17 years after the launch of Wii Play, the Nintendo minigame collection that's mostly remembered by fans as 'the one that's not as good as Wii Sports,' nobody had managed to get a perfect shot in the 9-ball billiards game. Speedrunners have finally changed that, but only after decompiling the game's code to build a tool that could finally sort through millions of possibilities to find the one magic angle.
Wii Play has a robust speedrunning community that's been around for years, and getting through the billiards game as fast as possible means trying to sink as many balls as you can in a single shot. If you're speedrunning a game of 9-ball, it'd be ideal to sink every single ball in a break shot, but as of earlier this year, the best anybody had ever managed was seven balls sunk in the break - something that had only happened four times in the history of the game's speedrunning scene.
A video from Wii Play runner cyndifusic broke down the problem in detail back in February. No two break shots ever played out the same way, and despite years of effort in the Wii Play speedrun community, nobody could ever figure out why. Nobody, that is, until cyndifusic worked with a developer named kiwi to disassemble the game's code and figure out why the hell it's so hard to get a perfect break.
Together, they discovered that the code that places the balls on the table very subtly randomizes their positions. The change is so subtle that it's impossible to see from the game's default camera angle, but it's just enough to ensure that no two breaks are exactly the same. After hacking the game to lock down the randomization, cyndifusic and kiwi managed to hit the same Wii Play billiards shot twice - a first in the game's history.
this screenshot is a landmark in time. for the first time EVER in the history of Wii Play, we have hit the same Billiards break twice. not even just twice in a row, twice at all ever. pic.twitter.com/dik61KDempJanuary 23, 2024
That alone was an accomplishment, but players seeking the perfect shot still needed to lock down the exact set of conditions - ball locations, cursor position, and so on - that would allow for a perfect shot. As far as the community could tell, the only way to do that would be to build a brute-force tool that can try every single shot variation, running through millions upon millions of possibilities. And, in the back of everyone's minds, there's the prospect that a perfect break might be literally impossible.
Another community member, ElectrifiedStrawberry, built a tool to try and test those possibilities as efficiently as possible. And on June 1, just a few months after this effort began in earnest, it finally happened. The fabled 9-break became real.
This, of course, is all in the realm of tool-assisted speedruns. Getting the precise parameters necessary to make the 9-break on an unmodified console with nothing but a hand on a Wii remote would take 'getting struck by lightning after winning the lottery while witnessing a solar eclipse' levels of unlikeliness. But the combined efforts of the speedrunning community have, at the very least, taken a little bit of mystery out of the game.
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