The History of Super Paper Mario Speedrunning [Any% World Record Progression]

today i'll tell you the story of the black sheep of the paper mario series [Music] the story of how speed owners push the game to its absolute limits of course many people attempted speed runs over the years [Music] starting from humble beginnings the community grew exponentially the reason that game had far more potential than anyone ever thought this legend came to be known as super paper mario which is our story for today this is the history of super faker mario's speedrunning let's start from the beginning [Applause] on april 9th 2007 super paper mario is released to north america super paper mario is an action rpg platformer developed by intelligent systems and the third title in the paper mario franchise spm focused itself more towards its platforming aspect as well as introducing new gameplay mechanics like the ability to flip between two dimensions this differed greatly from the previous paper mario titles which were more focused on stage battles and open world exploration due to this change in style the game had its fair share of critics nonetheless the game achieved a cult following and sold over 4 million copies making it the best selling paper mario game of all time sbm was critically acclaimed for having a fantastic storyline as fans loved the darker tones that the game took on this and other factors earned the hearts of many fans who played the game i'm sure that you've all heard of speedrunning by now the concept of beating a video game as fast as possible is certainly not a new one many people have taken up speedrunning as their own passion for a number of years now users constantly grind for personal bests and world records in their favorite speed games with today's ease of access of capture cards and streaming it's easier than ever for users to share their progress with the world in recent years speed running has grown to new heights with certain speed games receiving an increase in overall popularity with more and more people being introduced to the concepts of speedrunning some games are much more popular than others while other speed games don't receive a good deal of attention until years even decades after the release fortunately for spm it didn't take long at all for speedrunners to show interest in what the game had to offer since the game's release spm's speedrunning community formed together and found a number of new tricks glitches and major discoveries that dismantled the game in ways that had never been seen before at the end of it all over an hour was saved off the first world record and the community achieved a major milestone that was once thought to be impossible somebody could that oh my gosh i just did it i'm done i'm done with this game i'm done with this game my name is nmflash8 and alongside jcr and our many guest commentators we're here to take a deep dive into the history of super paper mario speedrunning to start this story let's take a look into where this all began speedrunning has been around for a very long time with many citing the mid 90s is holding some of the first ever documented speedruns for speedrunners back then it was very difficult to find a place to meet up and discuss their passion hobby with one another however there was a forum on the horizon that would become the earliest community forum dedicated solely to speedrunning and would lead to the birth of numerous communities that still exist to this day in 1998 a website was created by a user named radix which was used to house a playlist of early day quake speedruns the site later became known as speed demos archive as time passed sda later began to include speed games outside of quake which allowed for the site's rapid growth and expansion the site would hit its peak during the summer of 2005 citing its largest user base and highest amounts of activity in the site's lengthy history it's safe to say that this was the first time a large group of speed owners were all able to come together and share their interests with one another for super paper mario this peak couldn't have happened at a better time nintendo had just announced that the wii was set to release in november 2006 and as a result many sda users picked up the console on launch day with super paper mario releasing soon after this some sda users began to show interest in what a speedrun of the game would look like the first post about spm speedrunning came just a few days after the game's release these threads included curious users who would go on to play an important role in the game's very first speed run but for now they were patiently waiting for someone to attempt the run of this brand new game unfortunately they'd have to wait a very long time before anyone attempted an spm speedrun just kidding just 18 days after the game's initial release a user named mr guy posted a thread about super paper mario to the sda forums mr guy announced that he was beginning a segmented speedrun project for the game this meant that guy would record his run from one save block to another and would be able to retry a segment as many times as possible if needed this was beneficial for the first ever run since very little was known about the game at all at this time some users didn't even have access to the game due to the european and australian releases being delayed for 5 months nonetheless guy received a decent amount of support from sta users especially those who had previously shown interest in the game as mr guide continued to post new segments of his run others would chime in on what could be improved in each segment as well as providing their own tips and tricks that they learned over the course of nearly three months users worked with mr guy to help form spm's first ever speed run one thing that can definitely be said about this run is that it was a community driven goal at the end of the day it's mr guy's run but many different people came together to help with advice or tips to assure the first run was as fast as possible when mr guy first planned out the route he noticed quite a few areas in which he could save time solely on prior knowledge for example since a fireburst was needed to wake up peach before chapter 2 guy decided to pick one up in vestovis house another example was in 2-3 where knowing the code nami's vault before beginning the level meant it could be beaten in just around 3 minutes peroxide also pointed out that using the return pipe during the game's pre-chapter and emissions could save a lot of time on backtracking mr guy also received helpful feedback to improve on mistakes that he made in initial attempts satoru pointed out how it would be faster to skip the megastar animation in one 1-1 while amazing ampharos suggested the idea of using multi-bounces to help guy improve his ow chunks fight in 1 3. another example is seen in 2-2 where tjp mentions that guy could skip a large chunk of platforming in merley's mansion with the use of some neat 3d movement outside of prior knowledge time saves and help from other sda users mr guy also came up with a few tricks on his own to save more time in 1-4 guy was able to perform a one-cycle fractal fight by jumping on fractal's tail and landing on his head again mr guy saves up to a minute and a half by skipping a 40-second cutscene that occurs when falling off fractal then in 2-1 guy uses a paragoomba to jump on an unreachable platform which saves a decent amount of time since he skips a long cutscene as mr guide progressed throughout the run most segments became pretty self-explanatory since they all became very similar to completing the game casually guy did a great job planning out fast rats for early chapters but then played through the rest of the run with very few noteworthy time saves the main times they've left on the run consisted a mr guy using the bowser thudly combination on many bosses for amazing ampharos's recommendation both bowser and thudley have increased attack damage properties so this would allow guy to get through bosses much quicker finally on july 14 2007 mr guy submitted his segmented run to speed demos archive with a final time of 5 hours and 13 minutes that spanned across 45 segments the final time was recorded using the game's in-game file timer while this run may not stand out nowadays this was a really impressive feat at the time due to the fact the game had released so recently thus very little was known about the game overall at this point mr guys stood atop as the super paper mario world record holder and many who followed him from the start sent congratulations on his job well done however this wasn't the end for spm speedrunning in 2007. while mr guy was making posts about his run there was a user silently lurking who planned on doing their own segmented run of super paper mario for more on this let's throw it over to one of our many guest commentators jared's giants on october 8th 2007 a user named saru made a post on the same thread used for mr guy's runs announcing that he too planned on doing a segmented speed run for super paper mario saru was able to pick out certain flaws in mr guy's run that he felt could be improved for starters saru found that you can actually skip through text using both the one and two buttons while guy had only been using the two button with the ridiculous amount of text in this game this did go a long way to saving time during longer cut scenes saru also found more platforming and route improvements in comparison to guys run in 1-3 saru carried a squig to the end of a room got it to shoot a coconut then jumped off that coconut to get over a wall which skipped another cutscene for 2-1 a user named yoshifan gave saru the suggestion of jumping off of jabba's head to reach a set of doors quicker another user named king cttr laid out a faster 3-1 route for saru which was done by using peach's parasol to reach a pipe in mid-air however none of these improvements came close to the biggest change that saaru contributed to the run power leveling in 1-1 saru got a squig to continuously shoot coconuts thus allowing him to constantly level up after doing this for around 5 minutes saru was able to get his level up above 400 000 points meaning that for the rest of the run he will be able to finish all bosses much quicker than mr guy for example the o chunks fight in 1-3 took mr guy 20 hits while it only took saru three with this principle applied to most of the other bosses saru was easily able to gain time on guy's run new segments for the run would continue to be posted early into 2008 with saru posting his 4-3 segment on january 20th unfortunately this would be the very last post he'd ever make in regards to the run as saru became busy with other projects he had less time to work on his run thus the run was eventually shelved after saaru's last post little at all can be found about spm speedrunning during 2008-2010 the game's hype had slowly died off since its first release and other sga users took off to work on bigger and better projects while the game remained awfully quiet during this two-year span there were some new users who were about to shed a whole new light on super paper mario some of whom would quickly break the game in ways that were never seen before [Music] shortly after a huge recession in spm activity the game would quickly shoot back into the spotlight as it was being picked apart by an unfamiliar name on the task videos form the topic of tasks or tool-assisted speedrun would pop up and people would ask questions to see if anyone was working on a task for certain games or had any intentions on making one while it seemed like no one had enough interest for spm tasking a lot of questions arose such as were there any major skips at the time no one knew of anything large enough to be called a skip until a user by the name of the wario would make their way onto task videos and post about some of the most important finds in the game's history the warrior was playing through spm when they found some of the biggest tricks to be known right off the bat he showcased one of the more interesting yet infamous tricks in the game live stream jump lsg is a frame perfect double jump using the live stream death mechanic the wario found that at the tail end of the revive animation you could jump or dimension flip just one frame after the animation was over within that same post the wario posted about another glitch he found which allowed mario to gain infinite height when using the pixel thudly it's possible to cancel a ground pound in mid air after doing this there's one frame where the game detects that mario as standing on the ground which the player could press a and flip to the other dimension the game will then give you the option to jump and attempt the trick again by doing this process repeatedly you can technically gain an infinite amount of height and distance with this broken pixel the wario initially called this fine dimension hopping but later down the line the trick's name was changed to thudly jumping however both of these tricks would prove to be very tedious in the long run and became a struggle for any new runners after this point on the main issue with both tricks is that each input could only be performed on one frame while running on a 60fps game for thudly jumping it was possible to learn a rhythm to the trick since you can attempt it as many times as possible but for live stream jump there is only a very tiny visual cue and you only got one attempt at the trick the best bet for runners would be either be spending a long time studying the visual cue and learning the timing or just mashing a after dying and hoping for the best after these two game breaking glitches were laid out it was time to go over any potential uses for the two tricks for more on that let's hand it over to another one of our guest commentators gamer squiddy within the same post on taskvideos.org the wario provided new uses for doubly jumps and live stream jumps in an rta run for doubly jumping here were some potential uses that the wario theorized in 5-1 you could skip having to input the very long passcode and instead just thudly jump over the final wall to get to the star block this strategy saved about 16 seconds and was eventually implemented in runs and was titled block puzzle skip in 7-3 you can skip waking up peach collecting two apples and talking to cyrus the cloud by doing an insane amount of bubbly jumps up to the last stair in the level this trick took a large amount of consecutive dudley jumps but would save about two minutes if done very well this strategy was eventually implemented into runs and was named peach skip in 7-4 you can skip collecting all three orbs and activating the rainbow bridge by doing four to six dudley jumps over the gap to reach the bone chill fight while this trick didn't require as many dudley jumps as some other tricks it is easily the largest amount of time saved in the game up to this point saving over seven minutes from completing the level normally this trick was immediately implemented in runs and was called rainbow bridge