The World Record History of Blue Yourself in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

most people who play mario kart fear the blue shell in fact even speedrunners fear the blue shell the blue shell is a simple reminder that even the best players in the world run into the same problems as everyone else however in one particular speedrun category speedrunners actually want to be hit by a blue shell not one thrown by computer players but one by themselves speedrunners have created a category where throwing and hitting themselves with their own blue shell is the objective this is the world record progression video of blue yourself in mario kart 8 deluxe [Music] for those who don't know the blue shell is an item that targets the person currently in first place and blows them up bringing them to a temporary halt and letting other racers catch up the idea of this category is to obtain a blue shell drive all the way up to first place and then use the blue shell on yourself this idea was first conceived by akos on february 24th 2021 when the community was trying to think of new meme speedrun categories akko's suggestion said bs percent you smuggle a blue shell into first and use it on yourself as fast as possible bs percent received a positive response in the community and runners quickly got to work on their attempts [Music] [Music] the earliest known run comes from a runner by the name of misty's the run itself was fairly basic and really just showcased that a speed run was indeed possible now because you need to reach first place very quickly after obtaining the blue shell mistis began the run in dry dry desert which is known for having a particularly large shortcut the idea was to get a blue shell use the shortcut to reach first place then use the blue shell on himself this run was also using the shells only in-game rule this allowed for a better chance of obtaining a blue shell for the first minute and a half misty's purposefully placed himself in last place until he was able to obtain a blue shell once he got the blue shell he immediately began to race to first place as fast as possible the moment misty's reached first place he used the blue shell the blue shell targeted misties and blew him up thus ending the first ever successful run in 2 minutes and 13 seconds [Music] before we move on let's take a moment to explain the mechanics of a blue shell in mario kart 8 deluxe two conditions must be met for a player to have a chance of receiving a blue shell from an item box the first condition is simple it must be at least 30 seconds into the race and the timer begins when lackatoos lights turn green the game will stop power items like the golden mushroom the bullet bills blue shells etc from appearing until after the first 30 seconds of a race in an attempt to keep the race somewhat balanced the second condition unfortunately is a bit more complicated in shells only mode the player must be at least 3 300 units behind the leader this is because of the way that the item roulette works the chance of obtaining each item is determined by the distance from the leader not the player's current position like it is in previous mario kart games in shells only mode the item arsenal available between 3 300 and 5500 units away is the first length of distance to have a chance to obtain a blue shell even once these conditions are met though your chances of getting a blue shell are still very slim in shells only mode it has a two and a half percent chance of happening the downside to shells only mode is that it removes items like your mushrooms and your stars which could potentially help you reach first place a little bit quicker and you might be wondering how big of a distance 3 300 units actually is but we'll cover that later on in the video it's also worth noting that the game decides what item you get the frame you hit an item box not after the roulette finishes that means that theoretically you could attain a blue shell at exactly 30 seconds misty's 213 was quite unoptimized he had spent about a minute and seven seconds to get the blue shell 41 seconds to reach first place and then when the game registered him in first place it took him just under half a second to throw the blue shell at himself but that didn't stop misty's because just a few attempts later he tried a new track snes rainbow road misty's went for the same approach as he did in dry dry desert get far enough behind the leader wait for the 30 second timer to pass and then try to find the blue shell there aren't any good shortcuts in snes rainbow road so we're not really sure why the track was chosen nonetheless just a few attempts in misdeeds had something magical happen he got a blue shell on the first item box once that 30 second timer had passed he then raced to first place yet again as fast as he could despite being hit by a red shell on the way a new world record had been set at 1 minute and 39 seconds 34 seconds faster than his previous world record the rest of misty's attempts that day weren't able to beat his 139 so that's where the record stood the community was excited and several runners began to compete to surpass this newly set record it didn't take long before the 139 was beaten in fact it took a total of 31 minutes before a runner by the name of zack posted his achievement of 1 minute and 13 seconds 26 seconds faster than misty's 139 unfortunately there isn't any video evidence of the 113. the bs percent category was still at its early stages and runners at the time were okay with the honor system we do know however that zack used the dry dry desert track the same track that mistis used for his original 