Super Mario Bros, infinite lives in World 3-1, by Josh Millard.

This was some of that early magic, one of those weird tricks in the original Super Mario Bros that you talked about in hushed tones or read about in Nintendo power: all the extra guys you want!  Just get jumping on a koopa on a staircase juuuuuust right so that you keep bouncing on him again and again, and then let that keep going while you got more and more bonus points and then after eight or nine bounces an unlimited string of 1ups.

Or not quite unlimited; the game would start displaying weird glyphs in place of numbers once you got past 99 lives, displaying little 8-by-8 pixel tiles from bits of graphics memory on the cart not intended for numerical display, and then once you got a little too greedy you’d screw up your game.  

I can’t remember if it was just a game over or an actual cart crash, or whether the problem occurred instantly when you reached Too Many Lives was instant or if it only happened once you died and the game tried to do bad math (on what was probably a negative number value in a signed integer variable, where the number after 128 lives is -127 lives) and decided that less-than-zero lives was too few to continue playing with.

But it’s a weird image out of context.  Mario just stomping and stomping and stomping on that turtle in some rapid violent loop of life extraction.  The price of immortality.

I’ve never really done animation, this was a fun experiment.