skip in 8-2 it was possible to skip mimi's switch trap by doing one to two other jumps up to the room above which holds the key to progress through the level this trick was implemented in runs and called merlin's switch skip and it saved about a minute the wario also provided two potential skips using live stream jumps as well in 1-2 you could skip getting thoreau and activating the green bridge by performing a live stream jump over the final gap to get to the star block this strategy was estimated to save around two minutes and was called green bird skip but the trick was often just referred to as livestream jump because it was the only key use of a lifetime jump in runs in 2-1 it was possible to skip getting boomer by performing a livestream jump up to the blue switch that opened up the final door on the level the strategy was almost never attempted in runs since it was such a pain to go out of your way for another live stream and have to hit a second frame perfect trick in a run the wario would also make one final glitch discovery an infinite jump with bowser and carry called bowser bumps these are pretty difficult to pull off and there aren't any major uses for this glitch to this day overall with just one post to taskvideos.org the wario absolutely annihilated this game and opened a door of many opportunities to future runners after all of these newfound tricks a few new runners would enter the scene unbeknownst to any spm runners in the west a small community of japanese runners formed from november 2010 to june 2012 while much proof or video doesn't exist anymore for these runs we were able to find old leaderboard screenshots and other archived pages to give enough proof to say which runs were world records at a specific time unlike the runs prior to this point all runs from here on out were done in a single segment meaning they were done in one full recording from start to finish instead of being done from save block to save block according to a few form posts rikuma or rekvy held the world record with a time of four hours 37 minutes and 22 seconds on august 10th 2011. we'd love to give an in-depth analysis on what improvements were made in this run however none of rekhvi's sbm runs can be found anywhere the little bit of proof we have left was a picture of their splits on an ancient google doc that held some of the older run information a user named the ticken would do runs around this time as well while they never had the world record this is some of the earliest footage that still exists at a single segment rta run so we figured it'd be nice to have it on this list in early 2012 regfie would achieve another world record with a time of 4 hours 36 minutes and 38 seconds on january 26th but as mentioned the video no longer exists today moving back to the old sda forms around mid-2012 a runner by the name of deutsim began to take interest in super paper mario speedwriting while the old 2007 forums on sda had gone completely silent doison decided to make a new post in june 2012 under a thread about single segment spm runs he announced that he planned on doing a single segment speed run for spm and shared his route with users to try to retain feedback a few of doison's route improvements include using a shell shock on both bowser fights picking up the power plus to save time on leveling and picking up various items and catch cards to sell for coin routing this would allow him to open up the blue pipe from flip side to flopside which was an amazing optimization missed from previous runs doisum completed three runs in the span of four days and ended up with a time of four hours 52 minutes and 28 seconds while dwison never actually held the world record these runs were pretty significant as it's some of the earliest known recordings of the tricks like dudley jumping rainbow bridge skip as well as a few other time stamps found by the wario deutsim also helped in making numerous route improvements that runners would use for many years to come the wario and matured center also joined in on this thread and all three discussed time saves with one another some other notable finds from this time are ice turbo skip which is a trick in 1-3 done by taking damage from an ice turble so that its heightened position will be higher in the air allowing mario to jump on the turbo and reach the door saving around 12 to 15 seconds one last notable find was a faster version of the 3-2 blooper fight which could be done by flipping into 3d to lure the red tentacle out of the water then flipping back into 2d to get a quick hit with bowser after all of deutscem's runs and new discoveries rekvy would break the record for a third and final time getting a 4 hour 32 minute and 35 second run on january 30th 2013. as with all other rec v runs the only thing that exists still to this day is a screenshot of the run splits and nothing more unfortunately a lot of the information during this time is extremely dated broken and fuzzy as we leave 2013 the game is in a very interesting state barely any active runners a non-finalized route and some reminiscence of unimplemented tricks like the 1-2 livestream jump which could be feasible but very frustrating to deal with at a top level lucky for spm however a band of new users are about to enter the scene to form the speed game's first generation of runners as 2014 rolled around the spm community found itself in yet another activity slump following deutsin's departure the game had very few active runners so there's very little information to be found during this time while not much activity occurred on the speedrunning side of things there was an early showing of a new sub community that had yet to be seen in spm up to this point glitch hunters glitch hunters are a subsection of community that dedicate a majority of their time to finding bugs or glitches that may help improve a game's speedrun these glitch hunters may also use an emulator to slow down game speed and create specific button inputs for every single frame this is the same process used to create tool assisted speed runs or tasks for short in late 2013 a well-known tasker named malio began to task super paper mario malio had worked on a task for paper mario 1000 year door prior to this so he took a keen interest in spm due to both games being made on similar engines while malio never completed a task for this game he did find a glitch that would prove to be totally game breaking on january 22nd 2014 malia made a post on taskvideos.org about a small out-of-bounds clip that he ran into during the tasking process this find was deemed to be very specific since mario seemed to clip out of bounds purely based on awkward geometry since this particular out-of-bounds trick was discovered barely anyone has been able to recreate it to this day at the time however this led users to believe that there could potentially be more with this trick or that it could possibly lead to a consistent out-of-bounds clip with this information mally would continue researching but it wouldn't take long to make a new out of bounds discovery just five days later on january 27th malio made another post about a new glitch corner clipping he had discovered a method to clip through blocks and 2d with the use of mario by duck jumping at a corner and pressing 2 at the height of your jump you were able to clip best any corners of almost any block in the game this trick broke up in many new possible time saves in spm but most weren't found till a later point in time for now the community was left to only theorize potential uses of this trick as time moved on in 2014 malio became much more busy meaning work on the spm task came to a halt unfortunately the spm community would not see a full game task until many years after this point however more and more users began to gain interest in glitch hunting which led to some more discoveries in 2014. one of these users was dsy as dsy took notice of spm and began glitch hunting she would upload any interesting finds to youtube and compile them all into a playlist some of these videos include thundley jumps being used in specific levels coin routing tests or various oddities that can be found in spm however there is one video in particular that would lead to one of the largest rabbit holes in all of super paper mario history the peach intermission cutscene sequence break for more on this let's toss it over to one of our special guest commentators sacred ghost the peach intermission cut scene at blex castle is home to one of the most perplexing potential sequence breaks in all of speedrunning after beating chapter 1-4 there is a few short cutscenes that play before being transported back to flipside one of these cutscenes gives us control of peach for the first time and we must navigate the halls of blech's castle and attempt to escape while it may not be apparent at this early stage of the game we are actually traveling through the same corridors that are present in chapter 8-1 in fact it's due to the 8-1 map being loaded during the pre-chapter 2 cutscene that makes this sequence break an actual possibility in the very first room that you responded there is a tall ledge on the right side of the door that cannot normally be reached at this point by using moon jump hacks with peach to reach the top of the ledge we will find that the pipe is still loaded from the 8-1 level by entering we are still taken to the same room that contains the key by collecting this key and exiting out the same pipe we will successfully trick the game into thinking that we are in 8-1 while we're actually only progressing just through chapter one once you gain control of peach during the intermission your sequence value is set at 55. when you pick up the key the game doesn't care at what point of the game you are its only instruction is to give you the key and set your sequence value all the way up to 361. big jumps and numbers like these are what are known as sequence breaks while this is an incredible achievement in itself there is still a lot more that needs to be worked out before we are able to beat the game in this state for starters there is currently no way to make it on top of the ledge with legitimate means during the cut scene the game locks us out of the menu meaning we can't use items pixels or characters if we figured out a way to make it on the sledge only using peach we would actually be able to regain our menu ability by traversing to the nearest safe block then resetting the file but even so from this point we are stuck in an extremely awkward position while we are currently playing as peach the only character we can switch to is mario since we technically haven't unlocked peach yet meaning we can't switch back to peach once you switch to mario all previous lock doors are unlocked however all pixel chests are open and all story related events are set to complete even though you've never interacted with them in chapter 8 the minimum required party members that we need are bowser for the fire puzzle in 8-1 fleet for the dimension chase in 8-3 and tippy to reveal a door in 8-4 unfortunately due to this restrictive game state it is currently impossible to obtain any of these party members one final interesting note is that there are actually two points in this state where we can perform a second sequence break sequencing ourselves backwards in the game the first is in 2-1 with a key and a chest which is pretty much pointless because not only is it slower from the normal route you won't even have peach too it is also possible to sequence back to 3-4 by defeating francis but it has not been done without the use of hacks yet while this very interesting sequence break would need some major breakthroughs to be applied to any percent just finding a way to jump on the ledge would prove to save time for other spm categories if we were able to find a way to beat the game with this sequence break the speed record would go from being 4 hours long to being around only an hour long spm's glitch hunting community remained active throughout 2014 constantly working to discover new tricks and glitches that had yet to be found on the other end of the spectrum the speedrunning side was completely dormant at this time barely any runs were recorded in 2014 and no progress was made to the world record outside of another 432 achieved in late 2013 but as the year came to a close there is a new runner on the rise who is about to quickly take the game by storm on november 1st 2014 a user named gamerob decided to run super paper mario any percent gamerob held the world record in the thousand year door at this time and was intrigued by some of the interesting strats that spm had to offer in game rob's first ever completed attempt he got a 439-14 proving that he was capable of getting a great time and sure enough six days later game rob would improve the record to a 4 30 57 game rob made improvements to the old record by refining his movement and improving the route while also utilizing thudly jumps to help save a significant amount of time in levels such as 3 3 and 7 4. in this record game rob also used a new level grind method in 5-2 to increase his hp and attack power significantly which would help defeat late game bosses much quicker than before as gamerob did runs all throughout the month of november he continued to improve in every major aspect of the game however these runs were unable to convert into a new record wanting to push the time down game rob began to use spm's most infamous trick in his runs livestream jump as previously mentioned in the video livestream jumps were found in 2011 and along with this was the discovery of the one-two green bridge skip to recap the trick the player must first go to hauseit's shop and buy live stream for 50 coins after this flip into 3d and walk to the empty gap just before the star block the player must have their health drained to 1 hp and with a well-timed jump die midair in the center of the gap after this they must successfully perform a live stream jump by pressing either a or 2 on the correct frame if all is done correctly they'll successfully complete green bridge skip in theory this trick doesn't sound too bad since it occurs just 14 minutes into the run however live stream jump would prove to be the most reset heavy point in super paper mario's history while the trick saved two minutes it could only be attempted once if you missed the one frame there would be no point to completing the level normally since you lost so much time buying the livestream this meant the only option after failing the trick was to reset and start a new run this quickly became a large deterrent for running the game many runners would be frustrated at having to play the first 14 minutes over and over again just to likely miss a one frame trick and repeat the process again on the flip side of that a two minute time save was huge for the run at this time since the strats used were very limited and could only be pushed so far once game rom implemented livestream jump into his route many runs would reset on the trick causing streams to become a grind just