SethBling Wiki, Biography, Age, Spouse, Height, Net Worth, Fast Facts

SethBling wrote artificial intelligence programs that play Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Kart. He held a world record of 41.35 seconds for Super Mario World until June 2020, and a former world record for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He achieved the world record for Super Mario World by using a glitch that enabled him to execute arbitrary code and skip to the game’s credits. In 2015, he was the first to do so on a home video game console. He injected code to play a Flappy Bird-like game within Super Mario World on a stock Super Nintendo Entertainment System. He was the first to perform this kind of arbitrary code execution by hand. In 2017, Cooper Harasyn and SethBling created a jailbreak by hand using exploits to save a hex editor onto a read-only memory cartridge, allowing for creation of mods.

Early life

SethBling was raised Jewish, but has since become an atheist. He decided that he was an atheist sometime around when he was in elementary school, but “played along” through high school. SethBling’s nickname is derived from his AIM screen name in high school.

SethBling started out programming his calculator in middle school and wrote “lots of” games throughout high school, including an MUD. SethBling wrote in 2012 that C# was his favorite programming language.

SethBling worked as a software engineer at Microsoft for three years, where he worked on Xbox, and for four months on Bing SethBling said that his work at Xbox had not been related to video games, and that he had worked on the Xbox version of Internet Explorer, and on Xbox SmartGlass, a mobile phone app for remotely controlling an Xbox console.

Video games

SethBling played Super Mario Bros. 3 when he was five or six. Super Mario World was “one of the hot games” of his childhood. SethBling had the Sega Genesis home video game console, and played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog on it.

SethBling started playing Minecraft around September 2010, after college, after his roommate told him about it. The sandbox aspect was “very appealing” to SethBling, as he played MUDs in middle school and high school. SethBling thought the game was “really cool” and played it for about a month, after which he was “done with this game”. A few months later, he bought a new computer and decided to play Minecraft again. SethBling got into the technical community and was quick to discover redstone, a programmable resource in Minecraft, and began uploading videos of his creations to YouTube weeks later. SethBling was inspired to use redstone in Minecraft because he wanted to build a minecart station. Inspired by other YouTube videos about Minecraft, SethBling created his first few videos to “better get [his] money’s worth” from the screen recording utility Fraps he bought. SethBling initially uploaded videos on YouTube in order to share his creations on Reddit. He did not expect to gain subscribers as a small channel with only a few videos. SethBling’s YouTube channel greatly increased in popularity when Minecraft creator Markus Persson shared one of SethBling’s videos on Twitter.

My roommate was talking about it and I thought the idea of a completely moldable world was really cool. I actually played for several hours without looking at the wiki because I didn’t want to spoil the game, and my roommate came home to see me huddling in a dirt castle. I hadn’t figured out how to craft. Needless to say, I looked at the wiki shortly thereafter.

— SethBling, in Sam Gutelle, “SethBling Teaches Minecraft For A Living” (2013), YouTube Millionaires, Tubefilter

According to SethBling, he “almost never” played on consoles despite working at Xbox. Working at Microsoft, SethBling would spend almost all his free evenings and weekends playing Minecraft. SethBling quit his job at Microsoft around April 2012 because of his YouTube channel’s success and has been independent since.

Minecraft career

Unless stated otherwise, all Minecraft builds mentioned in this section run on unmodded Minecraft, except modified block textures.

Super Mario career

Speedrunning

Until June 2020, SethBling held the world record of 41.35 seconds for the Credits Warp Any% speedrun category of Super Mario World. Players can use glitches to modify the game’s RAM values, allowing them to write assembly code. When executed via arbitrary code execution, the code allows players to skip directly from the first level to the credits without having to defeat the game’s boss. In 2015, SethBling was the first to execute the Credits Warp glitch on a home video game console, with a time of five minutes and 59 seconds, after Twitch streamer JeffW356 had successfully executed the glitch on an emulator. SethBling executed the glitch for the first time on console minutes after a Super Mario World world record was set without using arbitrary code execution. By successfully executing the glitch on a Super NES console, SethBling validated the faster, emulator run by JeffW356. SethBling used four controllers via two Super Multitap devices to finish the game in under one minute. He left specific buttons on the controllers pushed down to manipulate memory bytes and write certain code. In the game, SethBling executed certain actions and pixel-precise moves like duplicating Yoshi blocks and launching a red shell at a specific pixel..

SethBling holds a former world record for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild without use of in-game unlockable bonuses enabled by Amiibo figurines, saying in 2017 that using the unlockables is “seen by casual audience members as ‘cheating’, but they also currently don’t affect the run that much.” In 2017, SethBling told Kotaku, “When I touch a game, I want to understand it.”