[00:02] the world record progression for Super Mario 64. That video talked exclusively about the 120 star category, which is where you collect every single star in the game before beating it. It showed how several gamers were able to work to
[00:15] speedrun that category in the shortest time possible, and how over time they and lower. Oh my [ __ ] god, dude. I'm a [ __ ] But there's also another side to Mario 64 speedrunning. Some people try to beat
[00:30] the game as fast as they can while still collecting every single star. Some collecting every single star. Some people though don't play by the rules. people though don't play by the rules. [Music]
[00:59] For the past two decades, there's been an ongoing battle to beat the game with as few stars as possible. Traditionally, beating a game in the shortest route possible is called any%. But in Super Mario 64, any%'s definition kept
[01:13] changing. The game designers intended to make it so you needed at least 70 stars to beat the game. But through various exploits, gamers have determined that you can beat the game with way, way less than 70 stars. This is the story of that
[01:27] tried their hand at speedrunning Super Mario 64, but only a few have risen to the top. Let's take a look at the world record progression for the any% category of Super Mario 64. [Music]
[01:44] [Music] Woohoo! Yahoo! then, the internet was primitive compared to today, but it was still an
[01:59] option for talking about your video games. People ran to internet forums to talk about their favorite games. One of the most popular being Super Mario 64. It became consensus very quickly that you needed at least 70 stars to beat the
[02:11] game. Because in order to beat the game, you need access to the final level, which is at the end of the endless staircase. The endless staircase is exactly what it sounds like, a staircase that never ends. Fortunately for the
[02:23] player though, once you get 70 stars, you'll be able to travel up the stairs without any problem and access the final level. But until then, the stairs will just loop indefinitely. So, for the first few years of the
[02:35] through the game required you to get at least 70 stars. Nobody was really there were reports of people beating the game in a little bit over an hour. Maybe someday somebody would be able to come up with a way to beat it in under an
[02:50] hour. But then a groundbreaking trick was discovered. When people discovered big tricks in games, the first place they used to report it to was usually a gaming forum or some other gaming community online. But this particular
[03:03] trick was a little bit different. It first appeared in the November 2000 issue of the Spanish version of Club Nintendo and was apparently discovered Nintendo and was apparently discovered by two guys in Mexico, Jose Anel Ruiz
[03:15] Variel and Dante Aan Ruiz Variel. They explained that if you go to the endless staircase before you have 70 stars, there's still a way to get past it. You go on the stairs and face towards the camera and then do a long jump. Instead
[03:29] of going forward though, you push up the stairs and move backward and then mash the A button over and over again. You're now doing backwards long jumps. If you mash A in the correct way, Mario will build up an incredible amount of speed.
[03:43] more speed with a long jump as long as he's below a certain number. Since his below this number. So, they always just keep adding more and more speed to it. He eventually builds up so much speed that he can fly up the stairs and land
[03:58] right next to the entrance of the final stage. You still need to collect 50 the first place, but this backwards long jump was cutting out 20 stars from the route. Interestingly, this trick went undetected on the internet for a while.
[04:12] It wasn't until 2003 before it made its first appearance on the internet on a Gamefax thread called Beating the Game with 50 stars. A user named Gara 2000 posted about the backwards long jump, which nobody else had heard of before,
[04:26] and from his description of it, nobody there was able to duplicate it. Finally, he posted a video of it. The earliest known footage of the backwards long jump being performed. It was just a 13-second clip of him pointing a camera at his TV,
[04:39] but this video opened the door up to so many others on the forum. of people being able to beat the game in around an hour. There was still no footage that had surfaced of any of the runs, though. Around the same time,
[04:54] another way to save time with the backwards long jump. You could do it on this staircase to launch yourself through the 50 star door. Although it's version since you have less room to work with, this trick drastically cut down
[05:09] the number of stars needed to collect. All you needed now was the 30 stars needed to get upstairs, plus the one star required from Dire Dire Docks to get to the second key from Bowser. 31 stars is all it took.
[05:23] So, to sum up what the route was, you would start the game, collect 30 stars however you could, then go through the 30 star door, get a star from Dire Dire Docks, which unlocks Bowser in the Fire Sea, where you can get the second key.
