Transmission Zero

Introduction

This page shows a few tricks for the SNES version of Super Mario World. The first is a glitch which allows the player to easily and quickly get the maximum possible score, and the second is a secret area in Larry’s Castle which holds the two remaining dragon coins, and allows you to save your progress.

Maximum Score 9 999 990

In Super Mario World, the maximum possible score is 9 999 990. Once you reach this, your score no longer increases—a lot better than some other games where getting a very high score results in integer overflow and causes your score to become a huge negative number! It’s actually possible to reach this score easily and quickly in the first level of the Forest of Illusion.

Near the middle of the level you’ll reach a platform where you can find three wigglers (the caterpillar type creatures). When you jump on one, it will turn red, become invincible, and start moving a lot quicker. If you move so that they run off screen, and then return to where they were, you will find that they have returned to their normal state, and you can jump on them again. There are three wigglers in this part of the level, and you can exploit this behaviour to score many extra points and many extra lives—jump from the first wiggler, to the second, to the third, back to the second, back to the first, and so on without touching the ground, and you’ll quickly be scoring huge amounts of extra points. This appears to be a glitch, as the game cannot display the correct graphics for a 4-up or high scores, and the scoring seems to become quite random, even awarding you coins for stomping on an enemy! The following is a YouTube video I have made of the trick being performed:

Larry’s Castle Secret Area

If you’ve been trying to collect all of the dragon coins in Larry’s Castle, but you are missing two of them, you probably haven’t found the secret area in this level. It’s located just before the exit from the first room, after the spikes.

Instead of leaving via the door, drop into the pit whilst moving as far to the right as you can—it’s not quite as dangerous as it might look, because although you will lose a life if you drop all the way down, you’ll find there is a platform to the right. This contains the two remaining dragon coins, a super mushroom (which you might want to jump over if you already have a better reserve power-up), and you can cut the tape to save your progress. The following is a YouTube video I have made of the trick being performed: