It may be 23 years since Super Mario World was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but new content is still being discovered in the game. A new video from YouTube user "A + Start" details a glitch that can be done in the beginning of the game to obtain a broken item that loads a cloud that Mario can use to float around the screen.
To successfully do the glitch you must: Go to level 1-2 on the map. As small Mario, get Yoshi from the block in the beginning. Have Yoshi eat the first red shell. Spit fire at the right moment. Follow that fire, eating another green shell. Place that shell on the fourth ledge in a series. The fire hits the shell, turning it into a coin, which Yoshi eats. Spin-jump off Yoshi and grab the coin, but hit the R shoulder button to make the camera scroll right. The coin becomes an enemy, which it eaten. A glitched image will appear in the item box on the top of the screen.
(The video makes it more understandable.)
This glitch works because it forces the game to replace the coin you grabbed from Yoshi's mouth with a recently spawned enemy. The enemy he eats is a Charging Chuck, which normally can't be eaten. That forces the game to give Mario a power-up item that doesn't exist in the game, the cloud.
Besides just the novelty of doing a recently discovered glitch for a classic game, the important part of this process is that it gives players an item to summon a floating cloud. Using said cloud lets someone speed through a level. And something like that is very important to the niche community devoted to speedruns of games.
Speedruns are all about finishing a game in record time, usually by using glitches and other exploits to make enemies easier to defeat or even to skip whole levels. The cloud can be used to speed up the final boss fight with Bowser. The cloud causes Bowser to skip some animation, which makes fighting him quicker. Using the cloud also makes fighing Bowser easier by grabbing enemies from the air and then tossing them at Bowser.
Another YouTube user named "dram 551" has been using this glitch over the last few weeks and finally beat the speedrun world record for finishing Super Mario World, finishing the game in about 9 minutes and fifty-two seconds. You can see him grab the glitched cloud and then later use it in the last fight.
The cloud is normally usable by Mario when he kills a Lakitu and steals his cloud, but in those cases the cloud must be used immediately and is not an item that can be saved for a later level.
Recently, another user named "Lord Saradoc" used a variety of glitches to beat the speedrun record for the original Super Mario Bros., beating that game in about 4 minutes and 58 seconds.
