A speedrunner by the name of Blubbler has beaten Super Mario Bros. in four minutes and 57.69 seconds.
I am not very good at Super Mario Bros. I’m just fine at the rest of the series but every time I play the first game I usually wind up staring at the Game Over screen within the first ten minutes. That being the case, I can’t help but be amazed at just how freaking good some gamers are at this game.
Case in point, a speedrunner going by the handle Blubbler has recently set a new a record for finishing the classic game in an incredible four minutes and 57.69 seconds. Blubber’s run beats the old record (four minutes and 58.09 seconds) by the space of about a second. To cut that sliver off of his time Blubbler employed an impressive combination of practiced precision and time-saving techniques. For instance, he avoids triggering any of the end level fireworks sequences and, in level 8-2, he manages to skip Mario’s post-flagpole victory strut by hitting the level’s end at exactly time as a Bullet Bill.
All in all, it’s a fairly amazing feat of gameplay and watching it from start to end I can’t even imagine the amount of practice and preparation that Blubbler had to have put into the game to achieve this record. Even more than that though, I’d marvel to see the speedrun that does better than this. As the old adage goes, there’s always someone better. Even so, it’s hard to picture how anyone could do much better than this.
Source: Eurogamer
