Super Mario 64 speedrunner Suigi quickly became an absolute legend in pretty short order, and now he's cemented that legacy with an absolutely monstrous run through the game's most grueling category.
Suigi has spent the past few years utterly demolishing Super Mario 64. In March 2023, he set unbelievable times in the 1-star and 16-star categories which many in the community believed might never be bettered. To this day, the 16-star time remains uncontested, but somebody did end up beating the 1-star time just a month later: Suigi himself. He's also held the 0-star record since 2023, and held the 70-star record for half a year before it was taken by Japanese runner ikori_o.
Despite Suigi's dominance in four of the five major Super Mario 64 speedrunning categories, he had never held the world record in the 120-star category - a grueling completionist run that takes well over 90 minutes per record attempt. The category has seen a ton of development in the past year thanks to the discovery of a viable method for performing a legendary trick thought to be a meme. That trick helped lead to six new world records in the year following its discovery, but Suigi was not one of the record setters.
Instead, Weegee's record of 1 hour, 36 minutes, and 2 seconds became the time to beat when it was set in July 2024. Suigi was nowhere close to that time. In a world where speedrun gains are measured in seconds, Suigi was over a minute off the pace, setting a 1:37:11 a day after the 1:36:02 was established as the time to beat. Suigi just couldn't beat the 1:37 barrier, and reaching a time in the low 1:36 range, where the world record stood, seemed a long way off. He was on pace to do a 1:36 just last week, but that run ended up destroyed by a rogue Gooba. The result? A 1:37:00 flat.
Which is why it was so shocking when Suigi followed up that time with a world record of 1:35:33 less than a week later. There's no massive secret to how he set this time - no big route change or unbelievable single skip that got him there. His run through the first half of the game was middling, but the back half was unbelievable. In the end, he shaved a full 29 seconds off the record. That's the biggest time save this category has seen in over nine years.
"Was watching this live, saw it was huge WR pace with half an hour left and it seemed too good to be true," speedrunner and community documentarian Summoning Salt says on Twitter. "Surely something would go wrong. But then I remembered it's Suigi playing and I was 99% sure he'd close it out. Dude plays on WR pace like it's a warmup run with 0 pressure."
"He just skipped 1:36 straight to 1:35," as one Reddit commenter observes. "Is this going to go down in history as one of the best WRs in all of speedrunning?" Or, as another puts it, "He'll have the world's first 1:34 at this rate, easily the best to ever play SM64."
Suigi has become the first person to set a world record in all five major categories, and he currently holds four of those five records. That's a level of dominance that seems downright unthinkable in a speedrunning scene as competitive as that of Super Mario 64.
"I didn't think I could ever play so consistently for so long, but I did," Suigi writes in the description of his record video. "And im so glad that I kept going after the rough past 3 months of motivation for this game. Honestly this came at a weird time, just got back into mario and the groove of things after a pretty awful bout of depression for a few months. This isn't changing my life; but it's proof that those who fight and get up every single time are those who prevail in the end."
