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Speedrunning is a game of inches – or rather, milliseconds – and every new PB and world record is the result of somebody clawing out a tiny time save through nothing less than hard, grueling work. Such is the case with a new Mario Kart Wii world record, which started with a simple question: is a "humanly impossible" trick really so impossible?
That's the question a runner known as Ejay B posed some time ago about a tool-assisted speedrun on Luigi Circuit, the opening course of Mario Kart Wii. "What does it take to be the first person ever to get a world record using an exploit everyone thought was humanly impossible?" as the runner put it more recently on Twitter. Tool-assisted speedrunners, using emulation tools to program a precise series of inputs into the game, figured out that the fastest way to complete the course was through a technique known as a superslide.
Supersliding involves positioning your vehicle along the seam between the edge of the track's ground geometry and the abyss of the out-of-bounds area, then essentially shoving yourself into the floor. The resulting state of being half-embedded into the ground can let you reach ridiculous speeds, but it's very finicky to actually stay in the ground, and it's only really possible to maintain this position on the Wario bike – which Ejay describes as "one of the worst bikes in the game stat-wise."
That, of course, is impossible for a human to do. But that doesn't mean the TAS version of the superslide is the only way to do the trick for real. That's where Ejay comes in. The runner discovered a setup where, by aligning yourself with a particular roadside sign, you could theoretically hit the right angle to clip out of bounds, and a path to superslide around the track that you could effectively follow with merely human reflexes.
What came next was a multi-hour grind every day for "over a month," as Ejay explains on Twitter. While the strat made the glitch viable for a human to perform, it certainly didn't make it easy, and Ejay estimates spending around 50 hours altogether to finally make the run work. It took 60 attempts to simply get the glitched jump to go out of bounds. 919 attempts to land on the seam between the void and the level. 1,293 attempts to stop on the seam.
It wasn't until attempt number 3,059, after a full month of grinding, that Ejay actually managed to get embedded in the ground and got a superslide going. This one, magic attempt was all it took. Ejay got all the way around the track, executed the planned route, and broke the single-lap record, which stood since 2023, by 0.378, "the biggest ever time cut for a Luigi Circuit world record."
If you want the full technical details on how this trick works and what was put into figuring out a human-viable method to achieve it, I can't recommend Ejay's full video on the subject enough. The kicker? This was just a single-lap record, and Ejay's already worked out a method that could make this technique viable for a full three-lap race record. Godspeed to whoever attempts it, but I'm sure there's somebody in the speedrun community dedicated enough to try.
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