I mean tasvideos.org goes back to 2003: https://tasvideos.org/SiteHistory#2003

I don't think anyone is saying that there was no TAS in general in 2017, but that there was no TAS for the Wii U in 2017.

I'm fairly sure the Wii U was already hacked by 2017, so he could've just played the inputs back on the console itself. Either that or just hack the game into thinking he cleared it when he didn't.

No need to hack anything, you just have to make a Bluetooth controller with the same characteristics than Nintendo’s controllers. They are pretty standard.

Even with a microcontroller, doing frame-perfect inputs is tricky because you don't have anything to sync off of - even tapping into the vsync signal from the video output is an imperfect reference because there's no guarantee that the game engine is actually synced with it (although I have no knowledge of SMM, maybe it does work better than I expect)

You can start off with a start input to unpause the game, for instance.

That doesn't solve the problem, in the general case (it might work acceptably well in practice, though)

if your controller has such loose timing that you can't match a 10ms window reliably, you're doing something very wrong. '

Match a 10ms window how far away from your last sync point? Every clock has a drift rate.

I get where you're going, but also consider the level is 17 seconds long. It's not unreasonable to think he just ran it a few times until the clocks decided to cooperate.

Except that many top players said it was very unlikely due the time it was uploaded and the availability of TAS methods at the time. The creator took a day to beat it, because not only couldn't sync inputs with the game engine current state, but also there's real rng in the trick.

The funny thing is if you watch the clear vid it actually looks really straightforward.

The original purpose of the video was to coyly announce the TAS tool the maker created, but the video was mostly ignored because it looks like a regular clear vid.

That’s how it so effectively accidentally flew under the radar. The level lacked a TAS label, and TASs are usually obvious and flashy.

But then you play it and realize those jumps are insanely precise.

Yes, frame perfect, but also mostly pixel perfect x,y precision.

There is even RNG manipulation necessary to ensure a bomb is spawned from a note block in a specific direction.

Streamers had already beaten it in chunks so it was theoretically possible for a human to do, but once people started offering monetary bounties the uploader felt it was time to let everyone in on the 7 year old joke.

> He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs.

The streamer featured in TFA, ThaBeast721, said that he and some other high profile streamers playing the level were contacted by the maker, whom many in the community knew prior and so there was chat history to authenticate the claim, and shown a video of the device breaking the level.

Thab described the device as a “raspberry pi or arduino type device hooked up to an actual controller somehow”

When the clear video failed to go viral the maker dropped the gag, and forgot about it until recently, because the device was a pain to use anyway.

The maker said it took 3 months to upload the level. Something about the device causing the console to crash when programming the inputs.

https://m.twitch.tv/thabeast721