Mario Kart Trick Pulled Off After 27 Years
A gamer managed to pull off a Mario Kart speedrun that hasn't been successfully done in years.
A Mario Kart player just repeated a speedrun skip so difficult to execute that it took the gaming community years to repeat it. Apparently, 27 is a magic number when it comes to the Mario franchise, as one gamer managed to get the impossible 1-Up mushroom—which has a pretty terrifying origin—27 years after the game’s release.
As for the Mario Kart trick, according to Kotaku, YouTuber, Abyssoft, managed to pull off a speedrun skip in the Bowser’s Castle course in Mario Kart 64, which is so difficult to execute that no one has been able to repeat it for the past several years. The maneuver for this skip is very complex as it involves hitting a track wall at a certain angle with the aid of a speed mushroom item, and gamers have been oblivious to the trick for the better part of 27 years until it was introduced by a speedrunner named Forest64 in 2021.
For the majority of the Nintendo Kart 64 gaming community, Mario Kart usually involves timing the use of your items correctly and knowing how and when to drift. But speedrunners are an entirely different breed of gamers. They spend hours, days, and even months searching for a way to break the gameplay and skip ahead in games, usually by finding the invisible gap in the textures or by triggering a certain chain of events that would teleport them forward through in-game time and space. It’s not cheating or any unfair advantage; it’s actually an art form.
When Forest64 first executed this Mario Kart skip, the speedrunning community caught fire as everyone tried to replicate what he had done. However, it wasn’t until a few days back that Abyssoft managed to recreate the skip and shift some speedrunning records along the way. In fact, Abyssoft has an entire video about the breakdown of the skip, the inner workings behind it, and how speedrunners have become able to utilize this skip nearly 27 years after the game dropped.
Forest64 himself managed to pull off the skip in an actual run after spending more than 200 hours and thousands of attempts during testing. He beat the previous non-speedrun time by just four-tenths of a second, which was pretty impressive, as it both surpassed the original time and marked the first time the skip was successfully executed in actual play rather than speed run testing. Now that the Mario Kart skip has been recreated once again successfully, the speedrunning community is likely to incorporate it into the standard practices.
The speedrunning community aims to shorten their gameplay to reduce the time necessary to complete the entire mainline story of a game. And they’re much more widespread than just Mario Kart. For example, 2004’s Prince of Persia Warrior Within, a sequel to the Prince of Persia remake, which takes approximately 17 hours to complete entirely, takes speedrunners no more than half an hour for this special breed of gamer to complete.
Speedrunning has become so popular that some games, such as High on Life, now tell players which stuff they can skip. As for the Mario franchise, the influx of news regarding the gaming titles only reinforces the good news we received about the Mario film, which is already more successful than any Disney movie.
