Speedrunner Conquers Super Mario Bros.’ Minus Worlds In Record Time

Watching a speedrun through a classic game is fascinating, for a couple of reasons. Number one, it leaves us in awe to see a player overcome all odds to become one of the fastest to run through a game; and number two, it leaves us wondering about our own video gaming skills, but in a good way.

Leave it to yet another one to step forward and prove his worth in the unlikeliest of places – the Minus World in Super Mario Bros. from the NES era.

Yes, the Minus World exists, a glitch (or is it?) found in world 1-2 of the 8-bit classic, and this player, who goes by the name of Kosmic (or, technically, Kosmicd12), managed to beat all three levels in a record amount of time. Well, a record that could be beaten in the future.

This player manages to have world records in the three top Super Mario Bros. games over at the Speedrun page, and his latest record can be seen in the Twitch stream above. With it, he's managed to attain the best time on Minus World by 2:33:587, which equates to 143 milliseconds faster than the previous record set by a player named SoloQ. Sometimes, those milliseconds can make a world of difference.

"This run arrived at -3 tied with the previous record and then saved several frames there," he explained. "There are still 3 framerules to save before entering -3!"

Though the speedrun appears to still be in the verification stages, there's no question that this is pretty damn impressive – especially to those who still have yet to access the Minus World in this game.

Kosmic is no stranger to attaining records through Speedrun, including those in "category extensions," which involve unique rules to playing the game, such as getting through it without killing a single foe (it's harder than it looks) or beating the game one-handed without using a single warp pipe. Yikes.

Check out the records here, and watch the end of the speedrun above. It's good stuff, especially if you're starting to get into watching these. Man…this sort of thing makes us want Awesome Games Done Quick back again.

(Hat tip to Polygon for the heads up!)