Despite the immense popularity of Super Mario 64 speedrunning, there is a comparatively small amount of people running the blindfolded categories, a testament to how difficult blindfolded speedrunning really is. And so it was surprising when I was on twitch this week and was notified of another runner doing blindfolded 16 star runs. Blindfolded runs of Super Mario 64 have been recently made popular by a small but EXTREMELY dedicated group of speedrunners. However there are clear differences between the runs that those already established players have done and the runs that this particular person is completing. The main difference, of course, being that this particular runner is creating fake runs and attempting to pass them off as real. I have here a video of one of these runs, and I aim to show some of the clear discrepancies between this run and the genuine blindfolded runs of sm64 that are out there. When watching this run, it is important to note that the author claims to not have practiced blindfolded speedrunning much at all, and that this is apparently only his third blindfolded run. He claims to make up for this with the fact that he has been playing Super Mario 64 for the past three and a half years. However it should be noted that despite the amount of time he has spent on the game the best time on a run he has submitted is an 18:26, a relatively mid-level time for 16 star. The first thing that actually put me off when I was watching this run was the fact that the streamer had both follow alerts and text-to-speech alerts on. If you have ever seen a blindfolded speedrun before you will know that runners pretty much always have these kinds of sound alerts turned off. Considering how important sound cues are when you literally can’t see, you would think that he would do the same. However this guy is so good he apparently doesn’t even need clear sound cues to do the run. Throughout this run, he also attempts multiple times to explain the strategies that he's been using, except there are multiple problems with what he is saying versus the things he is actually doing. He mainly claims to be using a combination of sound cues and muscle memory for most of his strats. Most speedrunners know however that VISUAL cues in particular are just as important as muscle memory in many cases. It’s very unrealistic to assume that anyone could just casually do a blindfolded run off of visual muscle memory alone, no matter how long that person has been playing. "I can't do one star blindfolded. Even though I've played this game for years and years and years, even trying to do one star blindfolded is insanely difficult." Blindfolded speedruns often employ what are called normalized strategies. A normalized strategy is any strat that is done such a way that the outcome is always exactly the same. In Super Mario 64, many of these kinds of strategies can be employed. For example, moving in a cardinal direction on a controller with notches, using two slow walks to ledge grab at the corner of a platform, or punching against a wall to push Mario a fixed distance are all normalized strats. As you can imagine, these kinds of strats are often completely different from the ones you would see in a normal run and require hundreds of hours to properly learn. And yet this person is claiming to be able to do the same thing after openly admitting to having little to no preparation. Keep that in mind when you look at the so-called “blindfolded” strats that are claimed to be employed here. The run begins in Bob-Omb Battlefield with Behind Chain Chomp’s Gate. Looking at a legitimate example by Bubzia, you can see that a consistent setup with clear intention is being used in order to get onto the Chain Chomp’s pole. Note the use of a notched angle and fixed camera in order to guarantee a direct path to the pole from the corner of the gate. Comparatively, this runner seems to have absolutely no normalized setup whatsoever. He takes what looks like either an intentional death or a legitimate mistake, and then tries again a second time. This time around, he seems to be using an almost completely different, yet still unnormalized setup to get onto the pole. The unexpected hit that he takes here from the Chain Chomp should have immediately thrown him off, and yet he is somehow still able to turn around and recover. The runner seems to be using intentional mistakes along with fake setups to try to sell the idea that he is actually blindfolded. Many more of these will come up throughout the run. The run is already off to a suspicious start, however the first absolutely massive red flag appears in Whomp’s Fortress when the runner decides to opt for owlless, a strat usually reserved for sighted runs. It should also be noted how much the runner is talking during this very input-heavy and spacing dependent section. Again, anyone who has watched a real blindfolded speedrun before knows how quiet the runners tend to be during difficult sections. With how much focus and skill are required to complete a blindfolded run, it’s an anomaly that this runner with barely any practice is casually able to do a strat that no other blindfolded runner has attempted. And yet with absolutely no normalized strats he seems to do everything with some relative ease. Looking at a run that this same runner has done without a blindfold, you can actually see that he can do the EXACT SAME movements blindfold or not. His muscle memory must really be that good. On his first attempt, he is then able to triple jump wallkick up to the floating island without giving himself any sort of indication of where he is. With absolutely no normalization he is able to set up and fail owlless three times before finally landing it a fourth time. He even comments on the fact that he should probably “learn” to use the owl blindfolded, and it’s anyone’s guess why he didn’t opt to learn this much more consistent strat in the first place. In the next star, he goes for the traditional cannonless setup that you would normally see in most