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Blindfolded speedrunning specialist Bubzia has dominated the sightless Super Mario 64 scene for years, and he's not stopping yet. He's is currently working on beating his own blindfolded 70-star world record, and after a months-long grind he was on pace to do just that. But Bubzia's entire community was willing that run to fail because his broken webcam would've invalidated the run anyway.
On February 10, Bubzia was 20 minutes into the 90ish minute run just a few seconds behind world record pace. The community was getting cautiously excited that they might see a new record - with clean play through the remainder of the game, Bubzia could easily do it. But at the 23:59 mark, the unthinkable happened. Bubzia's webcam suddenly turned off.
One of the key rules in blindfolded speedrunning is that you have to prove that you're actually blindfolded while playing. That generally means keeping a webcam pointed at your face through the whole game, which is how Bubzia's streams usually run. He'd been having some trouble with his camera earlier in the day, but those problems seemed to be fixed. It turned out, of course, they weren't.
Bubzia had no idea that his webcam had suddenly turned off because, well, he was blindfolded. He continued playing very well, ultimately reaching better than world record pace with gold splits heading into the deepest parts of the run. The community's turned from hope to horror as they all started to realize that this potential world record might be completely invalidated by the webcam glitch. Of course, one member of chat did briefly suggest that "this could be the funniest wr," so it wasn't all horror.
Yesterday, it finally happened. My webcam died in the beginning of a 70 Star run, and I did not know until I finished an hour later. Luckily, it was a few seconds behind World Record 😅😅 pic.twitter.com/7BJzFwYHVHFebruary 11, 2025
Most of Bubzia's viewers were low-key willing him to fail, just so nobody would have to deal with the disappointment of a world record invalidated by a simple technical glitch - especially when Bubzia had already spent well over an hour working to accomplish it with no idea that the whole effort was suddenly rendered pointless.
Ultimately, Bubzia did make a handful of mistakes in the endgame that would've cost him the world record by a few seconds regardless. "It wasn't a bad run by any means, but I'm so not satisfied, dude," Bubzia lamented in the final moments of the run. "Yep. Short of the record by a few seconds. Oh, shit." After a few seconds of silence, he added: "Oh, wait. Camera is off?"