to get it a 1-2 however on november 12th the grind would finally begin to pay off after game rob improved the record to a 4-26-42 after getting past livestream jump game rob carried the run into chapter 7 and proceeded to save two and a half minutes in eight splits this just went to show how much time save was still present in chapter seven and eight in only 12 days of doing runs gamerob was able to improve the world record by over nine minutes at this point game rob had far and away established himself as the best spm player to date but of course he wasn't done yet over the next month game rob would grind spm on and off in hopes of getting another run while his record was fantastic during the final stretch there was ample time saved during the first six chapters of the run the hardest part as per usual was getting past one two game rob described this time being a constant grind fest having to repeat prologue over and over again until hitting a one frame jump was very tedious and sometimes it was too much to put up with but alas he continued attempts up to december 14th 2014 when this happened [Music] [Music] [Music] this run wasn't perfect but i am really really happy with it i want the 421 some of this but i'm not going to get it because i'm probably not going to do any more run to this game i think i'm done with this with this run i might come back eventually blue but this game is like once you start doing live stream jump it becomes a huge grind at least that was my experience i really didn't enjoy resetting a live stream jump a bunch it made the run a lot less fun for me so i'm really happy that i just got it over with with that final run game rob improved the record by a total of 11 minutes during his month and a half tenure with the game staying true to his word in the recording this would be the last spm run that he'd attempt for a very long time even with his short tenure gamerod proved to have a lasting effect on spm as his final record would be one of the longest standing any percent records in the game's history it would take runners a very long time to match the skill level that gamerob was at but unlike prior instances in the game's history something was different this time around game rob was soon to have competition before that a few notable things occurred in early 2015. over in the glitch hunting community dsy continued to post new spm videos to her playlist and made some new interesting finds one of these was a midair 3d jump using thoreau by holding an enemy and jumping just before the 3d meter runs out mario will take damage in midair and will quickly be able to jump off the enemy this trick can be used to skip a few gaps or reach high places but an enemy must be present in the room for the trick to work the last few videos showcased things like peach skip bowser bumps and the a2 merlin switch skip while june 2015 marked the end of the playlist it would be constantly looked into by newer runners and community members to see many of the weird glitches that the game had to offer another thing that happened in 2015 was the rise of super paper mario's speedrun.com page the page was added sometime in 2014 but wasn't actively used until game rob's runs from this point on speedrun.com spm will become the home of every runner's times rather than runs being placed in a google document with the site's introduction to the community it quickly became a spot for runners to talk with one another and share strategies to help newer runners that were interested in taking on any percent and about halfway through 2015 two brand new challengers would appear on june 2nd a new runner named i'm dead would submit his first ever any percent run with a final time of 509 39 similar to game rob deb was the thousand-year door any percent world record holder at the time of joining spm unlike game rom however dead would stick around in the spm community for years to come all throughout the month of june dead would pb on four separate occasions finishing off the month with a 4 40. dead was improving at a steady rate and continued to do runs all throughout the summer however for the first time in this game's history he wasn't the only person actively running the game on july 24th another new runner named mirror a would submit his first any percent run to speedrun.com at a time of 451.19 mirror had played mario kart ds and paper mario 64 before this but had practiced spm for a while before submitting runs just like dead mirror did consistent runs for about a month until improving his time till 4 35 by the end of august with summer coming to a close both mirror and dead would become very busy and would only be able to stream attempts every now and then however something interesting was developing during this time during the summer a new app called discord was released to the public this app was designed as a new platform specifically for gamers to communicate with one another in august a discord server was created for all paper mario speed games and some users began posting in the spm channel people who had previously taken interest in spm came together to show their love and support for the forgotten paper mario game while the feeling of community wasn't quite there yet there was enough interest in the game and the right number of runners to classify this era as the first generation of spm runners with that being said the story of the first generation doesn't end here and the new year would bring many new changes to super paper mario as the new year of 2016 kicked off new improvements were set to be made in spm very soon dead and mirror both got back to actively doing attempts during the month of january and would consistently stream multiple nights a week dead was the first to pv getting a 433-38 on january 14th which improved his time by over seven minutes shortly after this mirror would go on to get a 4-33-22 on january 31st this would become a common pattern for mirror and dead where both runners would pv in a similar time frame and have times that were very close to one another as both continued to improve at the game they would begin to form a friendly rivalry since both were the only two active runners streaming spm at this time as a few months passed mirror pv'ed on three separate occasions lowering his time down to a 425 in late april dead would also improve his time again in may achieving a 4 2804 at this point both runners were extremely close to passing game rob's old time which had stood strong for around a year and a half now no major skips were added to the run rather both mirror and dead made slight improvements and refined their movement in each level to match game rob's skill the summer of 2016 was rapidly approaching and a large number of people would actively tune in to i'm deads and mirror streams in hopes of being there for the record this wasn't a question of if they'd beat the record but rather who would beat the record first luckily viewers didn't have to wait long to find their answer [Music] i'm dead would take the world record with a final time of 424 34 just barely beating game rob by only six seconds the final three chapters of the run were some of dead's best splits and of course he ended off the run with an insane super dimension fight with that gamerob had finally been dethroned after holding the world record for 540 days and dead received congratulations from the entire paper mario discord while all this was happening mirror continued to do attempts in hopes of beating dead's new time des run wasn't perfect as there's a decent amount of time save all throughout the mid game mirror continued runs throughout the summer and over the next month would either have runs not get past lsj or die in late game but finally on july 11th mirror would finally get the run he was looking for mirror would set his first ever spm record at 4 24 18 beating out dead's time by just 16 seconds while mirror had some very refined gameplay in this run he actually wasn't too satisfied with it and pointed out that there is still ample amount of time to save especially in chapter 8. regardless mirror and dead had both finally claimed records after a year of their hard work their viewers were very satisfied to see both runners be rewarded for their efforts after all this time while dead would enter a hiatus mir continued to do attempts over the next two months however during these two months mirror would discover something that would change the game for the years to come sometime in early 2016 nintendo announced new eshop titles coming to the wii u which would now include certain wii games it was eventually announced that one of these games happened to be super paper mario this was huge for the speedrun since it meant you can now play a digital copy of the game rather than playing on a disc digital copies of games have been known to have faster loading times as compared to playing on disc so mirror took it upon himself to run tests with the new digital version after making some calculations mirror found that the wii u version could potentially save up to a minute and a half on loads versus playing on disk it's important to keep in mind that the last two world records at this point were improvements by only a few seconds so an entire minute and a half would go a long way to saving time for the run right after this discovery mirror began doing runs with the wii u vc copy of the game it was immediately apparent that it saved time since mirror golden a vast number of splits all across his attempts just a few weeks into wii u attempts mirror was able to improve the record to a 423 40. with the help of wii u loads mirror could afford to lose time in certain areas since there was a huge advantage on the version that he was playing on after mirror's last run in september the record would stand still going into 2017. these past two and a half years of runs from game rob mirror dead and many other runners were some of the first glimpses of competition in the game and as 2016 came to a close more and more runners began popping up to do their own 80 attempts this trend would continue into the next year where we'd witness these runners come together and lay out the foundations of a true community [Music] as we enter 2017 a mirage of new runners are about to enter the scene while dead and mirror went on an extended hiatus dead would eventually return to runs while mira would not return to any percent at all mir and dead's spm streams in 2016 actually had a significant impact on the game's future runners at this time there were no any percent video tutorials available so knowledge of running the game was either through the spread of older documents that were floating around or by watching mirror and dead play the game due to this certain viewers that frequented mirror and dead streams would actually go on to do runs of their own leading to a significant increase in runs from 2016 to 2017. an interesting example is when a viewer named jcr caught wind of dead and mirror streams and became interested in running super paper mario jcr was able to gather a few runners from the luigi's mansion speedrunning community to do a semi-blind any percent race together the runners included were jcr jared's giants hdlax glitch phd and a2 rhombus while jcr was the only person to end up completing their run this was one of the earliest sightings of a community organized race and certainly wouldn't be the last about halfway through 2017 dead would eventually return to spm fortunately he was able to equip himself with the wii u version of super paper mario to save time on loads and was ready to start improving on mirror's world record after getting back to attempts in the middle of july dead achieved a new world record of 4 hours 23 minutes and 31 seconds improving on mirror's world record by nine seconds this was a decent run by dead standards with a very solid early game but when it came to thudly jumps dead would lose quite a bit of time similar to mirror he would get tons of new best splits due to the faster loads on wii u dead felt the record could be improved by a lot so much so that he felt he was inching closer and closer to the next big milestone a sub for 20. over the next three days dead would continue attempts and on july 28th dead would break through big time [Music] finally gonna blaze it that is a nice little pb despite everything that happened prior to chapter 7 which was just mediocre well some of it was like some of it was worse than other parts of it but i would say this run was mediocre until chapter seven while dad wasn't super thrilled with his little pb he demolished the record by over three whole minutes achieving a time of 4 hours 20 minutes and 27 seconds this wasn't the sub 420 he had hoped for but the run still had an amazing showcase of skill highlighted by a really good peach skip in 7-3 after this run the summer of 2017 would quickly come to a close and dead would enter another hiatus for the rest of the year while not much happened in 2017 there was one major showcase that took place in april which would put super paper mario's potential on full display for more on this let's throw it over to another one of our guest commentators hd lacks on april 8th 2017 seemingly out of nowhere a super paper mario test was released by a japanese taser named karage hirage had previously attempted to make an spm task in 2015 but the project was scrapped after runners found that many strats and optimizations were missing to avoid this problem during the second task herrage kept in active communication with mir who followed the route to make sure it was as fast as possible after the task's completion the final time came in at an incredible 3 43 42 seeing spm completed this fast was astonishing since the task was over 40 minutes faster than the current world record there's a lot to mention about this task to start it had a very helpful display that would show the viewers exactly what was going on during this run of course movement was basically flawless and menu navigation was perfect this run also would manipulate rng or the random number generator to make the game give us whatever items were desired there were also a lot of tricks that runners wouldn't attempt in their runs whether they were just too difficult or too rng heavy some of these tricks included things like ladder jumps boomer skip using the fast flower in 3-3 carry skip faster point grinding 5-4 water switch skip with a live shroom jump longer peach skip and bowser bumps in 5-4 and 8-1 alongside this basically every boss fight in the game would be insanely optimized which included the use of many rng-based item drops we could honestly spend a few hours and talk about how amazing this task was especially for its time runners to this day still look to the task for new routing tips and tricks even though it did miss a few tricks such as merlin cutscene skip this is still the most up-to-date task for any percent to this day early into 2018 a new runner named nmflash8 would complete his first run of the game with a time of 6 hours 22 minutes and 25 seconds he would pause and play