213 run zack had said that he got the 113 after just 10 attempts and that the run was lucky as hell zach also said that he saved time because misty's used the hard cpu difficulty whereas zach used the easy cpu the hard cpu is tougher and faster and therefore it can take longer trying to catch up the first place whereas the easy cpu isn't as tough and they often make mistakes making it easier to catch up but just an hour and 45 minutes later this run was posted by akkos [Music] [Music] while it was only one second faster than zach's 113 it was the first time the community actually got to see a fairly optimized run akkos took a different approach on the item reel though he used normal items instead of shells only remember how shells only mode made the blue shell available at least 3 300 units away well normal items had the same distance but the chance of getting the blue shell was actually lower down to one percent instead of 2.5 percent the reason atkos did this was so that he could obtain mushrooms to help him get to first place quicker and it worked he got the triple mushrooms before the 30 second timer ran out he then got a blue shell on his first try just a quarter of a second after the 30 second timer he used the three mushrooms to go through the shortcut and reached first place just 19 seconds later the fastest anyone had done at this point when he reached first place it took him half a second to throw the blue shell at himself this 112 would set the standard for all future runs to come getting the blue shell on your first try and using a boost such as mushrooms to reach first place as quickly as possible was pivotal in order to achieve a competitive time up until this time most runners were still playing in dry dry desert one runner by the name of simlola661 decided to try a different track to compete against dry dry desert and that track was n64 royal raceway the reason he wanted to try this track was because the glider ramp would allow the leader to get far away increasing the odds of getting a blue shell it also featured a shortcut just after the ramp so that he could catch up the first place and so he began doing attempts on royal raceway and soon he would find that his theory was correct [Music] sim lola waited the requisite 30 seconds obtained a blue shell 1.1 seconds after the 30 second timer used his mushrooms went over the glider ramp and managed to reach first place in just under 16 seconds he used the blue shell on the same frame that the game registered him in first place thus performing the first ever frame perfect blue shell throw the blue shell hid himself in 1 minute and 10 seconds a new world record by almost 2 and a half seconds unfortunately he hit a banana while trying to reach first place so there was still time to be saved hitting a banana can lose you anywhere between two to three seconds so a 107 was theoretically possible semilola also used a different item rule instead of normal items he used frantic items this shortened the blue shell minimum distance from 3 300 units down to just 2 000 units it also increased the odds of getting the blue shell to two and a half percent runners would from here on out use frantic mode as it was now deemed the fastest method sim lola had determined that there had to be a few things that a track needed to be viable for a run these things were item boxes in the right spots at least 2 000 units away from first place a fast bit to let the leader run and then a shortcut to catch back up both dry dry desert and royal raceway met these conditions making them both viable for runs akko still preferred to run on dry dry desert and he continued his attempts there and just a day later he managed to get this run [Music] one minute and nine seconds the first ever sub 110. runs at this point were starting to get competitive runners were hitting the item boxes just after the 30 second timer and reaching first place very quickly there wasn't a whole lot of time to save at this point you just needed good luck and then reached first place without running into any obstacles as runners began to do more and more attempts interesting situations began to arise akkos had posted this run wondering if it counted as a world record this started the conversation in the community on whether or not that this was allowed technically akkos did obtain a blue shell he did reach first place and he did throw the blue shell at himself but because he had invincibility from the star akkos didn't technically get hit by the blue shell he dodged it simlola also had a situation occur where he was hit by a blue shell while in first place but he wasn't the one who threw the blue shell you see as mentioned earlier in the video the category at the time was named bs percent or blue shell percent sim lola said that blue shell percent implies that the goal is to get blown up by a blue shell nothing's saying that it needs to be yours it's just faster and more consistent if it's yours simlola then continued to do more runs and claimed to have gotten a 104. more conversation was had within the community and it was agreed upon that the spirit of the category was that you had to throw the blue shell at yourself this also started the conversation of the official category name due to the popularity of the category a poll was created between two options the current bs percent or blue shell percent or another suggested name of blue yourself the blue yourself name came from a well-known mario kart 8 deluxe speedrunner amber her reasoning for the term blued was often referred to getting hit by a blue shell both the fact that it was a little crass and to some other people