That's primarily because they were sticking to Twin Galaxies' rules, which still prohibit the use of unintended glitches to complete the game faster. ![]() speedrunners struggled to beat the game any faster than in 5:08. In the early 2000s, many Super Mario Bros. What goes into a feat like this? Join me for a quick primer. Niftski's performance approaches the theoretical limits of what a human can achieve in this seminal game. Niftski's performance is within spitting distance of the machine-generated perfection of tool-assisted speedruns, which use emulator-recorded frame-perfect inputs to push a game to its limits. That might not sound too impressive on the surface it's only about a quarter-second under the world record set by Miniland just two months ago, after all, and less than a second under the first sub-4:56 time (4:55.913) set by Kosmic over two years ago.īut once you understand everything that needed to come together to break SMB's 4:55 barrier, the feat becomes something akin to speedrunning's version of the four-minute mile. in under four minutes and 55 seconds (4:54.948, to be precise). faster than this.Įarlier this week, speedrunner Niftski became the first player to ever beat Super Mario Bros. It’s within spitting distance of the TAS time, though if GTAce’s visual history lesson teaches us anything, it’s tha t Super Mario Bros. speedrunners will always find a way to push the boundary of what’s possible.You'll likely never see a human beat Super Mario Bros. And the newest world record was set just a couple days earlier-Niftski managed a time of 4:54.798 on August 7. Just this month, the speedrunner Tole managed a block glitch on world 4-2 to save another precious few frames. It also takes me back to when I saw a few of these world records live, and I get to relive the excitement and joy I felt with them back when they achieved that record.”Įven now, speedrunners are managing to pull off new tricks once thought impossible for anyone but the TAS. “I consider a lot of the runners in this video good friends now, and it’s fun to watch them get excited when their hard work pays off. “I replayed the ending reaction so many times during the creation of this video, and it was heartwarming every single time,” GTAce said. The entire tribute ends with each runner celebrating their achievement. And then of course there’s the tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) by Maru370, currently setting the benchmark for the best possible theoretical time at 4:54.265. More recently, a runner named Niftski has been leading the pack using a keyboard rather than an NES controller. Next Darbian came onto the scene, followed by Kosmic. Kessler and a speedrunner named Trevor Seguin traded records throughout the early 2000s. It was the last time more than a few seconds would be saved in a single run. In April 2004, Scott Kessler cut down the known records by another minute. “I don’t think they were intended to be ‘speedruns,’ but are the earliest known videos of Super Mario Bros. being beaten on the internet. ![]() “The first two runs were emulator movies posted to ‘High Level Challenge’ in 1999,” GTAce said. A month later, a player who went by Xox shaved over three minutes off. It was the kind of run reminiscent of the best kid on your block growing up showing off in the basement. ![]() It begins with a player called Casion who established the first record of sorts with a time of 9:51 in April 1999. “I’ve been a top-level Super Mario Bros. speedrunner for a few years now and the community has been a big part of my life during this time, so I wanted to give something back that I knew a lot of people would enjoy watching.” “I starting working on this video around my 5-year anniversary from when I discovered speedrunning,” GTAce told Kotaku in an interview. The visual history shows how the gains between game-defining runs were huge in the beginning, and also how different speedrunners dominated the scene at various points in the timeline. The veteran Mario speedrunner took every new record breaking run since 1999, and put them side-by-side, timing them to make sure they all finish at the exact same moment. GTAce’s latest YouTube video lets you do just that. Why watch just one world record run when you could watch all of them at the same time, in just 11 minutes? Super Mario Bros. is one of the most storied games in the history of video game speedrunning, and an incredible new compilation shows just how far players’ mastery has come.
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