sighted runs. Once again, looking at a blindfolded version of this strat, there is a clear intention with every input using normalized movements and guaranteed setups. Looking back at this run however, the movement across the falling bridge and over to the piranha plant is extremely wobbly and very inconsistent. He then lines up next to the plank using these extremely small adjustments that have no audio cues whatsoever. Anyone who runs this game or has even tried this trick before knows that it’s pretty precise. The only possible way anyone could do it blindfolded with the movement used here would be if they weren’t actually blindfolded at all and were instead using a distinctly visual cue. The run only gets more and more suspicious from this point onward. Following a couple more extremely wonky and unnormalized setups in Cool Cool Mountain, we reach Bowser in the Dark World, the first Bowser Stage. Here, only a true gamer such as this man would be able to somehow sidestep this goomba, quickly make his way up the path and then do this long jump to the next platform all completely blindfolded and with absolutely NO SETUP necessary. Simply amazing. He then punches a goomba that he claims he “heard” even though there is no good way of gauging distance that precise with sound cues in SM64. It would have probably been both faster and safer to just keep walking forward anyway. Notice then the small adjustment he makes in order to be lined up with the final slope. Anyone who is actually blindfolded here would have almost certainly kept holding right with no adjustment. And yet this man somehow knew he was just a little too far down despite having absolutely no real setup beforehand. If none of this was suspicious enough then next we have the first bowser throw. Looking at legitimate runs by Katun and Bubzia we can see that a setup is being used to slowly move Bowser into the bomb without even throwing him. For a faster strat, you can also toss him a little earlier with a slower spin, which provides a much larger frame window than normal to hit the throw. It should be noted that there is also a consistent way to throw Bowser at full speed using a combination of pause buffering and a sound cue. When Mario is spinning bowser, a distinctive 'whoosh' noise will play. This noise will always play whenever Bowser faces North, regardless of the camera angle or Bowser’s orientation when grabbing him. Furthermore, the whoosh will make a slightly different sound depending on what frame you pause on. This is the strategy that Nobori implements, and it’s how he’s able to consistently pause buffer a B press to throw bowser into the bomb. However, it seems like this runner couldn’t be bothered to learn any of these strats. He instead opts to throw Bowser in the conventional way, while claiming to also be using a sound cue. Notice however, that he also opts to turn his camera towards the bomb. As explained, turning the camera during spins does not affect the timing of any audio cues and so it would be pointless to do this if this runner was truly blindfolded. It’s pretty obvious here that he is just turning the camera so he can visually see when to throw. Moving onto basement we see another series of extremely suspicious and inconsistent setups. In Shifting Sand Land, he is somehow able to get the talon star using a strategy only viable for visual runs. The amount of adjustment needed to long jump to the fly guy and twirl over to Klepto is simply too precise to be done consistently in a blindfolded run. That doesn’t stop this guy though. He’s able to do it first-try with no issues. In Hazy Maze Cave however, he reverts back to setups that might pass as blindfolded to try to further sell the idea that he cannot see. However the quote-unquote “setups” he is using make absolutely no sense. On the emergency exit star he seems to have created some kind of fake counting system involving more unnormalized and inconsistent movements. Compare this again to Nobori’s strat which uses normalized movements along with the game’s fixed camera option for even more consistent angles. Up to this point, the run has been extremely suspect at best. However, what happens in the second half absolutely destroys what little credibility it had in the first place. The last half of this run is so blatantly fake, that it makes the previous 20 minutes look completely legit by comparison. We now come to MIPS clip, in my opinion one of the most impressive sections of blindfolded 16-star. Successfully doing MIPS clip in a real blindfolded speedrun requires an extremely precise setup involving walking into a corner with the correct camera angle, and then repeatedly regrabbing mips to achieve the correct spacing on the door. This is one of the most difficult and precise sections in the entire run. In the castle basement, even the tiniest mis-tap to the left or right can mess up your camera entirely, breaking any setup you may have had. This runner however, throws all of that out the window. To clip through the basement door he basically just runs straight at it and ends up in the right spot, no setup needed. Remember that there are absolutely ZERO sound cues here. There is no way he can know how close or far away he is from this door with the movement he is using. The exact same is true for his clip through the 30 Star Door. Once again with absolutely no discernable audio cues and no real setup whatsoever, he somehow either knows exactly where he is on the door or just gets lucky enough to clip through after randomly guessing. He spends around thirty seconds here walking back and forth along the door, and somehow is able to find the exact right spot to make it through. Somehow it still gets worse after this. At this point he pretty much goes through the rest of the game without even thinking about what a real blindfolded run should look like. It really looks like he’s just given up on trying to sell the illusion any further. He approaches the submarine in Dire Dire Docks from a seemingly random