a reference to arrested development was not on her mind at all in the end everyone voted on the official category name and blew yourself reigned victorious at this point blue yourself became an official category and was posted on the mario kart 8 deluxe category extensions page this meant that official rules were put into place and some of these rules were a bit different than what runners had been doing before all runs to this point ran on the standard mario kart 8 deluxe timings this meant that the time started when pressing the ok button on the track selection screen a special rule was created so that the timing would now begin on the frame when lacking two's lights turned green this was convenient for two reasons the frame when lakitu's lights turns green is also the moment when the 30 second power item cooldown starts like we mentioned earlier this allowed runners to look at the time of their run and know exactly when to get an item box for a chance of the blue shell this was also convenient for loading times a digital copy of the game would load faster than the cartridge version of the game because this category was so short having different loading times would have a significant effect on the run starting the run when lakitu's lights turned green allowed for all players to have an equal playing field no matter what copy of the game you were playing the timing for the end of the run would stay the same which was the first frame of the blue shells explosion other rules would also be added to clarify any sort of issues with the blue shell since the timing of the runs were now started at a different time the timing changes were retroactively applied to older runs akkos's 109 run became 48.75 seconds long and was no longer the world record simlola's 110 was actually 48.6 seconds long and was just .15 seconds faster and became the new world record for blue yourself shortly after blue yourself became an official category something big happened a runner by the name of teo took a different approach to royal raceway [Music] [Music] 43 seconds almost five and a half seconds faster than sim lola's 48.6 teo did something that required a crazy amount of luck he managed to get a bullet bill and a blue shell at the same time not only that but he was able to get the bullet bill in the first item slot then the blue shell in the second item slot the chances of this happening are incredibly low a mere 1 in 247 or approximately 0.405 percent bullet bill provided an extremely quick way to reach first place most runners were able to reach first place in about 16 seconds teo did it in 10. the community was blown away and viewed this as a time that was near impossible to beat things like that's not going to be beaten for a while were being said and they were right because everything that you've seen in this video everything that i've explained has happened over a week teo's record would stand for the longest time that anyone's had at this point five days later and still no one was able to match him that is of course until someone else finds a new strategy [Music] on march 10th 2021 a runner by the name of skillos posted a message claiming he had achieved a time of 40.867 seconds over two seconds faster than tayo's current record how is that even possible well as it turns out royal raceway or dry dry desert for that matter might not have been the fastest track like everyone thought skillos claimed to have used n64 rainbow road a track that's never been used in blue yourself before skills was able to post his video and his claims were true [Music] [Applause] [Music] even though this was a large improvement on the record there wasn't really anything special that skelos did in his run he used the same strategies as everyone else but used them on n64 rainbow road instead and to recap these strategies were to obtain an item to help boost in the first place make sure that the first place cpu is at least 2 000 units ahead hit the item box as close to 30 seconds as possible and then use those mushrooms or whatever boost they had to reach first place as quickly as possible and in this case skillose was able to reach first place in eight and a half seconds he thankfully didn't have to use the same strategy as taos praying for a 1 in 247 chance of getting the bullet bill blue shell combo however a new issue had arisen the first place cpu not being more than 2 000 units ahead after the 30 seconds skillo stated that this strat is super inconsistent when you hit the item box at 30 seconds most of the time the cpus aren't far enough ahead for a blue shell remember earlier in the video when we talked about how which items you get are determined based on how far away you are from first place now's a good time to delve a little deeper into that topic how far is 2 000 units no one really knew or even how far a single unit was skills went on to two player mode with the exact same settings using frantic mode and experimented with different distances he would get the first player to continuously go through items while the second player would be at varying distances he would then line up when the blue shell started and stopped spawning noting where the second player was located and within just a short while skills figured out the distance of 2000 units for n64 rainbow road it turns out that it was a lot closer than what the community had thought now that skills had an idea of how far away 2000 units was he immediately began more attempts and shortly after he managed to get this run [Music] the first ever sub 40 39.9 seconds it was at this time where blew yourself started to gain attention around