The invisible walls of video games
Squeezing through the cracks
Teleporting and warping memory
The human and machine collaboration
YOUR GOAL
Master of How speedrunners walk through walls
diegoplays Invisible Walls
Out of bounds, out of bounds, We're slipping right past the wall!
diegoplays Games check for collisions at specific intervals, usually tied to the frame rate.
diegoplays Time your movements to discover how speedrunners exploit collision glitches to slip through walls.
Invisible walls: In Pac-Man, the ghosts actually have hitboxes smaller than their visual sprites to give players a tiny, fair edge.
An unseen barrier in a video game that prevents a player character from moving into certain areas. In 2024, researcher pannenkoek2012 published a comprehensive analysis detailing every such boundary in Super Mario 64.
What can happen if a video game character moves faster than the game's frame-by-frame collision checks?
What is the name of the invisible boundary shape used by game engines to detect when objects collide?
What standard frame rate check frequency allows a game to test for wall collisions 60 times every second?
Which 1996 Nintendo 64 game is famous for its speedrunners exploiting out-of-bounds areas to skip entire levels?
What is the technical term for the calculation a game uses to push a stuck player out of a solid wall?
What is the term for the empty, unprogrammed space that exists outside a video game's intended map?
How do game engines typically respond when a character's hitbox slightly overlaps with a wall hitbox?
Why do game developers use simplified shapes like cylinders instead of detailed character models for collision checks?