Good news, if you’ve ever been frustrated by the billiards minigame of 2006/2007 (depending on where you live) classic Wii Play, someone’s finally managed to score a perfect game in it, pocketing nine balls off of a single shot. This is the first time that’s ever happened, and getting there has been no mean feat.
If you’re not intimately familiar with Wii Play, first of all where’ve you been? Second, it’s ok, I’ll do my best to explain how we got here, with a lot of help from this great video by YouTuber cyndifusic, which runs down just how much work it’s taken to get to this point.
To kick things off, check out the end result below – that perfect game a player with the handle ElectrifiedStrawberry has just achieved, by managing to pot nine balls a game of billiards involves with a single breaking shot. Really take it in now, it’s art, especially due to the fact that your own Mii’s face is plastered on the bit of the cue ball that you hit.
So, as ElectrifiedStrawberry explains in the video’s description, that shot was the result of “a few months of decompiling the game, building a bruteforcer, and then finally searching millions of shots for the fabled 9 break”. Yep, digging into the game’s code – which is pretty much impossible to actually make without any of the tool assistance used here – and developing a program that could basically take shots over and over again until it found the perfect seed required to deliver a nine ball break.
As cyndifusic explains in the video I linked near the top, this has been neccessary because, as speedrunners have discovered, no two breaking shots in Wii Play billiards play out the same, no matter how many variables you try to control. Why? Because the game’s code randomises where they each ball spawns every time break is set up, by such a small amount that no one had noticed. Seriously.
So, with that knowledge, ElectrifiedStrawberry was finally able to set up and execute this shot, becoming the first nine break. For a bit of context, only about four players in 17 years have even managed to record a break that pots eight balls.
So yeah, very impressive, even if it’s not someone just playing regularly and catching a huge stroke of luck, as you might have expected.