mira's old world record and follow each section level by level flash enjoyed the run so much that he set up stream and started recording an official run the next day and beat his old previous run by over an hour flash began streaming daily and would pb almost every other day for the first month until he ended up with a time of 4 hours 34 minutes and 53 seconds flash quickly fell in love with speedrunning and would catch the attention of a lot of the active paper mario community members in his daily any percent attempts flash would soon find one of his new best friends in speedrunning slopdog after watching flash run the game for a while slop would try running the game himself the two would put up a friendly rivalry seeing who could beat certain milestones flash first slop would soon grow restless when it came to any percent but were excited about their newfound love for super paper mario speedrunning slop would move on to pit percent another shorter category where you beat the flip side pit of a hundred trials as fast as possible while flash would move on to 100 sure enough slop would quickly get the pit percent world record yes i think we got it 1 35 20 final time and flash would get the 100 world record soon after [Music] yes world record during flash's run he would stumble upon an exciting brand new time save [Music] somebody could that oh my gosh i just did it flash accidentally found water switch skip which was done by clipping through the top of a ledge in 3d by taking damage the trick was previously showcased in a task made the year before by using a live stream jump but with this new method it would prove to be viable in runs this was really exciting for runners it was the first time since 2011 where a glitch found could save time in an any percent run the other runners quickly searched for other spots with water where this would be useful however it seemed like this would be the only application for this new tech that was found shortly after this discovery runners would find a consistent setup that would save around 45 seconds the only issue is if you did this trick to get to the door you would have to do the trick a second time to get back after all this excitement flash was hoping more people would start learning how to speedrun super paper mario the largest deterrent for new runners was the lack of a solidified tutorial new runners would have to teach themselves from scratch not really knowing why or how things work just blindly following what the world record holders were doing one night flash would record himself doing an any percent run and explain each step and why it was done this was super useful for new runners and even old runners that had previously competed for world record with the video guides finally serving as a solidified public tutorial some familiar faces would soon return to the scene one of them being jcr after he saw the new video guides he would seriously pick up the game again at this point more than 6 people would run the game at one time whereas before only the ones going for world record would complete more than one run at a time this was the first time in super paper mario's history where the game would have its own community during this time a lot of the runners would come together and do weekly races every week the same four runners slopdop dead jcr and flash would always show up to do a weekly any percent race they would eventually bring in some new runners as well during all this excitement a brand new discovery was on the horizon during mid 2018 runners found a new way to region free their consoles allowing them to use the japanese virtual console on their wii u this was really exciting to all of the runners due to the amount of time saved the japanese version was expected to save let's quickly talk about version differences at this point most of the runners were running on their english wii u virtual consoles which was the fastest version due to the time save in loading zones however by playing on the japanese version they could have faster text and even faster loading zones so in order from slowest to fastest we have english disk japanese disk which had faster text english virtual console which had faster loading zones and japanese virtual console which had faster load zones and faster text and featured a few glitches that were patched in the english virtual console when runners found out about this new version they were excited due to the amount of time saved they would have while running the game with no repercussions whatsoever that's it yeah for some reason the japanese wii u virtual console has a small chance of crashing virtually after every load zone it's still widely unknown why but it's currently assumed to be a pre-caching error in other words when you enter a room the game will load the next rooms as well during this process there's a slight chance that the game will crash for some reason in other words at this point if you want to play the fastest version of the game you'd also have to play the crash lottery where even runs on world record pace aren't safe until you've made it to the credits while runs of super paper mario at a top level became scary dead was ready to take on the challenge with a new trick saving around 45 seconds and a new version saving a bit more time this was his chance to push his world record time even further however he wasn't alone this time around miro was gone but other new runners were improving rapidly and coming to take dead's world record with flash slop and jcr competing for his top time dead was ready to start putting in runs dead also had a few tricks up his sleeve at this point no one would dare attempt boomer skip because it was already hard enough getting a run past livestream jump so doing two live stream jumps in one run would be insanity his strategy was simple if he got a run past live stream jump that he wasn't happy with he would grab a second life stream found in 1-4 then when he got to 2-1 he would attempt boomer skip boomer skip was estimated to save around a minute according to a time comparison made by flash after grinding many attempts this happened for the first and last time in super paper mario history live stream jump boomer skip was done in a run dead went from 30 seconds behind to 20 seconds ahead but unfortunately this run would end up crashing in pre-chapter 3 and the video is long gone fortunately for us though we do have the clip to see his amazing reaction as discouraging as this was dead couldn't be stopped a few days later dead was on really good pace on a solid attempt but then this happened oh no i had global hockeys on i just hit reset on my sports what do i do dead accidentally reset his timer during the fractal fight due to global hotkeys while this was a very stressful moment as he had a very solid early game this wasn't going to stop dead from finishing this run fortunately with his help from twitch chat a user named how to cantaloupe directed him on how to get an accurate timer back on screen [Music] with his timer back on track dead had a run on faster pace than his previous boomer skip run this was exactly what dead was waiting for [Music] with this run dead broke his record with a time of 4 hours 19 minutes and 25 seconds getting the sub 420 he was waiting for after this run dead officially stepped away from super paper mario after achieving one of the biggest goals in the game's history and the first 10 minute barrier break since 2014 dead would pop up in the community every now and then but this was his last ever any percent pb over the past three years dead solidified himself as one of the best spm runners of all time and his departure marked the end of the first generation of runners with the first generation at its end the newer band of runners were ready to take the super paper mario community to new heights with tons of achievements being made in 2018 the community was ready for more while super paper mario's community was small it was still community flash eventually stepped up to be a super mod on the speedrun.com webpage and would lead the small group he would keep doing daily runs or routing streams while promoting the game's speed run wherever he could the small community was growing but still needed a little more room as brought up before super paper mario was a part of a sub section in the paper mario speedrunning discord this was where the majority of the communication occurred between runners while it was nice having help from the other paper mario runners there wasn't much space to branch out into other topics related to spm the other communities paper mario 64 and the thousand-year door had already branched off to new discord servers flash figured it might be a good time to give super paper mario the chance to grow on august 17 2018 flash suggested the idea that super paper mario should make its own discord server as well while there was a lot of mixed feelings toward this everyone was generally okay with the new discord a lot of concern was brought up that super paper mario wasn't active enough for its own discord server and if it did have its own server there was a high chance that most of the other runners from the other paper mario games wouldn't join it was a risk the group of runners were ready to take the next day flash would release the new super paper mario speedrunning server with the help of his friend hydro the two of them set up an amazing new server with many more channels where the runners could post discoveries and chat about running the game and discuss new strats with the release of the new discord all of the active runners would frequently join in calls and start glitch hunting sessions which would become a major tradition for the community during these sessions glitch hunters found all kinds of new things towards the beginning a lot of these tricks weren't exactly useful for runs but were still amazing nonetheless for example hydro found flopside early the trick wasn't exactly useful in any percent since there wasn't anything you could do in flopside but it was still really cool to see jcr also made an awesome find with well whatever you want to call this what what's going on dude you gonna tell me where is he going with all of these new changes super paper mario is stepping up and the cherry on top would be the new final time previously timing stopped when the d on the end stopped spinning this was a little awkward so it was soon changed to when may we meet again and another time in place fades to black right before the credits the majority of the runners widely approved of this because then they would be able to enjoy the credits and see their final time at the same time depending on the region this would take around 3 minutes and 31 seconds off of every run making the current world record go from 4 hours 17 minutes and 1 second into a run of 4 hours 13 minutes and 26 seconds flash would need a lot of help with the task of re-timing all of the leaderboard times and would add jcr as a leaderboard mod to assist earlier that year on january 17th 2019 flash would get his first pb in 5 months jcr pointed out that he was 5 seconds ahead of world record in pre-chapter 5. after this moment flash decided that he was ready to grind for world record over the past year he had gotten the 100 world record and second place in pit percent he had made a ton of improvements on the route such as cutting down on items and shopping and studying boss fights to use faster and more consistent strategies flash was ready for the grind little did he know how long it was going to take him after flash's last pb he immediately started pushing for world record what he didn't anticipate was how long it was going to take him there were multiple runs where flash was on world record pace but would end up crashing or yes even losing power some days flash wouldn't even be able to get a run past livestream jump and would spend up to four hours grinding livestream gym attempts just hoping to get past 1-2 after three months of grinding runs flash would inch closer and closer to the record getting a pb of 4 hours 14 minutes and 26 seconds which put him just a minute behind the record gg guys g freaking g 4 14 26 oh my gosh oh finally oh my gosh dude exactly one minute behind world record i remember castle when i first started running this game like i was so pumped about this game when i got my first pb i walked up to my dad i was like i'm gonna take world record i don't know how long it's gonna take i don't know how hard it's gonna be but i'm gonna have world record one day that being said he knew what he had signed up for and he was ready to claim his world record while this seemed like a very difficult time to run super paper mario with a crash lottery a frame perfect entry trick and double inputs ruining runs that's exactly why people stuck around super paper mario is getting harder and harder to run so seeing someone push for world record was exciting and because flash's community was growing so did super paper mario flash would constantly plug the discord and encourage new runners to join the community it was one of those exciting moments where at any point a new record could happen the main question was when were the stars going to align at one point flash finished a four hour stream with 60 viewers not once getting past 1-2 he promised them that later that night he would do more attempts that he just needed a small break later that night flash was calm and ready he finally got a run going and was off to a good start once he got to chapter eight however that's when everything changed [Music] oh no [Music] no no no [Music] oh my gosh you are not going to believe this oh good oh my gosh after a brief scare where he thought he would have to refight francis by selecting the wrong menu he would need what's called a one cycle mimi fight the 8-2 mimi fight has a spinning blade animation that takes up a lot of time however you could stun lock mimi if you timed your hits perfectly this would cancel the long animation and save around 45 seconds let's go guys oh my gosh let's freaking go dude this good world record flash nailed the fight and golden by 45 seconds being the first time he's been able to pull this off and a run he was 30 seconds ahead of world record but unfortunately he used his mighty tonic a damage boosting item earlier in the run due to double inputs and ended up losing a bit of time in the 8-3 boss this brought him down to only 8 seconds ahead of world record entering the last segment before the final boss fights [Music] guys this is it [Music] let's go let's freaking go [Music] let's freaking go [Music] oh my gosh i did it i did it [Music] maybe we meet again another time and another place world record record with that flash was done with any percent he finished the stream with over 150 viewers pumped for the brand new any percent world record thousands of new users would see his world record on reddit and youtube and some decided to try out super paper mario for themselves seeing flash grind for this world record was one of the most exciting moments in super paper mario