Year: 2026

Sundry Sunday: A Handmade Crank Organ Plays Mario 64’s Ending, and That Other Thing

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Two items this week. One is this simple yet charming video of someone who made a crank organ (festooned with plush parrots and a decorative octopus) and configured it to play the ending music, titled simply “Staff Roll,” to Super Mario 64. It’s very nice to listen to, and it’s only about three minutes long. Please enjoy!

The other thing? Oh, the final episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, which released to theaters a couple of weeks ago, finally hit Youtube. Everyone probably knows that already! It didn’t to badly in theaters (I saw it there myself for the first time), but now that it’s on Youtube the saga Pomni and her friends in their weirdly video game-like world is over. There’s laughs, quite a bit of sadness, and a hopeful tone at the end. I greatly enjoyed it! If you haven’t seen it yet here it is (58 minutes).

Will we ever see the Circus and its denizens again? Who knows? Creator Gooseworx has said she’s tired of working on it, but she seemed to leave open the possibility that production company Glitch could do something. The characters are interesting and unique, and we should be happy with what we have. But who knows?

The CRPG Addict Plays The Original MUD

MUDs, and their sibling games MUCKs and MOOs, now almost forgotten except among a rapidly-aging userbase, used to be the biggest gaming draw on the internet. When MMORPGs became big, it was largely by using the lessons of MUDs and applying them to a 3D graphical world with action gameplay. Everquest (admit it, you haven’t heard that name for a while) and World of Warcraft would never have become big if it hadn’t been able to stand on the shoulder of MUDs. And now, with WoW’s memory receding in the minds of many users, I think it’s well time to go back and find out what the originals were all about.

The CRPG Addict has come around to reviewing the original Multi-User Dungeon, the first of many. Because PLATO predated so many networked computer games it wasn’t the first online multiplayer game, but it was one of the first that could be played by many people. The Addict links to an extensive Digital Antiquarian article from 2017 explaining MUD’s history.

That Antiquarian article is pretty amazing. In the original MUD, if you got enough experience points you could become a wizard, basically a moderator yourself. If you killed another player they had to start over from scratch, and you got 1/24th of their experience points. Other ways to gain points was to find treasure and drop it into the swamp. Once treasure was swamped it was gone until the next server reset, which only happened when nearly all the treasure was so disposed. While you could find and use weapons, there was a limited number of most of those in the game so most players had to be satisfied with basic stick weapons.

But despite these limitations, players managed. Wizards could crash the game easily (there was a command specifically for doing so!), so mostly they didn’t. Customs were decided on; it was improper to kill a player more than two levels below yours. The game continued, and players largely came up with their own solutions to social problems.

The CRPG Addict explains that the original MUD is still in operation at british-legends.com, and that you can even join him there to play today! Times are in his post.

The Last Year of Animal Crossing

I was just looking through Hunter S’s video on the holiday glitches of Gamecube Animal Crossing (11 minutes). By “holiday,” it means the winter holiday, and the various weird things that are possible during this season, like using snowballs to get pushed out of bounds into the ocean, getting a dummy item due to a data error when playing games with villages camping in igloos, and others.

I think the most interesting thing however has to do with GC’s Animal Crossing limits. Although the system clock extends out to 2099, the calendar of the game itself only supports dates up to 2030! When the date rolls on at midnight, December 31st 2030, the game will advance to 2031, apparently as normal, but on saving and reloading the year will become 2030 again.

The video was made two years ago in 2024. It’s now 2026, so you only have about four-and-a-half years to play Gamecube Animal Crossing in the intended way. All the AC games have date limits like this. The Switch version, New Horizons, is said to be able to even open save files from 2061 and later, so that’s one edge the Gamecube version has over it.

Early Web Links

If you’ve been reading us for a while, you’ll know that I have an inordinate fondness for the early days of this here World Wide Web. I have become disenchanted with social media, the infinite scroll, and not just Web 3.0, but even Web 2.0. React.js and other frameworks. Gimmie that good old HTML religion. You can have some CSS if you promise not to go crazy with it.

