Mario 64 Speedrunning Declared "Dead" After Insane Feat From "The Greatest Speedrunner Of All Time"

"An unbelievable achievement"

by Damien McFerran 1:30pm

Mario 64 Speedrunning Declared "Dead" After Isane Feat From "The Greatest Speedrunner Of All Time" 1 — *Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension*

Famed speedrunner Suigi has claimed all five major records associated with Super Mario 64, effectively enshrining himself as one of the greatest speedrunners of all time (thanks, GamesRadar).

There are five categories when it comes to completing Mario's 64-bit debut really fast: 120 star, 70 star, 16 star, 1 star, and 0 star. Suigi has spent years perfecting his skills in the game, and on November 17th, he secured the world record in all five – something that many people assumed was simply impossible.

According to Summoning Salt, an account which follows speedrunning world records, Suigi's stranglehold on those five categories might hold for some time yet. "Not only does Suigi hold all 5, but he holds most by a huge margin. Nobody else can even get close to some of these. His 16 star record in particular, maybe the most popular category in all of speedrunning, was set over a year ago and still leads by 6 full seconds."

"He's the best player in the game's history by far," Summoning Salt adds. "Others have been dominant in one category for a while, but being able to do it in all 5 is completely ridiculous. A definite candidate for the greatest speedrunner of all time."

Suigi himself doesn't know how long it will take for his latest record to topple, but says "1:34 could take a month or a couple years plus, we don’t know."

The speedrunning community has been quick to celebrate this event:

[source gamesradar.com]

Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media's sites from an editorial perspective. He's also the editor of Time Extension, the network's newest site, which – paradoxically – is all about gaming's past glories.

“I wasn’t aware other Mario games existed,” said Suigi at press time. “Hell, I didn’t even know about the other consoles or video games until a few weeks ago. I thought Mario 64 was the only one they made. Cool, I guess.”

2
Spider-Kev
1:42pm

Could someone explain the difference between the star runs?

3
Damo
1:45pm

@Spider-Kev The 'star' count refers to numbers of stars collected in the game.

4
mariteaux
1:45pm

@Spider-Kev Different skips. You can use glitches and collision bugs to skip all the stars in the game, so the different categories just skip more or fewer of the stars. 120 is all of them, 0 star is obviously none of them.

5
Spider-Kev
1:56pm

@Damo
Yeah, I know that. I've played the game since it came out!

6
Spider-Kev
1:56pm

@mariteaux
Didn't know that many stars could be skipped. Thanks

7
romanista
2:35pm

@mariteaux @damo i understand that, but not really sure what are the different skills for each record..

8
mariteaux
2:54pm

@romanista The runs are very very different. Shorter categories mean you can use riskier and more optimized strategies for each star, because if you fail, the barrier to restart is much lower. Longer categories require more in the way of nerves management--if you're an hour into a 120 star run and you're on world record pace, the stakes are going to be a lot higher than if you're playing 0 star and you're only three minutes into the run on WR pace.

Staggered that anyone cares this much about it to be honest.

Greatest Mario 64 speedrunner for sure, but greatest speedrunner of all time is silly. That's like saying Tiger Woods is the greatest sports player of all time because he's arguably the top golfer. Or that Diddy is the greatest musician.

11
combywomby
3:10pm

@bluemage1989

More than anyone cares about anything you've ever done, that's for sure.

This is an incredible achievement. Now it's time to do it all blindfolded and using a DDR pad.

12
RupeeClock
3:13pm

@Spider-Kev
To give a bit of context.
70 stars is the normal requirement to reach the final level and complete the game, whilst all 120 stars would be the 100% goal.
Historically though, players figured out ways to beat the game collecting only 30 stars, and then later 16 stars. Eventually, ways to beat the game collecting only a single star, or no stars at all were figured out too.

The 30 star run was due to how access to the second Bowser level required 30 stars, which in turns unlocks the upstairs portion. Use of the backwards long jump glitch then makes it possible to skip the 50 star and 70 star requirements.

The 30 star requirement itself was also then skipped because they discovered that you can perform wall-clips through doorways using Mips the Rabbit, a character that appears in the basement when you've collected 16 stars.
That 16 star requirement too eventually fell.

What the 0 star run still needs to do is defeat Bowser in all three Bowser stages. That part is unskippable because defeating Bowser gives you the keys needed to access the basement and the upper floor. Those keys are hard requirements as the doors to each part of Peach's Castle are what loads each new area, as opposed to having loading zones behind the door.

13
Synecdoche
3:21pm

@RupeeClock @mariteaux Thanks, this is helpful context. I wish it was in the article tbh

14
RupeeClock
3:31pm

@Synecdoche
To be fair given the game's widespread fame and history, it's pretty well known at this point by anyone that's followed the game with interest.
There's plenty of good YouTube videos going over the history of how any% speedruns dropped from 70 stars, to 16, to 1, then 0. I think they too are probably by Summoning Salt?

15
mariteaux
3:39pm

@RupeeClock And what about the millions of people who have played the game and have zero experience with SM64 speedrunning? It's absolutely good context to have in the article, explaining the three different completely unintentional run types along with the intended two and what makes them more or less challenging than each other.

@combywomby if only I had wasted as much of my life as this chap has, who knows where I could have been right now - slow news day article on a niche interest website at the very least no doubt.

17
RupeeClock
3:47pm

@mariteaux
It's something that's unreasonable to explain every time there's a news article about an ongoing subject, however considering the special nature of SM64 and its multiple categories, yeah I think it would really add value to the article in this case.

SM64 world records are rarely broken these days, as there are fewer and fewer discoveries made to break minute barriers that runners strives for.

18
HoyeBoye
3:57pm

@bluemage1989 - Just to put it into perspective, most physical “accomplishments” are a “waste of time” as they don’t produce anything meaningful to the world at large. That being said, the accomplishments DO provide meaning to those performing and those interested in it, which I would argue is a benefit to the society.

Did he do this with a traditional cart or was it one of those emulators where they pause and move a frame at a time and act like they did something legit? Once I saw that’s how many speed runners get their records I stopped being impressed.

If this was with the legit game though, awesome accomplishment.

Summoning Salt has extensive video son the subject
16 stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_wscUcbynk

any percent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ePi38LnrA&t

120 stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2etSAWJKTs&t

And if those vids aught me one thing it's that speed running will see this a challenge to rally under, and do something even more insane.

21
RupeeClock
4:14pm

@AG_Awesome
Played on original hardware with no modifications.
Whilst the speedrun community for SM64 does allow people to play on emulators, they're maintained as separate categories from N64, and also Virtual Console, with N64 being the preferred method for conventional play.
https://www.speedrun.com/sm64

What you're referring to with people playing frame by frame in an emulator, is what's known as a Tool-Assisted Speedrun and are instead a demonstration of in-depth knowledge and execution of a game as software, rather than player skill.
Research into TAS runs however inform strategies in conventional speedruns and are a big part of why they've progressed so far, as many human-viable techniques are learnt from them.

If you've got 8 minutes to spare, you can watch Suigi's 0 star run of SM64 in 6 minutes 16 seconds: https://youtu.be/rdx0TPjX1qE
This record was set October 26th 2023 and has stood for over a year.

22
AG_Awesome
4:25pm

@RupeeClock Thank you for such an informative post! I appreciate you explaining the difference of the Speedrun types since I only knew they existed but not the terminology. Knowing he did this legit is wild to me. The precision and timing and memorization is borderline computer level mastery!

23
slider1983
21m ago

@bobby_steurer Dude is trolling. 🤔

Show Comments

Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...

Related Articles