Watch every Super Mario Bros. speedrun under 5 minutes in one go
The story of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning is one of the dedicated players who have spent years saving fractions of a second to complete the classic Nintendo game as quickly as possible. And nowhere has this journey been more fascinating than in a new video that compiles the hundreds of attempts completed in less than five minutes since 2010.
YouTube creator FlibidyDibidy took footage of the 369 under 5 minutes Super Mario Bros. speedruns on the official ranking and using an open source program known as Graphite, transformed them into recreations with tools, perfect to merge into one video. The resulting merger sees a veritable tidal wave of Marios sweep through the NES game – well, at least the handful of levels in the Any% category – towards their final showdown with Bowser.
It's obviously a lot of fun to turn off your brain and watch a bunch of pixelated plumbers hopping around the Mushroom Kingdom, but FlibidyDibidy's video also does a fantastic job of portraying a complex and essential aspect of life. Super Mario Bros. world record speedrunning known as the “framework rule.”
A perfect example of how this quirk affects speedrun times can be seen in the transition from World 1-1 to World 1-2. The hundreds of Mario horde completes the first in a messy mass of mustaches and overalls reminiscent of a defunct fan game Mario Royalebut begins to neatly divide the latter into three groups, depending on which framing rule was satisfied.
Over the course of the video, players move further apart as they miss or catch subsequent frame control milestones and try other speedrunning tricks until only one, current record holder Niftski, remains at the head of the pack. Niftski made his way to the top of the Super Mario Bros. Scoreboard back in Septemberwhere you achieve the best possible frame line at each level by executing strategies once thought impossible for humans.
FlibidyDibidy previously combined more than 5,000 of his own Super Mario Bros. speedrun attempts, and even organizes tournaments who use the same technology to view the progress of every competitor live on one screen.