history with this new attention to the game the community was about to see a boatload of new active users in the discord flash had given the community the spark it needed and a home to grow in he would stick around for a while but soon passed the torch on to jcr to lead the group of new followers into a whole new chapter for super paper mario the next generation of super paper mario runners were already starting to take form after flash's record super paper mario saw a massive spike of activity as many new users joined the discord to learn the speedrun help out with glitching or just to stay updated with all the game had to offer the recent activity from established runners alongside flash finally getting his first record was enough to skyrocket spm to a new height that had never been seen before a very high number of new runners were introduced during this time period many of whom would go on to make a significant impact in its game's permanent history this was the launch of by far the most competitive exciting and chaotic time in spm history this is the next generation oh and uh you're gonna want to buckle up for this one because this game is about to get very very fast [Music] with higher activity counts than ever before the spm discord was bound to see some new breakthroughs in the near future at this point in time there have been relatively no major time saves added to the run with the last edition being water switch skin since so much time had passed since the last major find some users began searching and surprisingly it wouldn't take long before a new huge discovery was made an spm runner known as mohawk began working on multiple different theories directly after flash's record one of these theories was boomer skip some of you may be thinking hasn't boomer skip already been discovered correct boomerskip's been around since 2011 since the wario's early findings however this early method was almost never attempted in runs since it required a second live stream jump and specifically needed a jump for the trick to work rather than a dimension flip however mohawk began looking for any methods to potentially do boomer skip without using a live stream on may 3rd mohawk proposed a video to the spm discord showcasing a new boomer skip method for the first time this new method consisted of tossing a shell shock up on a ledge at a precise point so that it's able to hit the switch above many community members were stunned by this achievement due to it being the first major skip found in a very long time as runners began testing the trick for themselves they found that the trick was surprisingly manageable for runs i became the first person to perform the trick on console verifying its use in future runs overall the new trick saved around a minute and 15 seconds which was huge for the run at this time with this skip the community was even closer to a goal that was previously thought to be a long shot the sub 410 with flash's record being a low 413 just a little over three minutes needed to be saved for a sub 410 time the crazy part about this is that not even a full year had passed since einded broke the previous 10 minute barrier and the community was already looking towards a potential sub 410 in the near future not only that but some members went even further wondering if an entire hour threshold could be broken if a sub 4 hour run was possible since many new fines would need to occur for this to happen a sub 4 was deemed to be impossible with the current strategies available and the community chose to focus on breaking the next 10 minute barrier instead during this mohawk continued his research on other possible theories for potential time saves since mohawk had just discovered a method to do boomer skip without a live stream he began working on removing the final live stream jump left in the run if successful this would remove the final grind spot of the run and make the speed run even more accessible however this livestream removal would prove to be the toughest of its kind for more on this let's toss it over to another community commentator zaclink99 with many new runners trying to push for the sub 410 barrier the one-two livestream jump had become the most difficult and irritating part of grinding runs numerous individuals had ideas of skipping the green bridge using other methods but none ended up working at the time the first main idea of skipping the green bridge was looked into by mohawk on april 17th by using a shell shock in hopes of doing a shell jump over the entire green bridge unfortunately mario doesn't bounce off of shell shots as high as people had hoped and it seemed gbs was still only possible with a livestream jump only 10 days later mohawk had a new theory using the background of the room by clipping out a bounce from inside of the shop mohawk figured out that you could clip out into the background that you used to get to green's house but there was still no way of getting to the star block just two weeks later on may 7 2019 something big happened mohawk found that with an extremely precise z coordinate you can climb up a vertical plane out of bounds and jump over the entire green bridge it was unknown why this plane even existed now it was possible to skip the green break without an illustrator for tool-assisted speedruns the community was freaking out over the discovery hoping that lsj was no longer later that day many tried it in rta without a setup but didn't even come close and was quickly deemed not viable for rta speedruns with task gbs being the last of mohawk's fines for now the community shifted its focus back towards the run itself with boomer skip implemented into runs many runners started doing consistent attempts to push for a pb with the new trick flash was unable to do runs at this time so other runners began to step in during the month of may new and old runners began doing attempts in hopes of improving their pbs some of these runners included zaclink99 castle i'm dead and myself zach and castle were newer runners who were looking to improve their times to get a sub 430. on the flip side dead and i were longer tenure runners looking to get a really good time or in dead's case potentially even get the record back while dead's attempts never proved successful i was able to get my first sub 420 run on may 21st with this pbe i secured fourth place on the leaderboard and in doing so created an interesting occurrence all four runners that did weekly races together the year prior now held the top four spots and all of them had a sub 420. this occurrence was a great showcase of the improvements made from all runners since the weekly races with all the new activity in spm there is bound to be significant improvements made to the record very soon the question simply came down to a matter of who and when however our answer came with a brand new runner who would go on to help change the way spm was viewed in a larger spectrum around mid-april 2019 a new runner named yoshizilla began learning super paper mario any percent just like i'm dead and game rob in the past yoshi was the thousand year door world record holder at the time of learning spm yoshi got the help of active runners such as flash and slopdop to aid in learning the game and was quickly able to finish his first few runs after starting out with a 509 33 yoshi proved at an extremely rapid rate and got a 4 26 11 in his third ever pb yoshi continued doing runs during the summer and within no time was able to pick up on the finer bits of movement used by top runners on may 28th yoshi got a four 1707 which was third place on the leaderboard within a month of running the game the grind never stopped over the next two months and sure enough yoshi was once again able to improve his time to a 4 13 49 on june 19th just around 40 seconds behind flash's record the rapid improvement scene from yoshi in this time span was something only rivaled by game rob's runs in 2014 so it's safe to say that many community members were caught by surprise to see yoshi actively competing for record when it hadn't even been two months since flash's 4 1303 another highly important thing to mention here is that up to this point yoshi had yet to even attempt lsj in a run with the addition of boomer skip to the route doing the no lsj route had become slightly faster than before this meant that newer runners technically didn't have to do lsj yet since flash's record didn't include boomer skip keeping with this trend yoshi continued to do no lsg attempts and was very happy in doing so since it was extremely easy to get runs out of the first chapter many viewers constantly tuned into yoshi's streams in hopes of seeing a new record and sure enough this happened [Music] [Music] yoshi had achieved the first ever 412 in spm all within two months of running the game yoshi's record showcased a high skill level and improved his movement in ways that hadn't been done before a sub 410 was a real possibility now and many community members were anxious to see if it would happen that being said yoshi was content with his record and began to pursue other plans lucky for the spm community there were a large bundle of runners on the rise who were about to give spm its most intense competition ever after yoshi's new record a handful of runners began to make significant improvements to their times out of these new runners two began to stand out from the rest zach link 99 and castle sr both these runners have been running the game for a few months at this point and both had improved their time significantly within the last few months at the time of yoshi's record zack had a 4 25 59 and castle had a 4 23 16. on august 4th castle go to 4-17-22 improving his time by nearly 6 minutes zach pv by just a minute on august 18th then went on to get a 417 of his own on august 27th which would miss castle's time by two seconds after this castle would grind attempts for the next two days and get two separate 415s ending off the month of august with a 4 1509 with both runners setting a combined five personal bests in the month of august they were quickly improving to a top level play as they were now in the top six spots on the leaderboard even with both runners continuously improving nobody could have predicted what happened in september 2019 on just the first day into september castle got his first ever 412 and now held second place on the leaderboard this run had a strong chance to be the record but unfortunately a missed one cycle on the a2 mimi fight sealed those hopes away regardless castle was now closer than ever to getting his first ever record but castle's eyes were set on something much bigger the first ever sub 410 this achievement had been nothing but a community dream just a few months back and was now looking more and more like a potential reality however castle wouldn't be the only runner looking to take part in this achievement zack also continued his attempts in the month of september and would further improve his pv by three minutes getting a 4 14 25 zac and castle were now closer to the record than ever before this all led up to september 15 2019 when the unthinkable occurred [Music] [Music] [Music] zack and castle each got their first world records both within an hour and a half of each other this is still the fastest transition of any spm any percent records to this day starting off with zach's record this run had numerous amounts of time loss all throughout the middle of the run what really brought this back was zack saving two minutes on peach skip from this point forward zack had a very solid chapter 8 and just edged out a new record with a 4-12-10 just as zack got this record castle was on the run of his life after being roughly even with his pb at chapter 3 castle proceeded to have a near flawless back half of the run after getting an insanely good p skip it all came down to having good black rng to secure the sub 410. sure enough blek had extremely nice patterns and castle was able to make history getting a 409 37 within an extremely short amount of time the standards for this game's speed run had been completely rewritten and another major time barrier had been broken the best part about this story is that the action doesn't stop here as castle moved on to running all pixels zach continued to do daily any percent attempts just a day after his short-lived record zach improved his pb by around 25 seconds getting a 4 11 45 just two days after that zach made a major milestone of his own getting the second ever sub 410 run this run would be a 409 45 which just missed castle's record by 8 seconds with zach's rapid improvement it wouldn't be long before he broke through with a really good run on september 19th zach achieved a 408 30 the first ever 408 run zach was able to have an extremely good early game this run and carried that time save to a world record even with some time lost in chapter 8. after this new record castle began as any percent grind again and was able to strike back just three days later getting a 408-23 this run just edged by zach's record by seven seconds and was overall a very solid time this is where the record would stand moving into october where the world record competition would continue to heat up after witnessing the incredible display from zach and castle the past two months yoshi decided it was time for him to try for a sub 410 of his own yoshi began streaming runs in early october and would improve his pb on october 9th getting a 409 30. this was one of yoshi's first attempts since his 412 record back in july yet he had already got a sub 410. over the next four days yoshi continued attempts to take back his record and sure enough on october 13th yoshi got a 407.09 this run was incredible at the time and featured very minimal time loss throughout the run with the strats that were available at the time with this time being said many community members began to wonder how far the record could actually be pushed down with the current strategies luckily these members didn't have to ponder long on this subject as a large number of discoveries were about to take place while the spm record was being slaughtered multiple times by the top three runners other members began looking for new time saves to aid in the run for many months prior to this the 1-4 key early trick had been theorized by myself and flash you were normally meant to enter a separate room and in a blue switch to reveal a hidden key in the previous room however using a free cam in 1 4 it was found that the key is actually still loaded in before completing the puzzle if there were a way to clip out of bounds and get behind these brown blocks we'd be able to pick up the key in 2d sure enough i found a method to clip out of bounds in the quicksand with the use of malio's old corner clipping method after this maneuver was shared with the rest of the vc flash began tasking the trick to see if there was a way to maneuver out of bounds and collect the key after clipping out of bounds flash hopped in quicksand over to the left edge of the screen and was able to jump on the ground floor above