One Super Mario Bros. speedrunner met with heartbreak after a potential world record run played with machine-level precision was thwarted by a single bad jump.
Super Mario Bros. makes for a very short speedrun, with top runners posting times under five minutes. It's also programmed with a unique timer behind the scenes - what speedrunners call the "frame rule" - that essentially ensures that each level has a certain minimum time that's impossible to beat. Tool-assisted speedrunners, who program precise inputs to see what a theoretically perfect speedrun would look like, have broken Super Mario Bros. runs wide open, and humans are actually getting close to matching that level of perfection.
Back in September, Niftski became the first human runner to successfully match the TAS time on Super Mario Bros. into the start of final level, 8-4, setting a new world record of 4:54.631. Now, another runner named KingOfJonnyBoy has managed to match the TAS into 8-4, but it all fell apart with an important trick in the middle of the level - a wall jump off of a pipe that requires extremely precise execution.
KingOfJonnyBoy plays off the mistake in the video, repeatedly saying "I don't even care, I don't even f***ing care" before unceremoniously dying to Bowser and abandoning the run. This run had a decent shot at becoming a new world record - KingOfJonnyBoy calls the YouTube video a "world record throw" - but just matching the TAS this deep into a run is an accomplishment in itself.
Now that multiple people have managed to match TAS into 8-4, the Super Mario Bros. speedrunning community is agog at the future of the scene. Niftski's run was already just 22 frames away from literal perfection, and all the time left to save is in that final level. Now, speedrunners need to match machine-level input precision for four straight minutes and keep a cool enough head in 8-4 to execute a bunch of frame-perfect tricks and shave off those last few fractions of a second. I have no doubt someone in the Mario speedrunning community will manage a perfect SMB run with human hands - it's just a question of when.
There's another heartbreak out there: An incredible Super Mario 64 speedrun fell apart after a botched trick doomed what could've been an untouchable world record.