angle and then tries to make it look like he knows where he is by jumping at it. The fact that he even says this is strange to me. There is literally nothing else in this level that you can slide off of besides the sub. So it doesn’t really make any sense to act as if he had to figure out what he was sliding on. He needed to make it look like he had some kind of cue to go off of and then did the absolute bare minimum to try to make it convincing. He then approaches the back of the sub as you would in a normal speedrun, but he ends up under the fin causing the camera to go in an awkward direction. It should be painfully obvious how bad this looks. A real blindfolded runner would be completely disoriented in this situation, and there is no consistent way you could realistically recover from this. Despite this he is somehow able to loop back around at the perfect angle and lands back on the fin, once again with absolutely zero sound cues or any setup. Nothing suspicious to see here. And then there’s fire sea. Right.... So after some more fake strats in Fire Sea, one fake bowser throw setup and some suspicious blj lineups, we finally come to what manages to be the worst part of the run by far. This run’s Bowser in the Sky is pure gold. It contains such a large amount of glaring flaws and inconsistencies that it’s insane that anyone could look at it and believe that the person playing could not actually see. He immediately starts the course with, again, completely unnormalized strats, moving through the course with small adjustments that have seemingly no explanation. He then commits what is possibly the most obvious and completely shameless move in the entire run. I was laughing my ass off when I first saw this. Not only does he somehow know exactly where the 1-up box is, but he also knows exactly what direction the 1-up will go in once it spawns, something completely determined by RNG. Then after chasing it on a moving platform for a completely arbitrary amount of time, he somehow knows exactly when and where to jump to the left. You don’t even need to know anything about Super Mario 64 or blindfolded speedrunning to understand that what just happened is completely bullshit. Immediately after skipping the first 1-up, he messes around on the first rotating elevator grabbing the next 1-up in the process. All clearly a calculated setup. After this, he once again makes an intentional mistake in order to make people think he is actually blindfolded. This is somehow the first and only time in this forty minute run that he accidentally runs off of a platform. Except immediately after falling off he somehow also knows to pull back to the right so he doesn’t fall all the way down. Only then does he comment that he knows he’s fallen down, again with absolutely no discernable sound cues. Following this, he traverses the wooden platforms and tries to go for yet another 1-up. He clearly saw this 1-up with his eyes but then remembered that he was supposed to be blindfolded. So he passes it off by acting like he knew there should be a 1-up there and goes back to grab it, again with absolutely no setup whatsoever. Watch now as he somehow knows exactly where he is on this spinning platform and knows exactly where the first pole is. Again, anyone who is actually blindfolded here would have probably just kept holding left and run off. However this guy is able to make a completely random amount of adjustments to make it onto the pole. He then makes his way to the next pole and grabs the red which he seems to be using as an audio cue. Then, immediately after jumping off of the pole that he KNOWS he was just on, he attempts to use two bob-ombs on the next platform to further determine his position. This is absolutely pointless as he had already just verified where he was. All he had to do here was hold forward and he would have reached the next wall. At this point, he once again reiterates the fact that this is only his third blindfolded run ever. In the last four minutes alone, there have been countless points of extreme suspicion. From the moment he enters the stage to the moment he enters the final pipe there is almost nothing that could be considered even remotely legitimate. However, the final Bowser throws that he does in the next four minutes are somehow EVEN WORSE. He begins by grabbing Bowser using the normal visual method. Running around Bowser with a tight enough circle to grab him is something that heavily relies on visual cues to properly do. This is why in a real blindfolded run, a setup is used for the first two grabs that involves luring Bowser to a bomb from the edge of the platform. For the final throw, a separate normalized setup is used. And yet after only one miss this person is able to grab Bowser in the normal way, no problem. Note that after this first mistake he does not miss a single tail grab for the rest of the fight. He then winds up for the first throw and misses. Once a throw is missed, Bowser will jump back onto the stage differently depending on where he fell off. There isn’t a very good way to account for this, so the only real backup is to run off and try again from the beginning. But this guy doesn’t do that. He instead goes for a regrab and gets it, again with no setup and no sound cues. He hits the throw on his second try, again using the normal visual method of throwing. During his second throw, he stops and talks for about thirty seconds to explain how he first learned to speedrun blindfolded. He is once again constantly talking during a section that should take an extreme amount of focus to execute. And yet he still figures out exactly when he needs to throw Bowser. After messing around for another minute, he then gets another re-grab, once again with no setup or any possible audio cues. During the final throw, he turns the camera not once, but twice to visually aim at two separate bombs. He then goes on yet another explanation about how he is able to do Bowser throws the way he is doing them. Obviously none of this makes sense