while still being inside the left wall after flipping back into 2d the game triggered mario to be in a mid-air state since we're technically behind all the platforms in 3d with this we could pass through all blocks but couldn't make it up to the key in one jump lucky for us the game allows us to stand on the yellow question mark blocks for some reason so by landing on one of these blocks and jumping again we can collect the key that's still loaded in behind the brown blocks this trick saved 15 seconds over the intended route and the method was improved months later when it was found that you could jump to the key in 3d meaning the trick now saves around 20 seconds this fine would prove tricky to use in runs at first but zack was the first up for the challenge just three days after yoshi's record zach became the first person to do key early in his runs and got a 407 344 a time just 25 seconds behind yoshi's record flash would also return to 80 runs on october 15th and achieved his first ever sub 410 with a 409 36 many runners were looking forward to continuing their efforts in improving the record however as multiple spm runners went back to grinding attempts mohawk hopped out of the woodworks to drop this bombshell on the entire spm discord [Music] this trick skip the entire inside portion of the 3-3 dot wood tree with tree skip we can now skip all of the vastly irritating things that 3-3 had once pained runners in the past while this new trick completely shocked the entire community there was a catch to do the trick we would have to buy another shell shock in one two this meant collecting eight more coins in early game which translates into pure pain runners would now potentially have to rely on coin rng to determine if they got runs past the one two shop not to mention getting past lsj thankfully this issue wouldn't last long as zach discovered a new tree skip method with the use of an enemy just a day later all these new tricks would be added to the run and combine over an entire minute of potential time save after a brief hiatus in the month of november our top three runners returned to the game in december 2019 and were all fighting for a new record the grind began on december 4th when castle improved his time to a 407 54 meaning top three was now all 407 times on december 5th zak would get a 406 45 breaking yoshi's record and getting the first 406. this was also the first record with the use of tree skip and key early just five days after zach's run castle stole back the record getting the first ever 405 this run featured extremely solid gameplay along with a very good peach skip zach would improve his pb to a 405 51 and yoshi would improve his time to a 406 56 on december 11. with that this would bring 2019 to a close during 2019 spm saw its largest increase in runners and doubled the amount of runs submitted in 2018. alongside this while there were only two records set in 2018 a total of nine any percent records were set in 2019. this was easily the most active year in spm's history up to this point and things were looking to heat up even further as we head into 2020 at the start of january zak remained as the only active top runner to continue pushing towards the new record zach would further improve his time to a 405 33 on january 3rd leaving him just 20 seconds behind castle's record on february 2nd zach broke castle's record with a 404 32 the run had gotten incredibly optimized at this point and it was becoming more and more difficult to improve the time without help from new discoveries zach's new record also brought yoshi back to do more runs he would pv twice in february and bring his personal best to a 405-33 this would be the last spm run from yoshi for a long time leaving the record competition between zach and castle for now with castle on hiatus from the game zach continued to do runs throughout february finally on february 22nd zak would achieve the peak time that the game had to offer [Music] after getting the first ever 403 zack stepped away from runs for a few months this left a pretty significant hiatus on runs with little to no activity being recorded in march 2020 this would all change in april when castle returned to the scene around the time that april rolled around big things were happening in the spm community more members were active than ever before and some big plans were being made this summer that included community races and the first ever pit of 100 trials tournament castle continued to run any percent consistently through the month of april hoping to improve his pb after six days of attempts castle would finally break through the barrier and pb by a minute and a half not only would this pve but it would also be a new record after just passing zach's time by 10 seconds this would be where the record would stand heading into the summer of 2020. it's actually astonishing to see how much progress was made to this game during the last year in april of 2019 flash set a record of 4-1305 after this point five or six major discoveries were made and three runners each combined to improve the record by a total of 9 minutes and 20 seconds almost an exact year from the date of flash's record the achievements up to this point had been nothing short of an insane community dream a year ago but they were now a reality as we head into the summer of 2020 just three and a half minutes away from the four hour barrier the community was ready to see even more progress made to this game's speed run after castle's record he decided to join the other runners in their hiatus from any percent however the game certainly didn't stay silent during this time as the glitch hunting community was in the midst of taking on their biggest challenge yet [Music] scanner skip is easily the most infamous trick in this game's history in fact scanner skip would probably have an entire hour long video of its own with how much research has been put into the trick over the years to get past the 5 4 scanner you normally have to get a floral sprout by defeating ochongs however this chunks fight can only be accessed by going through a lengthy process to get the pixel dotty who was used to get the key card for top runners at the time beating 5'4 took around 9 minutes on average if we were able to skip the scanner and go straight into the crocus fight runners would then be able to complete 5 4 in around 4 and a half minutes cutting the level time in half this would be the largest times they've found in many years and would easily make sub 4 a reality however a task as great as this is easier said than done the scanner room had a lot of systems in place to prevent the player from passing through without the floral sprout soon though a new user became active in the spm discord that would play a major role behind the research on scanner skip john p55 is a tasser and glitch hunter that joined the spm community around the summer of 2019 for almost an entire year john led the charge in research for scanner skip this led to an absolute plethora of information to be discovered about not just how the scanner worked but how the game worked much information was being discovered regarding how cutscene triggers worked how respawn locations worked along with many other mechanics related information as john and other glitch hunters were experimenting with some out of bounds tricks in the scanner room none of their ideas were able to skip the scanner at this time but jon had another idea he attempted out-of-bounds tricks in the keycard room just before the chunks fight you normally need to unlock dottie to get the key card but after trying an abridged version of mohawk's old out of bounds setup jon was able to clip through the wall and dottie skip was born dotty skip would have an immediate impact on runs as the trick itself would save a minute and 45 seconds however this trick would change the route immensely as there were two items required for the trick to work for starters another shell shock was needed to clip through the wall meaning runners would now have to purchase another shell shock in one two before doing lsj this brought back the very painful coin route that had been erased with the newest tree skip method meaning the coin grind in early game was a genuine reset spot for some runners along with this the trick also required the use of a gold bar this also messed with the coin route since the old route consisted of selling the gold bar in pre-chapter 5. runners still began to use dotty skipped run since it still saved time overall but runners were struggling to adjust to the new route as the extra shell shock was really throwing a huge wrench in everyone's runs this pattern stayed the same for around three weeks until flash accidentally did this on his stream what oh okay okay somehow flash was able to get into the tiny gap in the wall after switching to mario the community toyed around with this trick for a few days until roblox was able to find a somewhat consistent setup by pressing left for one frame with the use of a menu buffer i say somewhat consistent because some runners would still get this second or third try but it still saved time and stress over the old route and proved to be the most consistent version of dottie skip for a very long time with players going back to runs with the new dottie skip jon and the rest of the glitch hunting group decided to continue trying their luck with skinner skip over the next month soon enough we were about a week and a half into the month of july and the constant culmination of work spending back many months finally came to a turning point on july 12 2020 john and roblox were able to test [Music] this [Music] [Music] after almost a full year of work and research put into this trick it was finally proven possible this is one of the most complicated tricks in the game which is why it remained task only at this time after this trick was found jon took a much deserved break from research while roblox decided to continue searching for new finds in the very next day she found a major development to an important trip let's throw it back to zack for more many attempts at performing green bridge skip in rta were attempted mohawk himself who discovered the task version of the trip tried to make it rta viable but wasn't able to on july 13th there were discussions arising about how it could be possible with a good setup and later that day something big happened roblox a fairly new glitch hunter manually tested many combinations of frame perfect movements and found a fairly doable method the default respawn coordinates the game uses are in the room's origin on the nearest valid ground abusing this property by saving a file out of balance and loading it easily lets us get to the area to perform gds this setup would require pushing up against the pipe holding down left for one frame and then pausing with the home menu holding up for four frames and then pausing with the home menu only two hours later i was the first person to completely get this trick in rta as soon as this happened we all had high hopes that it would put illustrated to rest gbs allowed us to perform a 35k point grind of 1-1 that the lsj route could not do because of the unwanted hp gbs would also allow us to get an ice storm rather than a stopwatch saving another 15 seconds totaling nearly 40 seconds the very next day i got greenbridge skip in a run on the first attempt this run was record pace in the 7-3 but it had a bad peak skip it still finished as a 405 which was a very solid run for the time as time went on we found much more consistent shop clip methods a 100 consistent way to get the down left input which both made this trick much more viable with many big discoveries showing up in this time span things were looking great for runners as everyone began to get back to runs for the rest of the summer one runner stood above the rest in the month of july zack after many failed attempts and some time to adjust to a very different route he was able to put together a fascinating run on july 27th zach got a 403 24 improving the record by 21 seconds this is the first record to utilize new green bridge skip and dottie skip but still had significant room to improve since zach was still adjusting from an extended hiatus that runs regardless this pb moved the community even closer to the sub 4 dream after four more days of attempts zach continued to improve in every split and was beginning to get back to form all of his hard work culminated to one day july 31st 2020 this was the day that spm's potential would be put on display one [Music] zach softlocked on the breakthrough run that the entire community had been waiting for there was an unpredictable soft log nobody had ever seen this soft lock before but of course it happened at one of the worst times imaginable this run was near perfect and it had potential to be a very low 4 hour flat this would have been the greatest achievement up to this point but unfortunately it just wasn't meant to be this lost run stung the entire community for the next few months and many wondered what could have been in this run didn't softlock with that being said all the community could do was move on which they did following this run an spm runner named ptl was testing routing ideas involving the hp plus in flip side outskirts there was a way to obtain the hp plus early by clipping out of bounds through a wall after some help from zack both runners were able to determine that it saved around 8 seconds to sell the hp plus in any percent as it cut out collecting an ample amount of items at certain levels and let runners keep the gold bar for dottie skip with the new routing change zach and castle continued to get good paces in august on august 16th castle was able to break the record and achieve a 402 11 which improved the old record by over a minute however zach would also stream runs in the same day in hopes of redeeming himself after his lost soft lock run later on that very same day zach got a 401 40 beating castle's run from earlier in the day by 30 seconds after both of these records the official push for sub 4 was put on hold the top runners felt it was going to be an incredibly difficult task to get the sub for and would take some incredible grinding so both runners decided to take a break until the time was right [Music] as we leave this chapter in the middle of august 2020 the record had been improved a total of 8 minutes and 31 seconds in just the last 7 months the community was now closer than ever to a sub 4 just a minute and 41 seconds away and while many in the community were very happy with the record progression it was hard to deny the sour taste left in everyone's mouth after the lost four hour flat run regardless the community went quiet for a while leaving some to wonder if new potential competitors would join the scene [Music] at this point the community went awfully quiet but there was a brand new runner learning the game who would play a key role in the push for sub 4. a japanese runner named igerme began posting actively to the spm discord around mid-august and eventually did their first run on august 24th clocking in at 4 36 25. this was very impressive for a first run at the time as most first runs tend to be over five hours long e gurmee was different however as it seemed he had practiced a large amount of the difficult strats before doing a full run igurmi continued to do attempts into september and would go on to get a second pb of 418-32 which again was very impressive for just a second run another thing that seti germy apart from other new runners was his keen interest in glitch hunting and tassing spm as a gurney would do initial attempts he would also look for potential time saves all over the run some of his fines included improvements to water switch skip better routing at 5'4 4-2 and some better routing for the pit percent category as well iguremi kept improving at gameplay all throughout the month of september and pb twice to get a 408 54 on september 27th egermi was quickly improving and becoming one of the top runners in the game however something huge was about to happen the years of work done for the speedrun all the information that we've mentioned prior to this was all leading up to just one day october 1st 2020 as previously mentioned a majority of the community had taken a large break from doing active runs of this game however this all changed when castle announced on october 1st that he was about to return to any percent runs and grind for sub 4. after seeing this flash decided it was time to work on this very video since sub4 seemed closer than ever before after chatting with other discord members about the video flash and a few others decided to hop in the voice channel to discuss some ideas not even seven minutes into the call igerme made the post that would change spm runs forever a new out of bounds clip that could be used anywhere and as it turned out the key to freely clipping out of bounds was hiding right in plain sight the whole time [Music] we can now clip out of bounds at any wall with any character all with the use of slim and one gold bar the trick was done by throwing the gold bar at the wall using slim then pressing one and two simultaneously after picking up the gold bar to open the quick menu after switching to any pixel you could simply hold the d-pad direction towards the wall and you're successfully out of bounds at this point everyone in the call was going crazy the runners began theorizing ways this trick could be implemented in the run and zach was the first to question whether the trick could be done in 3d as well after some testing it only took zach 10 minutes to not only perform the trick on console but confirm that it also works in 3d with this new out of bounds method fully realized by the community what occurred next was an hour and a half of absolute mayhem [Music] hey [Music] all right the spm community had gotten the break it needed to get through the greatest barrier in this game's history spm had officially been broken after years of testing and many different theories there was finally a consistent method to clipping out of bounds and made all types of time saved dreams become an instant reality to recap the madness zack immediately found new methods to merlin cutscene skip and block puzzle skip which saved a combined 11 seconds but soon after it was realized that gold bar clipping was the last ingredient needed for scanner skip to happen after just 10 minutes of attempts john pulled off the trick on emulator and became the first person to do the trick rta just a little while after this zach confirmed the trick's viability by performing it on console for the first time and just like that two and a half minutes were cut out of 5'4 and scanner skip was no longer a theoretical dream the fun didn't stop there however as more and more new finds and improvements were being made to the route a 6 second improvement was made to tree skip which would eventually turn into 23 seconds a few months later many different clips were implemented during pre-chapter segments like pre-chapter 4 pre-chapter 5 and pre-chapter 7. norlem cutscene skip was found which saved 15 seconds by entering the chapter 8 door early before starting the cutscene and was accidentally improved on later when yoshizilla found another 4 seconds of time save to the trick and of all things carry skip became a reality kerry skip have been a long running joke in the community for years since it was technically possible but saved very little time and quite possibly featured the most difficult set of thudly jumps in this game's history but that was all thrown out the window with gold bar clipping since you can now save 15 seconds without any of the thudly jumps all in all a total of three minutes and 45 seconds of time save was found off of gold bar clipping in the span of two months but right after that night many runners were excited to get back to improving their times and the race for sub 4 was officially back in the spotlight at 1pm zach started up his stream and did a practice run after implementing all the brand new tricks just around four hours later zack beat his old world record by two tenths of a second all jokes aside it was understandable that this run didn't pan out since zach was just returning to the game and performing new tricks after not playing for months so some rust was to be expected however zack felt he still have what it takes for a better result and promised to go live again an hour later to try and improve the record sure enough zach fulfilled that promise and started his second attempt of the day i think i'll let this one speak for [Music] itself [Music] it happened zach got the sub 4 with a final time of 3 59 53 everyone that had been waiting for this moment celebrated together in chat as well as in the discord after the stream this was the biggest achievement in this speed runs history and the community celebrated together with numerous tweets posts and congratulations to zach and the entire community coming from the very first run forming into a group of fans taking their turn at the run over the years to forming a solidified community and breaking the game in unimaginable ways the progression of not just the world record but the entire super paper mario speedrunning community was an incredible sight to see over the years with the sub 4 barrier finally being broken things could only go up from here and sure enough our story isn't over just yet even after breaking the sub 4 barrier zack knew there was still more time to be saved in multiple areas of the run so zack went back to actively streaming attempts just two days later what happened next over the course of october 2020 was complete dominance of the any percent category that hadn't been seen in a very long time [Music] [Applause] now [Music] in the month of october alone zach improved the record a total of eight times this improvement ended up to be a total of six minutes and 20 seconds and the month came to a close with a 355-21 this was the craziest month in spm's history gold bar clipping scanner skip being made rta numerous other time saves the sub 4 and zack's constant improvement over the month to push the record just 22 seconds away from a sub 355 none of this could have happened without the years of grinding research and runs from all the amazing community members with the record being pushed down so far zak was very content with the strats in his 355 run and decided it was best to set up a fully commentated version of this run featuring commentary from himself ept hopper and myself this run was an absolute spectacle and was a great feature showcase of all the new strats found with goldberg clipping in the month of october while zach moved on to other projects another runner continued their rapid improvement during this time igurmy also did runs throughout the month of october and improved his pv a total of four times with the fourth pb on october 31st he gurmee got the second ever sub 4 with a 3 57 43. iguri's rapid improvement and immense contributions to the community were an absolute sight to see andy gurmey quickly solidified himself as a top spm runner and a world record competitor after getting another pb in early november the gurmee continued to stream world record attempts all the way into december finally on december 13th the grind would pay off igermi passed zack's record by just 12 seconds achieving a 3 509 while the guri and zak were happy with their times they both knew a 354 or potentially even a 353 was still possible just extremely difficult over the next three days zach would get back to doing attempts and would beat out igerme's time by 29 seconds to achieve the first ever 354 on december 16th as we closed out this crazy year of 2020 this is where the world record would stand heading into the new year but both runners were determined to make final improvements to solidify the record for once and for all very early into january it was clear that some improvement was about to be made to the current standing record about halfway through the month igurmy was proving to be very close to breaking through but just couldn't finish out his attempts finally after months of glitch hunting and grinding runs igurmi achieved the first ever 353 which is an extremely impressive run even for the top runners after this run it was theorized that 352 was possible but extremely difficult thus this is where the record would stand for many months after this with that we close out the story of how a band of runners and community members all came together to work towards one of the greatest achievements in this game's history but before we close it out we'd like to share one final piece of the spm story that might not have an effect on the world record but it's still an important story to be told wait wait wait wait what ever happened to castle like mentioned before castle is the first person to start pushing for sub 4. but shortly after the game was broken open the first sub 4 hour run was claimed by zack wildcastle was happy for zack in the community this was really frustrating to castle in a way he almost felt cheated he believed that sub 4 hours shouldn't be something that was found but more something that was earned all of the runners had started moving on to green bridge skip using the out of bounds movement while castle was determined to stick to his roots and keep doing the legacy route with livestream jump more and more time save was found with the new green bridge skipper out but this wouldn't deter castle he wanted more than just sub 4 hour speed run he wanted a good sub 4 hour speed run with live stream jump while green bridge skip allowed more attempts livestream jump was an exact time save you either got it or you didn't the next few months would be some of the hardest months to watch for spm speedrunning castle would constantly try for runs and get so close but something would always happen similar to flash's experience it would take a miracle just to get that one run many times people begged castle just don't do live stream jump it takes too many attempts and you can get sub 4 without it something that wasn't mentioned earlier was the first two sub 4 speed runs didn't even have green bridge skip there was so much time saved with all the new discoveries that it wasn't even necessary but castle absolutely refused he knew he was capable however it just didn't sit right with him castle would get very frustrated after a while with people constantly telling him to stop doing live stream jump and not being able to get runs in finally on january 19 2021 this would happen yes dude let's go we gotta run you heard it castle got a run little did he know this was the run that he had been waiting for one hit i think the grind has been hard i agree got it way faster he's a really good player then i got it before i did oh this is okay i'm happy i'm finally able to beat the goal [Music] oh dude this was a touching moment for the community castle finally got sub 4 and he did it his way it was a hard period for him and it just felt right seeing him get the run that he put so much effort into with that we're brought back to this present day this of course begs the question where are we now after this brief hiatus of runs a load of new strats were discovered during the making of this video these include a faster crocus strat a pretty consistent stone tablet early find and an rta viable blue pedestal skip just to name a few however the biggest time save found came in 4-4 where a new glitch completely broke the level it had been theorized for a long time as to whether it was possible to open a key chest and 4-4 early but it was finally possible after jon found a method to open these chests by taking 3d damage mid air a gurme would implement a few of these new tricks and achieve the game's most recent new world record with a time of 3 hours 53 minutes and 15 seconds with the new strats found it's very well possible that a sub 350 could be on the horizon but for now this is where our world record progression comes to a close from mr guy's 513 run in 2007 all the way to gurmee's 353 15 and 2021 this game has come an extremely long way over the years and we're so glad that you all joined jcr and i on this amazing journey we are so excited to see where the community goes over the next few years and we are so happy to share this experience with so many amazing people we also have a bunch of great things on the horizon john is currently putting together an spm any percent task which will be released sometime in the future this would be the first task in over four years for the game and a number of new strats have been added since then so the final product should be very fast and very exciting to watch there are also a number of old and new runners who are currently making their mark on the game and rapidly improving which among include a gurmee zack castle stevie ben zyle teddy and ptl there are also some older runners who are looking to make a return as well such as squiddy myself and gcr so stay tuned for more runs and sbm content coming very soon if you'd like to join the spm community or have any interest in checking out our discord channel the link is on the screen and in the description of this video if you're also interested in running spm we have a lot of great community members who would love to help you get started make sure to follow the spm twitch channel youtube channel and twitter account to keep yourselves updated on all things spm speedrunning we'd like to give a huge thank you to all of our runners glitch hunters and community members from over the years as none of this could have been possible without any of you we'd also like to thank everyone who helped out in the making of this video links to their twitch channels as well as the runners twitch channels can all be found in the description below as we send you off to our final credit sequence we'd like to thank you all for watching the history of super paper mario speedrunning on behalf of jcr my name is nmflash8 and may we meet again in another time and place take care [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: SPM Community

