genres, it won’t begin thinking about game development in any fundamentally grander ways—and there’s no telling when that might be. But that relatively ancient games in these genres so often exceed their modern counterparts gives us a clue: whatever the next evolution of video games is, there will be echoes of it in games from the past.
You’ve felt this. The primitivity of the video game medium constrains your ability to articulate what it is you’re feeling, but you can point to examples of it, of oddities that have stuck out to you over your life of playing games.
The first time I felt it was when I encountered the ice key in Banjo-Kazooie. In the game’s Christmas world, inside a cave that’s home to a walrus, there’s a frozen-over window with a floating key behind it.
You cannot obtain this key.
As a young child, this was the most tantalizing mystery I'd ever encountered. Even if it were a non-sequitur, it would still be a neat Easter egg. But what has earned video game secrets like this so much reverence is their history of pulling off what magicians consider impossible: yielding answers even more beautiful than their questions. The Minus World is real, you really can surf to the truck in Vermillion City, and the truth behind the ice key is cooler than you’d ever imagine.
Early models of the Nintendo 64 would retain RAM for 30 seconds after the console had been turned off. The developers of Banjo-Kazooie came up with a plan to exploit this that they called Stop ‘n’ Swop. They hid a bunch of collectible items in the game that you’d only be able to reach by collecting a sister object in its future sequel and then swapping out that cartridge for Banjo-Kazooie, at which point it would read the leftover sequel data and trigger a special event allowing you to collect the item. The ice key was one of these items and was visible to the player as a tease for Stop ‘n’ Swop—but between the release of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, the RAM quirk in the N64 was fixed, leaving the ice key forever unobtainable.
The story of the ice key resonated with me deeply. You could call it a “gaming mystery,” but there’s more to it than that. It’s canonical, existing within the fiction of the game’s universe and the rules of its code, while also being totally inaccessible during normal play.
It was in 2013 when I again encountered this phenomenon so clearly. This time, it wasn’t a key, but an eggplant.
Spelunky is “your favorite game designer’s favorite game.” It birthed the genre of roguelites by marrying the immediate action of Super Mario Bros. with the emergent complexity of Shiren the Wanderer. In it, you platform through a series of four worlds, each containing four levels, randomly generated within the confines of that world’s theme.
Expert players will eventually notice hints that point to a method for accessing a hidden fifth world. This method requires playing through the game in a very specific, very difficult way.
It wasn’t until a year after Spelunky’s release that players discovered a strange sprite in the game’s files that no one had ever seen in-game.
It was an eggplant-shaped face the size of the secret final boss’s.
The eggplant is an item in Spelunky that you can obtain by sacrificing a wrapped present on an altar in the first world. It’s seemingly useless and incredibly fragile. What hackers quickly realized after the discovery of the hidden sprite was that the eggplant held a secret: by throwing it at the final boss, his head would be transformed.
Transporting the eggplant from the first world all the way to the final boss would clearly require two players, due to several choke points in the game preventing one player from carrying it alone. But this analysis was wrong, and before long, the unthinkable solo eggplant run was completed.
There are better summaries of the solo eggplant run’s details than I can write here. What I specifically want you to understand is that no glitches were involved. This wasn’t yet another case of a speedrunner clipping through walls and bypassing the whole game. The solo eggplant run was a meticulous exploitation of Spelunky’s mechanics on a level that even the developers never foresaw was possible, with each puzzle being overcome by ingenious lateral thinking and extreme reflexes.
The solo eggplant run is why my Twitter icon is an eggplant. It’s quite possibly the greatest story in all of gaming. But, once again, I found myself unable to explain why.
Until a few years later, when I learned about parallel universes.
SM64 - Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses (Commentated) is a legendary video. It’s spawned half a dozen memes, the most recognizable coming from a line halfway through:
"You're probably wondering what I'm gonna need all this speed for—after all, I do build up speed for 12 hours. But to answer that, we're gonna need to talk about parallel universes."
The video has already been technical up to this point, but after that line comes out of nowhere, it goes off the rails. pannenkoek2012 goes on to explain how parallel universes in Super Mario 64 are a consequence of how the game tracks Mario’s position using floating point numbers but calculates collisions with the environment using 16 bit integers. We can abstract that math away and represent this as Mario occupying copies of the environment’s geometry existing far out of bounds, aka, parallel universes.
This discovery of parallel universes was in service to the A Button Challenge, in which players attempt to beat Super Mario 64 without jumping. You’d think that this would be either obviously impossible or relatively straightforward, but it turns out that this is exactly so difficult that participants have had to make slow progress over the past decade by studying Super Mario 64's code for bugs and exploiting every single one to its limit. If you watch every video on pannekoek's channel, you'll have computer science degree by the end of it.
Super Mario 64 was the first game I ever played, and the A Button Challenge revitalized my interest in it. Learning about the A Button Challenge was like learning about a secret even more complex eggplant run 20 years after the game came out. Once again, my intuition told me that this was important, but I couldn't explain why. I had a list of all of the coolest things I'd ever seen in video games. What did they have in common? What was a concise way of explaining this category of thing that captured me so intensely?
And then, about a year ago, I read a YouTube comment about the A Button Challenge that finally unlocked the answer:
“A hidden game inside of regular SM64, created by the negative space from the design that the game devs had originally carved out.”
The ice key. The solo eggplant run. The A Button Challenge.
These are all parallel universes.
To play a game is to enact a boundary. Within this boundary, a consistent set of rules is established, their interactions are explored mercilessly, and surprising consequences are discovered. And that's how the magic happens.
"Place 2 and 2 right in front of my nose, but make me think I'm seeing 5. Then reveal the truth, 4!, and surprise me." —Teller
Puzzle designers call this the eureka moment. Whatever it is, it's real, one of the most real things there is. Even more powerful is what happens when a game contains not just one set of surprises, but an entire secret world of them, lying just below the surface. A hidden goal that was in front of you all along, lying parallel to your journey, and that upon discovering, recontextualizes the entire experience.
What does it mean for a game to be more than one thing? In the era of infinite AI-generated content, it could mean severance from the canonicity that gives revelations their power.
But there is another possibility.
Even in a world where each person can generate their own personal video game on the fly, those games must have constraints to be interesting. This principle can apply to the process of generation itself, allowing games to exist within a shared tapestry, with each player able to explore different multidimensional corners of global state space. Super Mario 64 and the A Button Challenge are only two points within one of these state spaces, two parallel universes among billions.
Game development today is focused on building one universe at a time. Someday soon, this could be a multidimensional process, in which the greatest creators build out objects meant to be appreciated on myriad layers simultaneously. The most beautiful of these multidimensional objects will be the ones that reach outside of themselves, the ones whose parallel universes overlap with physical reality and reveal its constraints to be playgrounds that will bring people together to build, win, and guide this world to its dawn.
Over the past few years, my quest has introduced me to airship tycoons, mind readers, and genetically modified Australians, all wielding their unique powers in pursuit of this objective. My own power comes from the brief premonition I’ve been given of this one facet of the future that we will build together. The adventure that this glimpse has sent me on has been unlike any other, and the mysteries I’ve encountered along the way have assured me that this future will be more fun than you can possibly imagine.
I am starting this Substack to chronicle these mysteries.