After 27 years, Super Mario 64’s last remaining locked door has finally been opened

An unopenable door in Super Mario 64 – thought impossible to pass through without the use of mods – has finally been imprisoned open.

The door in question can be found within the game’s infamous penguin level – you know, the one where you definitely didn’t yeet the baby penguin off the mountain.

There, a log cabin can be found with a door that opens outwards – but that’s impossible to return through due to an invisible wall. Because of this, it’s the only door in the game that was thought impossible to be opened both ways – until, last month, someone finally pulled it off.

As shown in the video by pannenkoek2012 above, Nintendo fan Alexpalix1 managed to finally crack open the penguin level’s door from the outside thanks to some detailed knowledge of how Super Mario 64’s code logic works – and with some help from a certain baby penguin’s mother.

It’s been known for some time that the level’s invisible wall can be breached using Mario 64’s clipping ability – and that you can use the penguin to push Mario into the log cabin. But this simply leaves Mario plummeting to his death out of bounds.

The new breakthrough here is the knowledge that the game’s code logic handles Mario’s turning action in a certain way so that if he’s both falling and running in the same frame, the latter outcome will take precedence. This requires some careful timing, but means if Mario clips through the door with just a frame of walking, the door will open – and Mario will instead warp back to the room inside the cabin, safe and sound.

It sounds complicated, but the video above lays the whole thing out perfectly – and after 27 years, it is well worth a watch.

If newer Nintendo games are more your style, the company last week confirmed it would finally reveal Switch 2 in the coming months – or to be precise, before April 2025.