Doors, a notorious evil that attracts architects and game developers, usually work very simply in the 1996 3D platformer Super Mario 64 – all but one, which cannot be opened from the “outside”. The one-way door with no outside handle at the bottom of the slide in the Cool, Cool Mountain level has been perplexing Mario 64 enthusiasts for nearly three decades, but there has been an answer finally to this dilemma without using a hack.
This answer was found by Super Mario 64 speedrunner “Alexpalix”, inspired by a YouTube video from famous Super Mario 64 multiverse engineer and A button mashing expert, Pannenkoek2012, which explains the invisible walls in Mario 64 .Since one of the invisible walls obstructs this one since the door was opened, Pannenkoek’s previous work on their explanation was the key to the final answer to this old question.
Doors generally come in two varieties in Super Mario 64: “real” doors, which simply open and lead straight into the next room, and “fake doors”, with fake hallways behind which hide loading or teleportation areas. The door at the bottom of Cool, Cool Mountain is the last type, and you can leave through the door on any mission that gives you access to the slide, but you can’t go back inside . The developers were kind enough to remove the door handle to indicate this, but why do they do that in the first place?
Simply put, the natural disturbance of the shack (collision, or how objects physically interact, measured separately in 3D games from graphics) prevents the player from reaching the door. While other doors in Mario 64 can be bypassed using building materials, this trick is only useful for “real” doors so is useless here.
In the end, the secret to passing was just an even bigger hitting glitch. By getting the mother penguin, which is next to the hut in Cool, Cool Mountain, close enough to the door and then jumping behind it and spinning around, the player can turn to the normally inaccessible door and open it.
It would seem that there is nothing special about this, but in just one day almost 400 thousand people watched the video.
