That's primarily because they were sticking to Twin Galaxies' rules, which still prohibit the use of unintended glitches to complete the game faster. speedrunners struggled to beat the game any faster than in 5:08. In the early 2000s, many Super Mario Bros.

What goes into a feat like this? Join me for a quick primer. Niftski's performance approaches the theoretical limits of what a human can achieve in this seminal game. Niftski's performance is within spitting distance of the machine-generated perfection of tool-assisted speedruns, which use emulator-recorded frame-perfect inputs to push a game to its limits. That might not sound too impressive on the surface it's only about a quarter-second under the world record set by Miniland just two months ago, after all, and less than a second under the first sub-4:56 time (4:55.913) set by Kosmic over two years ago.īut once you understand everything that needed to come together to break SMB's 4:55 barrier, the feat becomes something akin to speedrunning's version of the four-minute mile. in under four minutes and 55 seconds (4:54.948, to be precise).

faster than this.Įarlier this week, speedrunner Niftski became the first player to ever beat Super Mario Bros. You'll likely never see a human beat Super Mario Bros.

Super mario bros. speedrun world record