A VIDEO HISTORY OF THE A BUTTON CHALLENGE
April 25, 2021
Bismuth has just posted a comprehensive video of the early history of the A Button Challenge which may be of interest to those visiting this site. I didn't create the challenge but I was one of the first people to promote the challenge and record my scores.
As the video notes, in 2008 I set up a page where people could upload their scores which were added into an automatically-generated leaderboard. However, it never really took off; perhaps in part because I didn't integrate it into the site well. In 2009 I planned to unify the database for the star times and ABC scores and make complete competition pages for both of them. However, a few computer failures in addition to working full-time on a Master's degree resulted in me neglecting the site. Around this time some players became frustrated with the slow site updates so they created their own site—resulting in less of a need for this site and further decreasing my motivation.
I'm a bit sad that I dropped the ball but I'm keeping the site archived for posterity. In 2019 a server upgrade broke my old PHP scripts so I converted all dynamically-generated pages to static pages. This included the Video Quiz run by Robert Z and the Star Time Competition run by ameba2. A long overdue congratulations to Myles and Filimonas for winning those! I hope keeping these pages up might bring back some happy memories for some people. Thanks everyone for your support over the years. :)
P.S. One inaccuracy in Bismuth's video—I was a high school student when I started this site.
MYLES BUKRIM CHEATED IN HIS 16-STAR SPEED RUN
April 3, 2015
Regrettably, it has come to my attention that Myles Bukrim's speed run which has been advertised on this page for nearly 7 years was recently discovered to not be recorded in a single take. Responding to the discovery, Myles said:
The video was spliced. The allegations are true. The evidence speaks for itself.
Formerly one of the most well-respected SM64 players, this is truly unfortunate news. While explaining himself, Myles gave the reasoning that he thought "cheating was growing out of control in this game". As one of the primary people responsible for verifying SM64 records over the timeframe in question, I take such allegations personally. To the best of my knowledge, none of the records archived on this website were achieved by cheating, although some were accepted on the honor system. If anyone has any evidence of cheating that I was not aware of, please contact me (cbright).
I have also updated the 16-star record page with the times of the current world record as recorded by MarioRuns. A lot has happened in the intervening time, and the current record is almost 3 minutes faster than Myles' claimed time!
THE IMPOSSIBLE COIN OBTAINED
July 23, 2014
I've been informed that the impossible coin has been obtained.
NEW 16-STAR SPEED RUN RECORD: 17 MINUTES, 31 SECONDS! [UPDATE: FAKE]
June 2, 2008
Last month the legendary Myles Bukrim completed an amazingly clean 16-star run, finishing the entire game (from first gaining control of Mario to Bowser's final star) in a mere seventeen and a half minutes. You can watch the video on YouTube — a symphony in three parts — or download the run (courtesy wrvids.com). The run should also be available on SDA in the near future.
This is the first known improvement to the record since Marius 'Holy Moly' Mollenhauer and Jacob 'LeCoureur103' Cannon battled over the record during the summer of 2005. Marius claimed to have a time of 18:14 and Jacob claimed a time of 18:08, but the battle fizzled out after spezzafer's 16:25 tool-assisted test run was released. Except for a 19:01 video from Marius, their videos never made it online. [Update July 6, 2017: Marius' video was also discovered not to be recorded in a single take.] Thus, Myles' video beats the fastest available video by a minute and a half. Star choices and times for various videos are available on this page, including an old run Myles himself made in 2005.
We've already seen how Myles dominates the races, but his star times are also top notch and on the last update he passed Thiago in our points ranking. Congratulations Myles!
On an unrelated note, the http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cbright/sm64/ link is going to stop working shortly; simply stick to www.sm64.com.
NEW A-BUTTON CHALLENGE RANKING
March 2, 2008
In December I was talking with Robert Z and he said I should update my A Button Competition page to include scores and videos from other people (like with the star times). Also, he suggested I have separate rankings for TAS-achieved scores (i.e., with save states and slowdown) and scores achieved in "Real Time". Well, the world record page has been up for over a week now and it allows anyone to submit their own scores. It seems to have worked pretty well; there's at least one score (TAS or Real Time) listed for every star, and 96 record videos, including 66 from Thiago Trujillo. Thanks to everyone who has submitted! Expect more pages like this in the future as I am starting to revamp the site...
