Super Mario Clouds

I wrote my last research post on this work, as it captured my attention as soon as I walked into the Whitney exhibition. Before watching this documentary, I knew that this piece is said to be made by hacking the game console of Super Mario. But after watching the video, I was shocked by the result of this reverse engineering.

Arcangel claims that there’s no generation lost because it’s the exact same image but it’s also not copying because the code was never copied or altered. But looking at the code, there are actually a lot of differences comparing to the original codes in the game. The color and saturation did not match the original either. Therefore, critiques are suspicious of whether Arcangel actually hacked into the console or coded it himself. This lead to Lemieux’s reverse engineer of the super mario clouds by using the ROM hacking process described by Arcangel. He realized that the coin at sprite zero could not be erased, suggesting that the Super Mario ROM was not contained in Arcangel’s work.

I was genuinely shocked by the result because during the research process of my last post, all the websites described Arcangel’s work as “made by ROM hacking”. It’s sounds so believable since the process is described so thoroughly and it seems very simple and doable. Therefore, the reverse engineering of the game really made me rethink everything. I don’t quite understand why Arcangel would claim that he hacked into the ROM when he didn’t. But I think reverse engineering is definitely a good way to test out what might be wrong.