Earlier this week, we covered the amazing story of a full Super Mario 64 speedrun completed in under two hours, while blindfolded. Well, it turns out the runner, Bubzia, wasn't content with smashing this seemingly impossible feat in one category, and has already done it again.
Bubzia has managed to beat the game in just 24 minutes and 16 seconds, without the use of sight at all. This time around he competed in the one star category, which involves pulling off a ton of pixel-perfect exploits to skip through sections of the game. Bubzia executes them all and effortlessly glides through levels as if he always knows exactly where he is, based on sound and memory alone.
As you can imagine, completing the game with just a single star requires a lot of glitches, which are often ridiculously fiddly to execute. For that reason, Bubzia is the only person to submit a run in this blindfolded category, while the usual one star leaderboards are vibrant and full of competition.
However, there's a fair amount of runners going for other blindfold records in Super Mario 64. The 16 star category has seven competitors, and is currently held by nobori56 with a time of 23 minutes, 48 seconds. The competition is certainly fierce - Bubzia's record from five days ago on the 70 star leaderboard has already been beat, now set at one hour, 26 minutes.
When a game is as popular in the speedrunning scene as Super Mario 64, runners will inevitably find more wildly impressive ways to blast through it. The first Super Mario game is no stranger to this, with runners completing levels without sight in as little as one minute. It's easy to see why fans drift towards these new and exciting challenges, as the main run is so well optimized that it can take months of work just to shave a second off the time. That can make trailblazing a new way to play seem very appealing.