the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] there was a lot of excitement around the blue yourself category but it didn't stop here from here on out one person completely changed how this category was ran this person was flint just before the 39.9 from skillos flint had been investigating the 2000 units they researched several other tracks and made an amazing discovery a discovery so big it would change blue yourself forever they found that game boy advanced mario circuit had the perfect setup for blue yourself there are some item boxes located just after turn number five after some experimentation flint found that blue shells don't spawn until just before the last turn of the track so we know that 2000 units is approximately that far flint also found that when playing against the normal difficulty cpus they usually end up at the last turn by 30 seconds sometimes they can be too slow or too fast so there was some rng to it there were also two shortcuts to use to get to first place quickly the strategy was to get a star use it to increase your max speed and then use mushrooms to accelerate as quickly as possible the star was also used to help avoid hazards on the track and any other shells or bananas used or thrown by the cpu it was important to use your start early enough so that it would run out before the blue shell hit you with this new discovery flint began attempts right away and the community would follow [Music] oh my god [Music] no way no oh i might have just done that that might be the record that might be the record i have to go and re-time that but i might have just i might have just done that sim lola had the record down to just 37.566 seconds which was pretty incredible considering the blue shell doesn't spawn in the game until 30 seconds however something unique happened during his run when approaching the head of the pack the cpu in first place actually got hit by a red shell from a different cpu this allowed sim lola to reach first place even faster the chances of this happening are unknown due to the random nature of the event but from here on out in order to get a blue yourself world record the first place cpu had to get hit by another cpu this was completely out of control of the runners it was just another element of rng added to blue yourself it was at this point when runners attempt counts started to rise exponentially most were in the hundreds and some were over a thousand attempts it wasn't uncommon to have a several hour session and only get a couple blue shells blue yourself had become a grind that required a lot of patience however shortly after a familiar runner posted this run [Music] akkos had finally gotten another world record since his previous world record of one minute and 12 seconds back when we did the old timing method it was the first ever sub 37 a 36.9 well over half a second faster than sim lola's 37.566 this run was really good akkos hit the item block at 30.3 seconds into the run just under a third of a second away from perfect when approaching first place the first place cpu was struck by another cpu allowing him to reach first place in just under four and a half seconds when he reached first place it took him half a second to use the blue shell the theorized perfect time of a low 36 point x was looking more and more plausible [Music] [Music] a 35.983 a 35 second run wasn't even believed to be possible how did skills manage to do this well first of all he chose the fastest possible ground speed card combination as marked in orange this consisted of using dry bowser the gla cart slick tires and the super glider second of all skills hit the item boxes .2 seconds after the 30 second blue shell timer which was a 0.1 second improvement over echoes that was fairly quick but it wasn't perfect he then took a cleaner driving line to reach first place in only 3.45 seconds which was just over a second faster than echoes skelos also had the favorable rng because the first place cpu was hit by a different cpu all of this was led to the first ever 35 second run or was it 35 seconds after this video was posted and the run was submitted one of the mario kart 8 deluxe moderators pianist 15 did an official retime of the run and discovered that skills actually got 36.000 seconds not 35.983 because the stakes were high pianist 15 wanted to have another moderator take a look just in case while doing so he realized he had been timing the video at 30 frames per second not 60 frames per second so only every other frame was being shown when he was doing the re-timing when re-timing in 60 frames per second he then confirmed that yes it was officially a 35-second run and he apologized shortly after this record of 35.983 stood for a very long time the longest time anyone had held the blue yourself world record at this point was about a week this record however would stand more for than 100 days there were a couple runners who managed to get a low 36 second run but no one truly contested skelos's 35.983 during this time skills was theory crafting a new strategy a new strategy that could not only get a faster 35 point x run but a strategy that could potentially break the 34 second barrier the only problem was that this strategy required exact precision and an insane amount of rng welcome to glider strats the idea for glider strats was simple instead of driving on the ground to reach first place skills wanted to fly into first place literally this was possible because there was a glider ramp near the necessary set of items and what's even better is that there was an item box right at the ramp but here's where things unfortunately get more difficult the glider ramp was