Super Mario 64 already has a healthy community of fans trying to break records for collecting stars as quickly as possible, but now, there’s a burgeoning scene around parodies of the game as well. Super Mario 64 FPS, the ridiculous-but-obligatory first-person remake that gives Mario a gun, is seeing more folks submit times for a dedicated leaderboard right now.
The idea to speedrun Super Mario 64 FPS is an old one; YouTuber EazySpeezy uploaded a video on a 70-star run midway through 2020. But more recently, YouTuber Alpharad threw his hat into the ring with a video detailing his own adventure learning the ins and outs of the game, and the “best” strategies to achieve quick times. There’s a lot of wall clipping. The game is also bit glitchy, so runners have to deal with things like Mario going invisible and or suddenly dying. It also means you get to hear wonderful sentences about, say, when prospective runners should look into acquiring a bazooka for Mario.
Obviously a lot of this is tongue-in-cheek and for entertainment — midway through his run, Alpharad starts using dev tools and reprograms his mouse to blitz his way through the game. But in the video description, Alpharad encourages his viewers to submit their own runs to Speedrun.com, the popular speedrunning website. While runs have been ongoing from the start of the year, there’s a fresh submission that is dated March 1. Clocking in at 34 minutes, 21 seconds, the current 70-star record belongs to Scottish speedrunner Falsepog. There’s also a race between Alpharad and EazySpeezy near the end of the video embedded above.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but gun Mario 64 is genuinely one of the sickest speed games ever made, and I just hope they’ll someday let me play this at GDQ,” Alpharad says during the absurdist video.
