Super Mario Bros. is approaching its 40th birthday, and speedrunners are still finding new ways to break it. Over the course of the past 16 months, a group of runners has spent hours upon hours utterly breaking the game apart to finally build a perfect run of the game that ends with exactly 000000 points on the scoreboard.
Each level completed in the original Super Mario Bros. gives you a bunch of points for the amount of time you have left on the board, so how do you beat the whole game with zero points? By scoring so many points that the scoreboard wraps around to 000000 upon the final Bowser kill.
Working since January 2024, a group has been building a tool-assisted speedrun, or TAS, to score exactly 10,000,000 points over the course of the game, reaching the ending with 000000 points displayed as efficiently as possible. The tricks required to do it are far too precise for human hands, so the run's been put together as a pre-programmed series of precise inputs.
You can see it in full below, and a Twitch stream from Kosmic – one of the devs of the TAS, though he downplays his role in its creation – offers a lot more detail on how it was put together. The run "does things that have never been done before in this 40-year-old game," Kosmic explains. "We love making new things happen."
Kosmic says it was "really hard to calculate how to optimize this, because you'll see a lot of levels are finishing with like 20 left on the timer or something. We need to get enough points, but we don't need to use all of the time available to get points. So it's like figuring out exactly the right amount of points to get on each level."
Core to the run is "one of the most famous tricks in Mario": the 1-Up exploit where you repeatedly kick a Koopa shell on the edge of a staircase. You get an escalating number of points for each stomp, eventually culminating in infinite extra lives. That trick is easy enough to execute in real time, but the problem is that when the 1-Ups start, you stop getting extra points.
In the TAS, however, Mario keeps precisely landing to interrupt the jump combo, restarting it over and over again to get points with no superfluous 1-Ups. The extra point of efficiency is that Mario is simultaneously killing Spinies thrown by a nearby Lakitu to rack up points even faster.
"This is the fastest known way to build points in Super Mario Bros., right here," Kosmic explains. "It's because the Koopa shell's next to a wall, and there's a one-block gap in the floor – it's just the perfect set of conditions to land as soon as possible and kick as soon as possible."
HappyLee, another dev of the TAS, said during the stream that "this project started in January 2024," and in a Twitter post noted that it "took hundreds of hours to make. It's not easy to do something new to a 40-year-old game." Clearly, the Mario speedrunning community is never going to shy away from a challenge.