Views: 219,912

Rating: 4.9429145 out of 5

Keywords: Super Paper Mario, SPM, Speedrunning, Speed run, World Record Progression, World Record History, WR Progression, WR, Any%, WR History, Paper Mario, Mario

Id: iOVyNobXTxw

Length: 121min 24sec (7284 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/HarlequinNight]

Great job. I would definitely recommend in the long run working on editing down your thoughts. Two hours is a lot to ask of a random viewer, versus say 20-30 minutes. It's definitely a hard skill to decide what to include and what not to, but scripting things out can help. I always think of this quote:

"Sorry for writing such a long letter, I didn't have the time to write a short one."

[u/heroofwinds2002]

Great job guys! (This is zeltov btw I can’t change my username)

[u/itsbasiltime]

Super impressive vid on one of my favorite games. Everyone involved did such a great job!

[u/yarbousaj]

TWO HOURS?!?!? That's awesome. I know what I'm doing tomorrow!!

[u/BelowTheCharacterLim]

I'm only halfway through the video, so maybe this changes later, but it seems completely ridiculous that the community decides to play on a version that's prone to random crashing just because of faster text. I know a lot of speedrun categories live or die on RNG, but:

• A comparable (just slightly slower but with no real skill or gameplay difference outside mashing) version of SPM without this issue already exists.

• Unlike RNG, there's no possibility to ever route these crashes out of the game or (likely) to manipulate them, and it doesn't meaningfully enhance the variety of the gameplay like in situations where runners can adapt to the RNG.

• This clearly wasn't intended as a gameplay challenge/mechanic by the devs. Yes, runs use glitches, but those generally make runs more fun to run, more interesting and diverse to watch, raise the game's skill ceiling, make the game's categories more diverse, or some combination thereof; this removes control from the player for no reason and makes the game less interesting.

• With bogus RNG events, you generally at least know when runkillers are coming. For example, you know the hands in Super Mario 3 are there. Here, it's just every single loading zone, which is quite frequent.

• It instantly loses the entire run with no chance of recovery.

• This is a 4+ hour run with a (legitimate, not crash-based) runkiller right at the beginning.

Watching a double life shroom jump be completed for the first and only time in an RTA run only to have the game crash and destroy the run and then seeing that this happened multiple times while Flash was on WR pace well into the run should've been the death knell for the JP VC version; I can't fathom how the community decided to stick through that garbage, and it would definitely turn me off from ever running the game.

[u/quizzer106]

Loved SPM as a kid! I remember there was an area where you're trapped and forced to "work off" your debt. I thought you actually had to grind for all the money and taped a button down on my wiimote to grind overnight.

Maybe you talk about this somewhere in the video, but how well does this game work on emulator without a wiimote?

[u/bones_heart_paper]

Very impressive work. Wow!! Loved it!! Congrats 🔥🔥🔥

[u/woomy-jpg]

I’m watching immediately

[u/ZachLink98]

Was glad to be a part of this :)