A truly fascinating 17-minute video where Chris Siebert at 100th Coin ventures out to play Super Mario in a way where every single byte of code and every single byte of graphics are used, and then shows his work:

There was something about seeing the visualization of the entirety of the code being “used” that made me sit up:

It reminded me of IBM 1401, the 1959 business computer I saw a lot at the Computer History Museum. It takes up a big chunk of the room…

…but is still so simple that you can watch its console and understand exactly what is going on in its little huge electronic brain:

There’s something very powerful about this and made me imagine a version of it for my code, my CSS, my blog. Even the web lost a lot of its visited link vs. unvisited link fog of war kind of feeling of exploring the space and understanding how it is shaped.

The video gets into the coding weeds in between 2:25 and 13:35 – by the way, isn’t it scary to imagine your code pored over decades later, bugs and hacks and all? – but if you skip this part, make sure to come back at 13:35 for the verdict, and then for the graphics.

Spoiler alert: Some bits of code are never used, but the reasons are fascinating. All the untouched bytes are remnants of shameful mistakes, abandoned decisions, head fakes, and twin protections so strong that their first layer never gets penetrated – each one of them a tiny afterimage of other possible versions of Mario we’ve never gotten.