Plenty of different games rely heavily on random number generation (RNG) in their speedrunning routes, meaning that players will often have to rely on a bit of luck here and there for the most optimized path. In one particular instance in 2013, speedrunner DOTA_Teabag went above and beyond in luck, saving time in his run thanks to a rogue cosmic ray from outer space.
During a Super Mario 64 70-star speedrun race against MidBoss, DOTA_Teabag encountered a glitch, widely considered to be completely impossible in the game: an up-warp without a grabbable ceiling. This means that Mario was teleported extremely high into the air, an act that is typically only possible under very particular conditions, in a situation where none of those conditions were being met.
This glitch occurred on Tick Tock Clock as the runner was collecting red coins, and when the clip caught the attention of prominent Super Mario 64 player pannenkoek12, a $1000 bounty was put in place for anyone who could figure out how to replicate the glitch. Super Mario 64 is the biggest speedrunning game in history with some of the most sought-after records, so a discovery like this would be massive.
While this particular instance only saved the runner a small handful of seconds, the knowledge of how to perform up-warps without grabbable ceilings would massively affect the routes of the game. Normally, a player must bump into a ceiling with the edge of their hitbox, while a grabbable ceiling is directly above them, higher up. The game will see that Mario is touching a ceiling and that there is a grabbable ceiling above him, so it will think Mario is grabbing that higher grabbable ceiling, warping him up to it. DOTA_Teabag was simply landing on a platform, not touching any ceilings, and got up-warped for seemingly no reason. His reaction says it all.
In the glitch hunt that would follow, numerous speedrunners and glitch-hunters tried their hands at replicating this glitch. Hunters matched the inputs of DOTA_Teabag down to the frame in emulators in order to try and pull it off and claim the large prize, but to no avail. But why was nobody able to pull it off, even when replicating exactly the inputs that DOTA_Teabag had used? Simple: this glitch requires a phenomenon known as a single-event upset, which is very much out of any player's control.
A single-event upset is a change of a binary state in a bit - either from a 0 to a 1, or vice versa - caused by an ionizing particle colliding with a sensitive microelectronic device. This occurs because of a discharge in the storage elements (the memory bits) after a free charge is created by ionization of the particle near the node. Cosmic particles that enter the Earth's atmosphere will collide with atmospheric atoms, leading to a sort of rain of protons and neutrons which can affect electronic devices they contact. While most of the time, the effects are barely noticeable, as the bit affected may not be of huge importance, this case here was very noticeable.
During the race, an ionizing particle from outer space collided with DOTA_Teabag's N64, flipping the eighth bit of Mario's first height byte. Specifically, it flipped the byte from 11000101 to 11000100, from "C5" to "C4". This resulted in a height change from C5837800 to C4837800, which by complete chance, happened to be the exact amount needed to warp Mario up to the higher floor at that exact moment. This was tested by pannenkoek12 - the same person who put up the bounty - using a script that manually flipped that particular bit at the right time, confirming the suspicion of a bit flip.
The odds of a single-event upset flipping a bit in a way that actually benefits a speedrunner in such a way are astronomically small, maybe comparable to a Minecraft speedrunner getting an end portal with 12 natural ender eyes - a one in one trillion occurrence. If it could be forced to happen consistently, it would pave the way for new world records easily, but that unfortunately will never be the case.
This up-warp has not been documented to happen at any other time to anyone, and it is unlikely that it ever will again. Not only is this the sole time this has happened in Super Mario 64, it may be the only example of a single-event upset inducing a positive effect, period.
Most single-event upsets result in hardware malfunctions, requiring devices to need reboots. In extreme cases, these upsets have caused planes to fall out of the sky and elections to give thousands of impossible additional votes to candidates, so for an upset to actually play the good guy for once and help a speedrunner out with his video game is pretty darn cool. Thanks, particle.