I could've used this Super Mario 64 secret 30 years ago, and it's blowing my mind now: all you need is exactly 11 button mashes to escape King Bob-omb

King Bob-omb grabs Mario in Super Mario 64 — (Image credit: Nintendo/Supper Mario Broth)

For many people of my generation, Super Mario 64 was our first encounter with 3D platforming. For people who've played, like, any 3D game before, King Bob-omb is a trivial challenge, but that wasn't the case for everyone in the '90s. As it turns out, those of us still figuring out the whole "analog stick" thing had a secret defense against King Bob-omb's attacks this whole time.

"In Super Mario 64, it is actually possible to escape from the grasp of King Bob-omb or a Chuckya after they grab Mario, by whipping the Control Stick back and forth and mashing the A button a combined total of 11 times before they throw him," Mario trivia hound Supper Mario Broth reports on Bluesky. Attached is a video demonstrating the technique, and yeah, it sure seems to work!

The idea of mashing buttons to escape a grab sounds obvious in hindsight, but the obvious answers aren't always that apparent when you're a literal child. Maybe I did flick the control stick enough to escape King Bob-omb's clutches when I was nine, but Chuckyas – a late-game enemy with a similar grab attack – still strike a level of paranoid fear in my heart that suggests I never managed to break free of their grasp.

In Super Mario 64, it is actually possible to escape from the grasp of King Bob-omb or a Chuckya after they grab Mario, by whipping the Control Stick back and forth and mashing the A button a combined total of 11 times before they throw him.
— @mariobrothblog.bsky.social (@mariobrothblog.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-02-19T22:00:06.722Z

But hey, maybe there's a reason for that too. Supper Mario Broth notes that this technique "does not actually always work on Chuckyas, as they may randomly give you too little time to perform 11 such inputs." The fact that they're often positioned near instant-death pits might also be a factor in why I still fear them to this day.

Now, I'm just amused by the precision with which we've narrowed down the exact number of button mashes this technique takes. 11 control stick whips or A button presses, or any combination thereof. "It's simply 'reach 11 of a combined total of both,'" Supper Mario Broth adds in a follow-up post, "so there are no restrictions. It could be 11 of one, or 11 of the other, or 5 of one and 6 of the other, etc. The only caveat is that if you do both on the same frame, it still only counts as 1." Don't go mashing too fast, now.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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