slightly ahead of the set of the other item blocks this also meant that the 2000 unit cutoff line the blue shell was further down the track than before skelos's idea was to fly over the block wall in a straight line and land directly in front of the first place cpu when landing you would be perpendicular to the direction of the track this meant that you had to land in first place because you would lose time straightening out this was incredibly difficult to do it meant that the first place cpu had to be hit by another cpu within the yellow region if the cpu wasn't hit the cpu would be too far ahead and you would not be in first place when landing this was by far the hardest part of glider strats it was incredibly precise the cpu had to be in a perfect position which was hardly ever the case in the first place if all the stars aligned and everything worked out like it should this strategy would quickly be known as god glider strats otherwise it was just glider strats that's how difficult it was this didn't stop skills from trying he figured that if there was a chance of it happening then it would eventually happen however over 2 000 attempts later skills was still not able to get god glider strats to work from all those attempts he did theorize that the best possible time was 34.7 seconds as long as the following conditions were met hit the item box frame perfectly at exactly 30 seconds reach first place in 3.083 seconds which is the fastest he had done with the blue shell before use the blue shell frame perfectly on the frame that you reach first place the animation of the blue shell takes 1.617 seconds for a grand total of 34.7 seconds it's also worth noting that skill has made sure to use the fastest cart combination for air speed which is marked in green this combination was wario the teddy buggy cart sponge tires and the waddle wing unfortunately after all of his findings nothing much came from god glider strats it just seemed too difficult to pull off there was simply too much rng and things were way too precise this was until a new runner stepped up to the plate for the blue yourself challenge this runner had been under the radar for a little while and he was determined to beat the long-standing record of 35.9 seconds this runner was strong man lin [Music] on june 21st 2021 strongmen lin had a personal best of 36.1 posted on his youtube channel however in this run he blew himself when he still had a start active thus not taking damage and invalidating the run if he didn't have the start active and took damage it would have been considered second place at the time but that didn't stop him from continuing more runs because the star issue was preventable by simply deploying it a little bit earlier despite not using glider strats or using the fastest ground speed cart combination he was confident that he could obtain a world record for himself [Music] it happened a second time strongman lin had an active star that prevented the blue shell from damaging him thus invalidating his run once again had strongman lin used the star just a little bit earlier and taken damage from the blue shell it would have been a new world record of 35.8 seconds it was truly an unfortunate series of events but just like last time this didn't stop him [Music] [Music] over 2 000 attempts strong man lynn had done it at 35.4 exactly half a second faster than the long-standing 114 day record of 35.9 from skillose the run was truly immaculate and for the first time ever a runner was able to hit the item boxes frame perfectly at 30.0 seconds it then took him three and a half seconds to reach first place and then use the blue shell within 0.2 seconds upon reaching first place landing him a new world record this record was truly optimized there wasn't much more time to be saved the community really wanted to see the last second saved and have the ultimate blew yourself perfection a 34 point x the only way to do that though was with god glider strands that's the beauty of speedrunning it doesn't matter if you're speedrunning a category that takes three days beating a yu-gi-oh game or one that takes 30 some seconds hitting yourself with your own damn blue shell speedrunners will always push whatever category they run down to the absolute limit of what's humanly possible and two months later that's exactly what happened [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] skillose had done it 34.867 seconds the first ever 34 second blew yourself a frame perfect item box 3.2 seconds to reach first place and .05 seconds to use the blue shell nearly 5 000 attempts in total he was 10 frames away from the perfect time of 34.7 seconds and that's where the record stands today thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Skilloz

Views: 1,927,408

Keywords: blue yourself, blue, yourself, mario kart, blue yourself mario kart, mario kart 8 deluxe, blue shell, blue shell yourself, skilloz, world record, world record history, world record blue yourself, blue yourself world record, spiny shell, blue yourself mk8dx, blue yourself speedrun, speedrun, speed run, mario kart 8 deluxe speedrun, speedrun history

Id: JR4isHLuAko

Length: 41min 6sec (2466 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/dmnass]

You need "A Nu Start" vanity plate on your kart to go along with this. Great stuff, wild amount of effort

[u/ssjg0ten5reddit]

Watched the video, then realised.... it was made by skilloz.
Anime plot twist of the year.
Still, great video, loved it.

[u/Demaculus]

Amazing video really enjoyed it. Throw an end card on that video and hopefully gain some subscribers. Right now the video just fades to black.