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The speedrunning scene for the original Super Mario Bros. is on fire, and there's a new world record that has taken human runners ever closer to machine-level perfection.
Back in September, a runner called Niftski set a new world record of 4:54:631 in the Super Mario Bros. any% category. That was just 22 frames away from the time that's been recorded in tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, where runners program specific inputs to make a speedrun that's theoretically perfect according to the current understanding in a given game. In other words, Niftski's Super Mario Bros. world record was just 22 frames away from literal perfection.
But any% isn't the only Super Mario Bros. category that Niftski competes in. More recently, he's been submitting times in the glitchless category, which bans the use of various exploits, most of which come down to ways of clipping through objects to cut certain corners. Niftski himself held the world record for this category since 2022 with a time of 5:02:785
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Niftski adds that a "5:02.5xx is possible" by performing the extremely tricky fast acceleration trick multiple times through the game's final level, but says "if I were to ever achieve this, it would definitely be my stopping point." The TAS time of 5:02:485 is a bit lower than Niftski's final goal.
Super Mario Bros. is a pretty unique beast in the speedrunning world, because of something runners call the "frame rule." Essentially, there's a timer that works behind the scenes of the game to check every so often whether you've completed a level. Even if you shave a fraction of a second off your time in a given level, it doesn't matter unless you make it to a new frame rule - like rushing to catch a bus only to find it hasn't even made it to the stop yet.
Combined with the game's short run time, this has made the Super Mario Bros. speedrunning scene a particularly tight race, where human players are within striking distance of literal machine-level perfection. The one level that's not subject to the frame rule is 8-4, the game's final stage. Much of the time left to gain on this ultimate level is through repeated use of that fast acceleration trick, which requires three frame perfect inputs in a row.
That's the kind of thing that once seemed to only be possible in the TAS, and now human runners are making it happen. Will anybody manage to do it perfectly every single time in a full run? I don't know, but I don't have it in me to doubt the skill of runners like Niftski.
