Bubzia, the Super Mario 64 speedrunner primarily known for running the game blindfolded, has just embarked on a new challenge. He's now running Super Mario 64 blindfolded on a dance pad. The first attempt didn't exactly go well, but I guarantee it turned out better than you or I could've managed.
All of Mario's controls were mapped to the dance pad, but these things don't have quite enough buttons to handle a full N64 platformer, so Bubzia also kept hold of a standard controller to manipulate the camera and pause the game. He also needed to keep a hand free to hold on to a piece of furniture so he wouldn't just fall over during all the ridiculous movements he needed to handle. "I need to multitask," he explained. "I need to hold with one hand, game with my feet, and operate the camera with the controller. It's a mess."
The challenge was intended to be a 16-star run, and Bubzia began the run without much confidence. "I am very confident we will not manage to get the actual 16-star run fully, but we're gonna try our best," he said. That insecurity turned out to be pretty well justified when the first star challenge saw him forget the game's most basic mechanics. "Wait, how do you ground pound?" Bubzia asked aloud. "My understanding of the Mario physics is gone. What do you do to ground pound? What button do you press? Just A and Z, right?"
He did ultimately figure out how to grab that first star, and several more besides, but none of them came easily. Turns out that Mario is difficult to control with your feet, and rewiring your brain to turn all those analog stick controls into toe taps is no joke. "This is so much brain work," Bubzia noted at one point. "This is much more mentally taxing than physically."
The punchline came when, one hour and 45 minutes into the run, Bubzia thought he had grabbed the eighth star he needed to enter the first Bowser level. The disappointment on his face when he realized he only had seven was immeasurable. It took him nearly two hours to actually get that eighth star, and by that time he'd given up. "We are just about to end this challenge because I am mentally a wreck," he said. He took off the blindfold to beat the first Bowser - still no easy feat on a dance pad - and called the effort off.
Just beating the first Bowser battle ended up taking over three hours and 33 minutes. Bubzia's blindfolded 16-star record using a normal controller is just 19 minutes and 43 seconds. If you're wondering whether there's a speedrunning record for beating Mario 64 on a dance pad without a blindfold - well, of course there is. That record belongs to PeekingBoo, who beat the 16-star category in 20 minutes flat on a DDR pad back in 2022.
Yet it seems combining dance pads and blindfolds just makes for a bad time. "I knew it was a bad idea and it turned out to be an even worse idea than I initially thought," Bubzia said.