[05:35] You use the second key to go upstairs. Do backwards long jumps on the staircase to shoot through the 50 star door. And then do backwards long jumps on the endless staircase to shoot right up to the final stage. And just like that,
[05:47] collecting a quarter of the stars that are available to you. Similar to with 50 their runs at this point. But a few people did talk about beating the game with just 31 stars. A man named Curtis Bright was the first to do so,
[06:02] acknowledging that he was able to pull it off in March of 2003. He didn't report a time, but it is reported that his run was still legitimate because he in the first place. And just a few days later, the second person to beat the
[06:15] game with 31 stars did it, Alex Penv. He claimed to do it in 49 minutes and 20 seconds. Once again, there's no video footage for this run because of how old it is, but it's probably legitimate. Although Curtis Bright's run may very
[06:29] well have been sub 60 Minutes, Penevs for sure was. So for the first time ever, someone could say that they could beat Super Mario 64 in under an hour. And then for a while, everything settled down a bit. Runners seemed to be
[06:43] satisfied with beating the game with only 31 stars, and it seemed like everyone was running into a wall, sort of. Penv's 49minute time was really sick, and game-breaking tricks were already being used. Nobody knew what
[06:56] else could possibly be done to beat the game more quickly. Several months passed without any new records. And then something amazing happened. In May 2004, someone named Dawn Dunk posted a picture on Gamefax. It was a picture of him
[07:11] being in the last level of the game, Bowser in the Sky, with only 18 stars. revolutionary new glitch that could allow you to beat the game with only 16 stars, and that he would reveal it on May 15th, which would be 5 days after
[07:27] the topic was originally posted. Naturally, there was a bit of suspicion, but there was also a bunch of nervous excitement. How could 16 stars be possible? There was no staircase you could use to get through the 30 star
[07:39] door early, so it seemed impossible. Over the next 5 days, excitement built forward to seeing what Dom Dunk had found. Finally, the day arrived. Everyone came rushing to see the post, and Don Dunk explained the following. To
[07:55] start, you would load up the game and collect exactly 15 stars from whichever stages you could. After you get them, Mips the Rabbit will spawn in the basement. You go to the basement, pick them up, and then go to the door that
[08:07] leads to the room with the 30 star door. Your goal is to go through this door while still having him in your hands. Normally, you can't open doors when they had to do this was to set him down in front of the door, go through it,
[08:21] then quickly run back before the door completely closes and pick him up again. Then you make your way over to the 30 star door. You're going to need to clip through it with Mips. There's a few ways to do it, but the method that Dom Dunk
[08:33] drop MIPS a short distance away from the door and jump in between him and the door. If done correctly, you'll then be pushed right through the 30 star door. star and Dire Dire Docks before going into Bowser and the Fire Sea, where you
[08:49] pick up the key, go upstairs, do the backwards long jumps that are needed to beat the rest of the game. If all is done correctly, you will beaten the game with just 16 stars. Everybody on the forum tried the root
[09:02] they were able to do it. The number of stars required to beat the game had been cut in half once again. A bunch of as they could with this new route. The first person to pull off a 16st star run
[09:15] was the man who discovered it was possible in the first place. On May 24th, 2004, Dom Dunk posted that he had been able to beat the game in 42 minutes with a 16-star route. And about a month later, Alex Penv reported that he did it
[09:29] in 33 minutes. But finally, someone posted a run with video proof. On June 19th, 2004, a man named Brad Cutler shared a video of him doing the 16star route in 27 minutes flat. Someone had beaten the game in less than half an
[09:45] hour. Cutler struggled with the BLJ's a little bit at first, and he missed a throw on Bowser at the end, but for the first run with Video Proof, everything went relatively smoothly. But perhaps the most important part of Cutler's run
[09:57] was inspiring so many others to give the run a try by giving them a video to watch. It seemed so feasible to do what Cutler was doing with a bit of practice. others decided they wanted to try it as well. In November 2004, Mark Corsac
[10:13] became the first to beat Cutler's time. He got 2625. than Cutler, he struggled a fair bit with the Mips clip still. People were that would blow everyone out of the water. And it turns out they wouldn't
[10:28] have to wait long at all, as in just a few hours. Literally the same day that Mark Corsac did his 16-star run, someone else posted a 16-st star run, but instead of 26 1/2 minutes, this one clocked in at 21 minutes and 55 seconds.
[10:44] Their name was Lii Pala and through better strategies from collecting the first 15 stars and faster clips and faster BLJs, their run looked absolutely amazing compared to every run that had come before it. And it was this type of
[10:57] competition that continued to push the 16 star time down in the mid 2000s. looked good and then someone else would come along and say, "Hey, I know you think your run's good, but actually I'm multiple minutes ahead of you. Haha." It
[11:11] really never knew what was around the corner. But unfortunately, after a couple of years of no new strategies being discovered, Super Mario 64 entered being discovered, Super Mario 64 entered a dark age. Starting in 2004, there were
[11:25] a few years where 16 stars seemed to be the fastest the game would ever go. So, a couple of runners whose names I will avoid decided that it would be fine to cheat and fake their speedruns. The first one was from October 2005. One
[11:38] player claimed that he was the first to beat the game in under 20 minutes, getting a run clocking in in around 19 minutes and 50 seconds. The run got a decent amount of attention, but in 2017, it was discovered to be spliced all over
[11:51] the place. Splicing a run is when you take part of one run and a part of another and piece them together to make it appear like continuous gameplay. He did this over and over in his run. Pretty much every screen transition was
[12:03] really him ending one segment and splicing on another one. The second one first. It was posted on Speed Demos Archive by a different runner a couple of years later in 2007 where it was
[12:16] widely viewed and the time of the run was about 18 1/2 minutes. But just like the first run, it was discovered to be spliced several years later and has since been discredited. Although both of these runs are known to
[12:28] be fake today, they still wowed so many people back at the time. People were beginning to wonder if Super Mario 64 could ever go lower. The execution in how could anyone find a way to beat the game with less than 16 stars. Then there
[12:44] was a bit of a breakthrough. In October 2006, YouTuber Mr. Robert Z uploaded a video of some glitches that you could do in the castle lobby. One scene featured him climbing into an out-of-bound section from below the lobby, and he
[12:57] wall, it could be possible to do a backwards long jump there. For a while would be valuable or not to do a backwards long jump there. And it sat in the backs of the minds of many for several more months. Meanwhile, over at
[13:12] people were discussing potential ways to beat the game with less than 16 stars. After more months of discussion, they released a tool assisted video, which is a type of speedrun where somebody goes
[13:24] buttons they want to be pressed on every frame of the run. In other words, it's a run that isn't done by a human, but one that's done by a computer playing theoretically as well as possible. And
[13:36] this tool assisted run that they released didn't collect 16 stars. It didn't collect 12 stars or 10. It didn't collect 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, or two stars.
