How many hours would you stand around Super Mario 64 waiting to do something that has never been done before? five? ten? All day? Speedrunner, who goes by Marbler, recently clocked over 80 hours with the Nintendo classic to be the first player to beat it without hitting the jump button even once. This incredible feat required meticulous planning and waiting several days for the platform to slowly rise.
Speed games for video games are known for their wild problems and the painstaking dedication of the players behind them, but few rise to the level of complexity and diligence required to complete them as Super Mario 64‘with’A Button Challenges,” which indicate that players aim to complete the game (or specific stages) with as few presses of the jump button as possible. Jumping is an integral part of the game’s 3D level design and the hunt for its collectible stars, so naturally speed runners have long wondered how few jumps they can get away with and still finish the game.
The story of the challenge it dates back decades and is full of incremental discoveries and improvements. While there are specific strategies developed for different stars and certain parts of the game, much of the difficulty revolves around the precise use of Mario’s other inputs, including the B button’s mid-air dive, to maneuver through complex levels. Marbler finished pressing two A buttons Mario 64 last fall and worked with the rest of the community to eliminate these two presses and achieve a true zero jump, 70 star run.
In the original Nintendo 64 version of the game, speed runners were reduced to one full press of the A button, which included half presses that rounded down. But in the Wii Virtual Console version, thanks to some idiosyncrasies of its technology, zero is possible, although it requires chasing down some harder stars like one with a red coin for Big Boo’s Haunt. Speedrunners often use software to map out what is theoretically possible in a game before trying to implement it themselves. This was not an option for the Marbler null button press Super Mario 64. That makes his latest run all the more remarkable; it was performed in real time by a human before it was ever simulated by a machine.
“The meaning of [this run] is pretty big in my opinion, at least for ‘A Button Challenge’ (ABC),” he said Kotaku in an interview on Discord. “There hasn’t even been an Instrument Assisted Tackle (TAS) made from a zero A full-game press because the TAS standards in Super Mario 64 community is that it should be playable on console. The Wii Virtual Console has a host of issues that make this nearly impossible for all but the shortest TASs.”
There are two key moments in zero press running. The first comes in Fire Sea, a section of the game where players collect red coins in a pit of lava on their way to the second of three encounters with Bowser. Typically, players must use moving platforms to jump onto a green pillar to climb to the next section. Navigating the obstacle course without jumps takes an incredibly long time, but it is possible thanks to how the Wii does math.
That’s because every time the console converts a double to a float, it truncates the extra bits, “effectively rounding those calculations to 0,” Marbler explained. “[This] means rigs (which use a double float calculation for a sine wave) will slowly drift towards the center of the level,” he said. “After 78 hours they are high enough to go around the pole completely.”
This stretch would have taken even longer—roughly a full eight days—if it weren’t for another trick Marbler used called “vertical velocity conversion.” Making Mario land in certain ways allows him to conserve momentum, which can then be used later to be launched upwards. “I set the console to work and forget about it for 6 hours, then I come back to it and touch the lava that gives Mario incredible vertical speed and immediately land on it to save it,” he said. “From there, I just keep hitting until Mario is right on the edge of the platform and let him run for another 72 hours.” Once he’s back, he can break through the wall to get where he needs to go.
The second defining moment comes near the very end when he faces Bowser one last time in the sky. It’s less about patience and more about precise execution. Players have to climb a long maze of platforms, which is usually impossible to do without jumping. However, a trick called the Chuckya drop makes it possible to bypass the hardest part of the level without a single A button press. Further painstaking refinements to the strategy made it possible for the Marbler to do everything in real time.
Chuckya is a purple enemy with red gloves that picks Mario up and throws him in semi-random directions when he gets close. But it is possible to manipulate the enemy into throwing Mario exactly where he needs to go, it’s just very difficult and was only theoretical until Marbler did it. The quick can write a fifteen page article in an academic journal on how the trick works. I’ll try to break it down as clearly as possible.
As Marbler explained, most enemies in the Super Mario 64 it has a certain amount of logic programmed into it to avoid walking on ledges. That logic goes out the window if Chuckya is in the air. The enemy also bounces when it falls. By making Chuckya walk down a slope, the game essentially treats him as falling and bounces him slightly so the game also thinks he’s in the air. When in the right spot, Chuckya can throw Mario exactly where he needs to go. Actually, setting up this scenario is much more complicated, especially since it is completely out of sight during the entire process.
Chuckya will usually chase Mario until he moves behind him, at which point he stops, waits, and then turns back to Mario. To manipulate this behavior, Marbler relies on Super Mario 64is a very short draw distance. Once Chuckya is just outside the bounds of what the game will render, it goes into a “limited update functionality” state. It continues to “go through the motions of the chase” but won’t actually move or be subject to gravity. This allows players to make Chuckya fall off a ledge, freeze him in place, turn him in the right direction, re-enable the chase, and get him to where he needs to go to enable the all-important maneuver of speedrun.
The last piece of the Chuckya puzzle is a 1/32 chance of being thrown in the right direction. Leaving nothing to chance, Marbler can manipulate this part of enemy behavior as well. The enemy has a built in guard where they will die if they reach a part of the map out of bounds. Before this happens, it will rotate for 15 frames to try to get back in the right direction. Using this reflex to his advantage, Marbler can make sure that Chuckya doesn’t throw Mario until there’s a floor in front of him.
“This raises the chance of a successful roll to 16/32, and on top of that, where it lands happens to have two extra corners that work to keep Mario alive, for a total of 18/ 32 (56.25 %) chance of success on the roll,” he said Kotaku. “Not ideal to have RNG at the end of such a difficult trick, but a hell of a lot better than a 3% chance.”
The final run lasted 86 hours and 48 and a half minutes. That’s more than three days total, but only nine hours of actual play, a drop in the bucket compared to the time Marbler said he spent practicing. “If I had to guess, I’d say the practice alone was probably somewhere in the 150-200 hour range, with research and strategy development coming in somewhere around 50-100 hours.”
For everyone watching live, it was more than worth it. Viewers started spamming the chat with “I WAS HERE” after Marbler successfully performed the Chuckya Drop Throw. By then it was clear they were watching history unfold before their eyes. “Dude, it’s done,” he said during the stream after the credits started rolling. His next target? Start training for the full 120 star challenge.