in the first place, but he is directly contradicting himself here. Here, he says something vague about using where his thumb is on the stick to know where Bowser is, which already makes no sense on its own. Except he also mentioned in his first Bowser throw that he was using sound cues. This whole time, he’s just been giving fake technical explanations to try convince his viewers that he actually knows what he’s doing. Except he also misses this throw because he was too far away to ever hit the bomb in the first place, something he probably should have known whether he could actually see or not. Maybe he’s only pretending to be blindfolded so he can hide the fact that he sucks at bowser throws. He eventually does land the last throw, luckily avoiding all the fire on the ground and barely avoiding running off the edge. Nothing but pure skill and gamesense. After the run is over he is challenged multiple times by one of the only doubters in his chat. He is asked to verify that he can actually do blindfolded Bowser throws but refuses to do even the simplest test to prove it. Despite the glaring flaws in this person’s gameplay, he has somehow been able to convince all but a few of his viewers that his blindfolded runs are legit. Messages in his Twitch and Facebook Gaming chats show that most of the people watching him are completely convinced that what they’re seeing is real. The best I can possibly assume in this situation is that he may actually be doing some of these parts at least partially blindfolded, only peeking through the blindfold whenever he’s completely lost or doesn’t know what to do. It’s either that or the blindfold is just completely see-through and his only goal during the run is to make it look like he can’t actually see. I almost thought that this run was a joke but it is clear from the way he is talking about his gameplay that he is completely serious. I can also only speculate on this person’s motives for faking these runs, but my best guess is that he’s doing it for either the money or the views. It should be noted that during this run, the only way to communicate with the streamer was to donate bits to play a text-to-speech message on stream. Considering the run is fake this just seems like a scummy way for him to take money from people. But honestly for only 1 bit per message it doesn’t really seem that bad. If the amount was any higher I would probably have a much bigger problem with it, but whatever small amount of money he did collect is probably the least of our worries here. There hasn’t been a notable cheating incident in the Mario 64 community for a few years now, so I guess we were about due for another one. By faking this run, this person has not only made a complete mockery of blindfolded speedrunning but has also detracted from the hard work of people who have actually put in the insane amount of time needed to do this for real. This particular run ended with a 42 minute time, however he claims to have completed a faster time of 33:23, a time which would be considered 2nd place on the current leaderboards. When asked if he will submit this time, however, he claimed that he wants to take first place before he makes any submissions. I trust however, that the mods of the category are smart enough to see that any run he submits will be clearly invalid. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if he never even submits a run, because he probably knows that it would never get verified anyway. If you happen to see this guy on Twitch or anywhere else, please just don’t interact with him. I have intentionally left his name out of this video 1. Because I don’t wish for anyone to harass him over this and 2. Because I don’t believe that any cheater deserves attention past simply being exposed. I want to give a big shoutout to both Katun and Bubzia for their incredible help on this video. They helped to clarify a lot of questions I had about blindfolded SM64 and this video would not have been as comprehensive without their inputs. Also thanks to both them and Nobori for allowing me to use their footage for comparisons. I’ve left links to all of their streams and Youtube channels in the description. PLEASE check all three of them out if you want to see some legitimate blindfolded runs of SM64 as well as many other games. These people have genuinely put in the insane amount of time and focus needed to successfully complete these runs for real. They’re the ones who truly deserve it. If you please you can also subscribe to this channel and check me out over on Twitch. My runs aren’t quite as cool as these guys’ yet but we’ll still have some fun.
Blindfolded run: transparent blindfold category.
Super Well edited and produced! Can't believe people would believe this scam.
Insert "what zero pussy does to a mf" meme.
Hope he submits his run for it to get further dissected, he's got a good enough time for 2nd place in the blindfolded category!
Seriously though, faking a blindfolded run is just sad
It's crazy how angry this made me. Reminds me so much of badabun's SMB faked run.
Great video!
Gonna watch the video soon, but any mention of faked SM blindfolded speedrun immediately reminds me of SethBling's totally serious and very real speedrun, highly recommend if you haven't seen it yet
Pathetic
If this guy and his faked run gets a lot of attention now, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he tried to pass it off as an "experiment" to see how easy or difficult it would be to cheat a blindfolded run. Considering how obvious most of the stuff he did was, it almost looks like he's intentionally doing a poor job at cheating just to see how quickly he'll get caught. But since he hasn't even attempted to submit the run to any leaderboard it seems unlikely, and it would probably be a stupid experiment to do either way unless he's talked it through with a moderator or something beforehand.
The commentary of the cheater is kinda cringe. Like it makes no sense and he knows it, but he is trying to BS his way through it.