You might wonder how many of these websites can be left. It was just in April that the long-decaying webhosts Tripod and Angelfire finally and suddenly went dark. How many of these old pages remain? Well, going by the link count at Early Web Links, at least 12,000 of them.

There’s actually many more than that out there, but they’ve been neglected, abandoned by the money web. Good luck finding sites like these in Google, they’re much more apt to send you to Reddit or Youtube. All the big social media sites actively downrank sites with the temerity to include links in them, for if you follow them, you’ll be leaving the lucrative walled gardens of Facebook, or the fascist-supporting castle walls of “X the everything app.” The rise of more healthy social media like Mastodon and Bluesky is a counter to that, but they’re still dwarfed in size by the likes of Instagram and Threads.

If you want to find interesting, independent Web 1.0 sites like these, your best bet is a directory like Early Web Links. Despite the name not all of these sites are old ones, many are quite new. They’re “early web” links because the sites are done in the style of the oldweb, and presented from a link directory not dissimilar to the fertile environment that, decades ago, was the mulch that supported the roots of Yahoo and its improbably-lasting multimedia empire.

Of course, that was decades ago. If you’re looking to make a fortune now then these sites aren’t going to provide it to you. But what they can give you is honest, earnest enjoyment, not tied to an algorithm or funding billionaires. Go have a look! We’ll be here when you’re done.

Obscure Extra Lives in Super Mario World

The Game Display tells us of an interesting kind of secret in Super Mario World that few know about. Once in a while in that game, a 1-up Mushroom just randomly seems to appear, flung into the air, sometimes in such a way as to seem to encourage you to leap off a cliff to go after it. Here is their video explaining what’s going on with those (9½ minutes):

There are some locations in a few levels that have four invisible spots in the background that can detect your presence. If you touch the four in order, the extra life appears. They’re found throughout the game, and they’re supported in code to the extent that, if you find one in a level, the game sets a flag for that level so it won’t appear again in that play session. You have to exit your game and load it back up again before you can get another extra life by this means from that level.

Many of these locations are arranged so that to trigger them in order, you’ll have to move in a loop around some location. This is similar in concept to the stakes in Super Mario 64 that, if you run around them a few times, cause them to generate coins to collect. Another kind of weird secret in a Mario game. I feel like Shigeru Miyamoto must have been lying awake at night brainstorming ever more obscure things to put into them.

More NextFest 2025 Demos

More of my series looking at the best demos from Steam NextFest October 2025 edition.

00:00 Intro
00:21 Repel the Rifts
2:59 Reanimal
4:28 Bloodright
6:39 Lady Dracula
8:17 Ambrosia Sky
10:25 Light Odyssey
12:16 A Game About Feeding a Black Hole
13:08 Eventide Matter
13:26 Outhold

Multilink Monday 6/15/26: Indie Web, Apple IIs & GenAI Backlash

We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.

  • As often happens, I find out about something cool right as it ending, and so it is with Good Internet Magazine. However its archives are still up at the moment! There’s cool things to find there like Build The Web You Want To See. I found out about it from this post on brennan.day, which is announcing an upcoming site called Long Horizon.
  • Along those lines, for three years now Robert Birming has been organizing Junited on his blog, which is just an excuse for bloggers to link to each other. I think people should link things all the time, for any excuse, at the drop of the hat (that’s largely what I do over on Metafilter), but if some people need an excuse to do it for a month I can get behind it!
  • On that site I found an Indie Web webring. Remember webrings?
  • Returning to the subject of cool things ending, it didn’t get mentioned much in my online circles, but both Tripod and Angelfire, two of the biggest remaining free/low cost webhosts from the early days of the web, have called it quits. Parent company Lycos continues to soldier on, free of one more of those pesky legacy services they couldn’t be bothered to preserve. Bah.
  • a2central is a site about Apple II computing.
  • Juiced.GS is a quarterly Apple II magazine. My searches for issues of Softdisk has had me in an apple-y frame of mind lately.
  • One useful page on that site is a rundown of Apple II emulators.
  • On Mashable, Chris Taylor has a piece about the backlash against generative AI. I’m glad it’s being noticed how much people detest it! Let the anger flow through you! It’ll give you cool lightning powers!