The rise of streaming has paved the way for a concurrent surge in the popularity of speedrunning, as evidenced by the massive success of charity events like Games Done Quick (GDQ) and the popularity of renowned commentators such as Karl Jobst. This same rise in popularity has also helped lower the barrier of entry for speedrunning, allowing thousands of new competitors into a video game “sport” that was previously very gatekept in terms of knowledge of a game’s inner workings and the strategies or skill necessary to exploit them for world record timings. We’ve seen the world record for the NES Tetris broken recently (though to be fair, that’s a score record and not a speedrunning record), and now Super Mario 64 speedrun champ Suigi has done what many in the community previously thought impossible.
As of November 17, 2024, Suigi is the first Super Mario 64 speedrunner to hold all 5 world record times for each category. This is a monumental achievement for the Super Mario 64 speedrun community and a groundbreaking speedrunning achievement in general. Simply put, Suigi has cemented himself as a contender for being one of the greatest speedrunners of all time, and his near-impossible achievement immediately raises the bar for would-be speedrunners hoping to dethrone him from his world record standing.
Suigi’s New 5x World Record, Explained
To truly grasp the magnitude of Suigi’s achievement, it’s important to have a little background on the Super Mario 64 speedrunning scene. There are 5 categories players compete in when speedrunning Super Mario 64, each with its own respective world record completion time. These are:
- 120 Star runs
- 70 Star runs
- 16 Star runs
- 1 Star runs
- 0 Star runs
As you might expect, runs where players collect fewer Stars typically take less time. For example, a 0 or 1-Star run might take an experienced speedrunner anywhere from 6-8 minutes. Conversely, a 120-Star run traditionally takes just over 90 minutes. Prior to Suigi’s most recent world record (WR) for a 120-Star run, the previously held time was 1:36:02. One hour, thirty-six minutes, and two seconds. To put that in perspective, HowLongToBeat.com tracks the average time to collect 120 Stars and beat Super Mario 64 as anywhere from 12-20 hours.
Suigi now holds the world record for all 5 competition categories; he is the first person in the history of Super Mario 64 speedrunning to do so. Even more impressive are his completion times for each category. In the speedrunning community, where the margin for error is seconds and not minutes, Suigi has smashed previous records for almost every competition category. His times for each category according to Speedrun.com are:
| Super Mario 64 Speedrun Category | Suigi’s World Record Time |
|---|---|
| O Star | 6m 16s 600ms |
| 1 Star | 6m 57s 580ms |
| 16 Star | 14m 35s 500ms |
| 70 Star | 46m 26s |
| 120 Star | 1h 35m 28s |
Overcoming One of the Biggest Challenges in Super Mario 64 Speedrunning
Suigi’s breaking of the world record time for the 70-Star run on Sunday, November 17, 2024, now places him as the world’s top speedrunner for Super Mario 64 and its current world record-holder in all 5 categories. But while Suigi has held three of these records for at least a year or more, the other two are more recent acquisitions. His two most recent WRs — the times for the 120 and 70-Star runs— were hard-fought following a crushing defeat.
The 120-Star run category is a daunting challenge that eats up, at minimum, 90 minutes. And in the speedrunning community, where players are always looking to shave precious seconds off their times, 90 minutes is a big ask for players to regularly commit to a run. It takes both time and patience to pull off a flawless 120-Star run, which can easily be derailed by a stroke of bad luck when players are already well into a playthrough. Suigi’s most recent 70-Star run WR is an astounding achievement, but the story of how he recently landed the world record for the 120-Star run category is perhaps even more amazing.
How Suigi Surpassed Weegee’s 120-Star World Record
In July of this year, speedrunner Weegee set the previous world record for the 120-Star run with an impressive time of 1 hour, 36 minutes, and 2 seconds. This comes after most record holders were previously hovering around the 99-minute mark (or, 1 hour and 39 minutes), setting an impressively high bar for other competitors to clear. Suigi, already the holder for the 0, 1, and 16-Star categories, set out to beat Weegee’s record almost immediately after it was posted, but he fell short by a full minute. His time was still impressive (at 1 hour, 37 minutes, and 11 seconds), but a far cry from the pace he would need to keep to beat Weegee’s WR.
But just a week later, Suigi was already posting more impressive times, eventually landing a run that was a flat 1 hour and 37 minutes. To anyone in the Super Mario 64 speedrunning community, it was obvious that Suigi was well on his way to claiming the new WR for the 120-Star run. Sure enough, on October 26, 2024, Suigi smashed Weegee’s world record time on a 120-Star run with an astounding completion time of 1 hour, 35 minutes, and 33 seconds. This time would be beaten by none other than Suigi himself on November 3, with the current world record completion time of 1 hour, 35 minutes, and 28 seconds.
A Recently Discovered Trick Has Changed the Course of SM64 Speedrunning
The biggest question one might have about speedrunning a game like Mario 64 is how the speedrunners can do it without the assistance of ROM hacks or other methods to alter the gameplay. And while you might expect that the answer is complex, the truth is it all boils down to knowing how to exploit a game’s inherent programming quirks. In the speedrunning world, there are different fields for competition, with some players choosing to compete in either altered or unaltered versions of games, each of which has its own world record times. The records that Suigi holds for Super Mario 64 are all in the original Japanese version running natively on Nintendo 64 hardware, which makes his 5x WR all the more impressive. None of it would be possible, though, without a trick discovered late last year.
On 70 and 120-Star runs, players must sit through a lengthy carpet ride section in one of the final levels in Super Mario 64, “The Big House In The Sky”. Sections of the game like this are one of the biggest hurdles for speedrunners to overcome, as there’s seemingly no way around wasting precious seconds on preloaded animations or autoscrolling sections. For years, SM64 speedrunners would joke about “carpetless” runs, which require near-impossible precision to pull off using a trick with a Bob-omb’s programming during its explosion. But last year, speedrunner Krythalith discovered, and then published, a reliable way to set up a “carpetless” run, with Suigi himself verifying its authenticity and dependability. Since then, the race for the speedrunning record has picked up, resulting in Suigi’s current achievement.
What Suigi’s Achievement Means for the SM64 Speedrunning Community
Though some speedrunners are joking that Super Mario 64 is “dead” thanks to Suigi’s incredible achievement, the truth is that it is anything but. Still, it will likely be a long time before anyone tops Suigi’s records in any of the 5 competition categories, save for maybe Suigi himself improving his already impressive times. The likelihood of someone beating just one of Suigi’s WRs is slim, much less someone else holding all 5 world records at once. Speedrunning expert and community commentator Karl Jobst, often one to expose and call out those who cheat, has taken to calling Suigi “the best ever”, and his achievement in Super Mario 64 is a speedrunning feat that we’re likely to not see replicated for some time, if at all.
The image featured at the top of this post is ©Super Mario 64 gameplay screenshot.