Super Mario 64 speedrunners have broken the classic N64 platformer in what seems like every way imaginable - yet they still keep coming up with new tricks. In 2024, a new glitch was discovered that could save a second or two, but this trick was so precise it was considered effectively impossible for human runners. Cut to February 2025 and legendary speedrunner Bubzia has now done it in real time - while blindfolded.
The first star in Hazy Maze Cave, the game's sixth course, requires you to navigate through most of the level and ride the dinosaur Dorries back up to an island floating in an underground lake. As it turns out, this cavern is directly underneath a conspicuously placed sign in the course's starting area, and in April 2024, tool-assisted speedrunner Alexpalix1 built a TAS that let Mario use that sign to get a double wall push and clip past the wall and fall all the way into the cavern below - a significantly faster way of reaching the star.
Things really get intense here when you consider how small those Z values are. "A single Z unit here is 1/2048th of a unit," Krithalith continued. "In real life, this would translate to roughly the width of a red blood cell. This means that if you try to completely YOLO this strat, the odds of success can be calculated to be somewhere in the range of 1 in 1 million to 1 in 10 million. Clearly, it will not be possible to find a setup for this strat that is even remotely reasonable."
Krithalith went on to explain that there is, in fact, a setup that makes doing this trick reasonable - though certainly not easy. But the trick was done in real time as far back as June 2024, and over the course of the past several months, better and better setups have been discovered making it more and more reasonable for speedrunner to attempt the trick in full-length runs.
Blindfolded speedrunning specialist Bubzia comes into the story alongside the most recently discovered setup. "It reduces this infinitely precise trick into only two frame-perfect inputs," Bubzia explains in a new video. "First you have to run into the sign to get a straight angle, then you crouch and Mario cam, and hold down the stick for exactly six frames. You can make easily distinguishable visual cues, or even pause buffer it, similar to carpetless setups. From here, you can simply jump, change the camera again, and pause one frame after being airborne. With this, the setup is guaranteed to work."
Of course, simply doing the trick in real time wasn't enough for Bubzia. He needed to do it blindfolded. The irony is that, with the setup that the community had discovered, getting the clip was the easy part while blindfolded - the tough part was correctly angling Mario to get the star once he landed in the lake. Nonetheless, he managed it, and did so several times over the course of a day's streaming, breaking his own blindfolded record on the star multiple times.
Over the course of less than a year, the Super Mario 64 speedrunning community discovered a seemingly impossible, TAS-only trick, collaborated to make it viable for real-time runners, and got the whole thing so consistent that it can even be done blindfolded. "Visual Speedrunners have NO excuse anymore," Bubzia jokes on Bluesky.
