When you think about speedrunning, Super Mario 64 is likely one of the first games that comes to mind for most people. This groundbreaking title, full of exhilarating exploits and players hungry for personal best times (PBs), is still played in droves nearly 30 years after its initial release.
Over the past week, the 120-star category has seen two new world records. These monumental runs are due to the incorporation of a new strategy called carpetless that was discovered last month.
Super Mario 64 contains a number of autoscrolling sections, including the elevator in Hazy Maze Cave and the moving platform in the volcano of Lethal Lava Land. Every single one of them has been beaten by shortcuts discovered by the players that allow them to bypass these boring sections and save a considerable amount of time, with the exception of one.
The last level before Bowser in the Sky is called Rainbow Ride, and it’s a death-defying stage suspended above the clouds. For one of those stars, titled “The Big House in the Sky,” players must ride a slow-moving magic carpet along a rainbow path to reach the top of a massive house on the far corner of the stage to obtain this star. Taking this path means a slow, arduous, 50-second autoscroller. And that’s just no fun at all.
Enter Krithalith, a player who’s been avidly experimenting in the game. On Sept. 18, they posted a video showing a way to get to the top of the big house without using the magic carpet (i.e. carpetless). To start off the trick, players must get to the side window on the left side of the house, which is pretty easy to get to, even without the carpet. From there, you perform a normalized strategy, designed to consistently set up the desired position for the carpetless strategy.
All of the movements are orthogonal, meaning players don’t have to frustrate themselves with diagonals, which can be inconsistent based on their controller’s notches. Finally, a series of frame-perfect wall kicks are performed with pause buffering to ensure that the control stick is held in the correct direction each and every time to scale the big house and reach the star.
When this trick was discovered, top speedrunners like Simply and Suigi began practicing it consistently. It was widely understood in the community that it would only be a matter of time until players started scoring astonishing new PBs. And surely, one of them would turn out to be a world record.
The first instance of this happened on Oct. 12, when puncayshun achieved a final time of 1:37:34. This beat the previous 120-star world record held by Weegee by a single second. Puncayshun was roughly 30 seconds ahead of PB pace going into Rainbow Ride and executed a clean carpetless to achieve the world record. The speedrunning community was astonished at this run as it was the first time that carpetless was incorporated into a world record run.
But just yesterday, on Oct. 17, another player rocked the scene. Karin achieved the newest and current world record for the 120-star category, earning a time of 1:37:32. Despite needing to restart the carpetless strat due to starting off in the wrong position, they managed to shave an additional two seconds off of puncayshun’s run to come out on top.
For reference, Weegee’s world record had been on top for 11 months. For two clean runs to beat this record within a single week demonstrates the significance of carpetless. The fact that any high-level runner is now a viable threat for the title of 120-star world record holder demonstrates the sheer potential that shortcuts like these may hold.
This is an amazing time to be a Super Mario 64 fan. New strategies like these breathe new life into speedrunning and demonstrate the dedication and passion of this stellar community. This new strategy is far from easy, but difficulty has never scared these runners off before.
