Behold, Super Mario 64 speedrunners can do "an absurdly lengthy and precise series" of 41 button presses to make Mario stand underwater: "This has no known practical purpose"

Super Mario 64 speedrunners have broken the N64 classic to pieces in order to find every little trick and glitch that could possible save a bit of time. Sometimes, they discover tricks that can do things which aren't actually at all useful. Such is the case with a ridiculous series of 41 button presses that can make Mario briefly stand underwater.

There's a tiny seam in Jolly Roger Bay, Super Mario 64's third course, that was discovered decades ago by modders. It's used occasionally in tool-assisted speedruns of the A Button Challenge, where the goal is to complete the game in as few A presses as possible, and you might have seen one such TAS if you tuned into AGDQ earlier this year.

But while those TAS tricks are effective impossible for a human to replicate, in 2020 a Mario glitch hunter who goes by bad_boot discovered a precise setup that would let you enter the seam using nothing but normal, human hands on a normal N64 controller. This trick was recently brought to the attention of the wider gaming world thanks to venerable Mario trivia hound Supper Mario Broth on Bluesky.

"By performing an absurdly lengthy and precise series of actions in Super Mario 64 (detailed in the video)," Supper Mario Broth explains, "Mario will be able to reach an incredibly narrow seam that allows him to stand underwater in Jolly Roger Bay. This has no known practical purpose."

This setup requires you to grab onto the sign in front of the cave in Jolly Roger Bay and jump-kick against it. From there, you simply punch 20 times, pause, hold up, unpause and jump two frames later, ground pound with frame-perfect timing, pause again, unpause again, jump and ground pound again, jump straight up out of the water three times, swim with the A button seven times, and swim with the B button three times. If I'm counting right, that's 41 button presses to get Mario into a bizarre state where he's on the ground underwater.

While the seam itself is useful for those A Button Challenge TASes, this particular setup has no real use. Once you've gotten Mario into the seam, you can look around and make him jump as if he's standing on the ground, but any significant movement will push him back into the water as normal.

The amount of digging it takes to find helpful speedrunning tricks naturally means you're going to find more than a few unhelpful tricks, too. Earlier this year, we also beheld a Super Mario 64 player who discovered that 34-frame loop repeated 2.8 million times over 36 days can make a log drift through a cliff to no known purpose. Who knows - maybe these discoveries will all turn out to be the key to essential speedrunning tricks in the years to come. In the meantime, I'll just keep marveling at the ingenuity of the Mario community.

Blindfolded Super Mario 64 speedrunner gets near world record pace, doesn't realize the run's been invalidated by a broken webcam until it's already over.