A Huge Month for a Super Mario 64 Speedruns
Suigi has done it: a sub-7-minute 1-star masterpiece
Power Action! has a thing for speedruns. We mostly took a deep dive into a more esoteric record: the “Dank%” record in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in which a glitch makes Link look like he’s smoking the Ganon’s Lettuce. The speedrunning world has recently been rocked by a record attempted by far more gamers. Three days ago, Canadian player Suigi beat Super Mario 64 on a classic console in under 7 minutes, only obtaining one star in the process.
"Out of all the categories, this wr will be the hardest to beat," one commenter offered.
"This is the first truly mistakeless WR I've ever seen in Mario 64,” said another on Reddit.
If, like me, you’re not a speedrun insider, you might understand everything that’s happening in the run, other than that you have to know how to do a Backwards Long Jump to even try it (the crux of skipping into several areas that otherwise require a certain amount of Stars to enter):
In a sense, you consider every new year to be the “biggest” for speedrunning, because people keep setting new records. However, the past several months have been particularly extraordinary for SM64 runners, in terms of the gulfs between the new records and the ones that proceeded them. Here are just a few of the records set recently on original consoles, per Speedrun.com:
November 2022: 120 Stars: 1 hour, 37 minutes, 35 seconds (Weegee), 13 seconds better than No. 2
December 2022: 16 Stars: 14 minutes, 41 seconds (Suigi), 9 seconds better than No. 2
June 2022: All Coins (yes, all coins): 1 hour, 7 minutes, 36 seconds (Alkobakknarko), 1 minutes and 7 seconds better than No. 2
The Other Biggie This Month
As mentioned in our subjectline, there is one other huge piece of Super Mario 64 news this month. Twenty-seven years after the game was released, a YouTuber was finally able to reach a 1-Up item previously thought impossible to obtain. It's on the slide portion of “Cool, Cool Mountain,” and the only way previously thought to get it was to jump off the slide and catch it while falling to your death. "PaLiX_" cracked a new method that keeps your life: He freefalls but then, through a series of wall jumps and glitching over the course of AN HOUR AND A HALF, gradually is able to grab the mushroom before finishing the race.
The patience below is astonishing. And while it’s a tool-assisted run, the rush to do it without has begun.