![]() It doesn’t just take playing the game with a kind of muscle-memory perfection few people achieve at anything in life, it also requires carefully figuring out where the game’s code breaks in very specific ways - and combining those glitches with perfect runs to set new world records. ![]() Combined, they ran through the game thousands and thousands of times, looking for every tiny advantage. Those 14 seconds may not seem like much, but watch the video and you get a sense of the sheer dedication these young men (and they all are young men) threw into this game. Using layman’s language, Summoning Salt clearly and lucidly explains how a group of dedicated speedrunners spent 12 years shaving seconds off the world-record time in Nintendo’s classic Super Mario Bros., starting at 5:10 and finally arriving (as of this writing) at just under 4:56. Which is why I love YouTube user Summoning Salt’s “Super Mario Bros World Record Progression” video. I know something impressive is happening, but I have no idea what exactly it is. The shorthand lingo developed among the truly obsessed - “Bullet Bill glitch,” “fast four dash two,” “flagpole clipping” - gives me the same feeling I get when I stumble across a game of cricket. It can also be incredibly opaque to outsiders. Speedrunning, a subculture of video game fandom dedicated to figuring out how to get through games as fast as possible, can be fascinating.
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