[13:49] A little over 7 and 1/2 minutes later, it beat the game while collecting just it beat the game while collecting just one star.
[14:27] out- of-bounds area that was seen before and did a backwards long jump. Doing boundaries of the castle. By then rotating the camera, they were able to the rest of the lobby into the first
[14:42] stars to open. [Music] key, which is used to go underground into the room with the 30 star door. And
[14:54] once in that room, you do this backwards long jump.
[15:07] This trick is extremely precise, but if done correctly, it eliminates the need to go past the 30 star door with myips. Enough speed is built up with the BLJ to shoot right past it. The task then got the one star needed from Dire Dire Docks
[15:20] to unlock Bowser in the Fire Sea. got the second key, went upstairs to do the backwards long jumps, and finished the game with just one star in their game with just one star in their inventory from Dire Dire Docks.
[15:33] As can be expected, this run made people lose their minds. It's possible to beat lose their minds. It's possible to beat Super Mario 64 with just one star. The runners have been able to cut out 119 of the 120 stars from the game. There was
[15:46] still remained. So now there is one last thing to do. Find a way to beat the game without that one last star. one last star. [Music]
[16:50] a task to beat Super Mario 64 without collecting a single star. The creators of the game put 120 of them in. They expected the player to collect at least 70 to finish the game. Through a decade of work, it was now possible to do it
[17:05] without collecting a single one of them. All of the effort the programmers put into designing 120 unique stars and 120 unique experiences was laid to waste. Well, all right. Their effort wasn't actually put to waste at all. There were
[17:20] still so many other categories you could run that gave you the chance to see more of the game. Runners to this day are still actively running 16 star, 70 star, and 120 star, which allow you to see most of or for 120 star all of the game.
[17:34] In fact, when these tasks came out in 2007, nobody knew if a human could even pull off the tricks, particularly the backwards long jump past the 30 star door. You needed to mash super hard in just the right way in order to build up
[17:47] just enough speed to get past it. Not to mention all the other tricks that could easily go wrong in the run. For a long time, no human was able to get past the 16star barrier. The exact history of humans executing the zero and one star
[18:01] route isn't entirely known. I haven't been able to find definitive proof of the first zero star or one-star run, but runners like Kaiman claimed to have a 9-minute one-star time a while after the task was released. The zero star route
[18:14] ended up becoming much harder to master. All because of the 30 star door backwards long jump or SBJ as it has become known. It's hard enough to get your positioning and mashing to get past the 30 star door in the first place, but
[18:27] to also get past Dire Dire Docks, which is required for Zero Star, requires ridiculously difficult and precise mashing and positioning on the stairs. It's so hard to build up enough speed to get the Zeroar route that it has been
[18:40] called harder than doing the recently popularized 1-2 pipe clip in the original Super Mario Bros. 351. Yes. The recent history of the zero star and one star route has been completely
[18:52] dominated by the Japanese. This differs from the 70 star and 120 star route Americans and Europeans and from the 16st star route which has seen a mix of both. Currently the onestar record is held by Zia at 721 and the zeroar record
[19:08] held by Zia at 721 and the zeroar record is held by Akira at 644. Both of these runs are as close to 7 minutes of perfect gameplay as you can get. And that is the world record progression for Super Mario 64 any%.
[19:22] Super Mario 64 is a rare example of how drastic route changes can become. Some games like Super Metroid are little more than changing the order of the bosses to save a couple of minutes. But in Mario 64, when a new trick was discovered,
[19:36] everything the runners thought that they once knew completely changed. We're not collecting 70 stars anymore. We're collecting 16. Whoops. and now we're not collecting any stars. Most of these discoveries took place in the mid200s
[19:49] when there was no Twitch to stream on, but instead gaming communities that you communicated with through text and on rare occasions a lowquality VHS tape. But these players all came together to see how far they could push Mario 64.
[20:02] And boy did they succeed. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. watching. I'll see you next time. [Music]