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COYOTE TIME
Originally pioneered by Super Mario Bros, pretty much every side scrolling platformer makes use of the technique known as Coyote Time, which sounds like a small, almost negligible tweak to games on paper, but has actually defined the genre for decades. Coyote Time is what kicks in when you run off the edge of a cliff, but for a split second, even though you have no solid ground beneath you, can still initiate a jump- you can basically jump off air. That fraction of a second that allows you to do that has shaped the genre greatly, and even though it is something we don’t notice while we’re playing very often, without Coyote Time, side scrolling platformers would be very different.