GAME COMPLETED WITH ZERO STARS!!
December 2, 2007
The ultimate goal in Super Mario 64 sequence-breaking has now been achieved — completing the game with 0 stars. Although this site isn't specifically about tool-assisted videos, again I must note the major new revelation which reveals to us just how much is actually possible in SM64. From the same people that brought you the 1-star run, AKA & Swordless Link now present SM64 beaten in 5 minutes, 47 seconds. The backwards long jump has really been perfected and is now used to bypass the lobby pillar glitch as well as warp directly to the basement door after beating Bowser 1. From 70, to 50, to 31, to 16, to 1, to 0... the backwards long jump has proved to be very useful indeed. The only other thing I can say is... go watch it.
GAME COMPLETED WITH ONLY 1 STAR
August 10, 2007
It had been talked about as a possibility for years, but now it's finally been done. Yes, only 1 star... less than 1.5% of what is supposed to be possible! Using tool-assistance, Swordless Link and AKA have managed to backwards long jump on the short staircase before the 30-star door and build up enough speed to pass right through it. Thus, the MIPS glitch (which requires 15 stars) is no longer required, and with the addition of another glitch which makes backwards long jumping possible in the lobby, the 8-star door can be passed through as well. Unfortunately, the glitches used require a very precise sequence of button presses and thus do not seem to be possible on an actual N64 console. You can check out their video submission here. Is there any room for improvement on this result? Well, bypassing the Dire, Dire Docks entrance would lead to a zero star run, but that requires more speed then seems to be possible on the staircase. Congratulations to everyone who helped make this a possibility.
NEW KOOPA 1 RECORD & OTHER UPDATES
August 8, 2007
Myles Bukrim has done it again! By utilizing the Wing Cap and a modified version of the Koopa 1 warping route he completed the race in 15"6 -- which is faster than the old cannon strategy by about 0.3 seconds (Myles has 15"9 using the cannon and Thiago has claimed to have 15"8 since last year, but it is unknown if he used any extra tricks). A video of his time is available on YouTube. In his GameFAQs topic [now archived] I mentioned that landing with the Wing Cap is a bit slow, since unfortunately the fastest way to stop flying is to lose the Wing Cap altogether, which only happens after a set amount of time. Well, Alex Penev determined the precise moment at which to start the race at so that the Wing Cap runs out just when it's time to land, and completed the race in a mere 14"9! A video of his time is also available on YouTube. Congratulations to both of these superb players!
In other news... I have updated the GameFAQs topic archive with the 'Secrets' discussions part 5 and 6. From now on I will be archiving the topics in the new GameFAQs layout, which can be viewed in multiple different styles. At the bottom of the archive page I added a style selector so that you can view the new topics in your favourite style. Your browser must support alternate stylesheets, JavaScript and cookies (to remember your preference), which luckily works in IE6, which is still used often (much to my dismay).
Also, if you've ever wanted to change the items available in some courses, you're in luck. VLTone has been hard at work decoding the SM64 ROM, and has released the very first SM64 level editor. Simply incredible work! This should help us understand certain parts of the game in even more detail. For example, I looked through the 1UPs in every course and found that, after all these years, was missing one in my list! There's a 7th hidden in Bowser in the Fire Sea...
Finally, I just wanted to mention that today marks the five-year anniversary of the death of David Wonn's Unique Video Game Glitches (the last glitch update was on August 8, 2002). I remember that when I first beat the game with 31 stars thanks to the BLJ, I didn't reveal my method immediately because I was planning on letting David Wonn reveal the trick on his website. It's a good thing that didn't happen, or else we would still be waiting for the update... ;)
P.S. David Wonn was also the guy who said "eggs appear to be easier to set up during the equinox"... however, don't fall for that.
SM64.COM TWO-YEAR ANNIVERSARY
June 29, 2007
Time flies... the domain www.sm64.com launched two years ago today. Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but things are looking up: Myles Bukrim is back and has started a new star times competition over at GameFAQs. Since the entire competition list was growing large and becoming more tedious to update manually, I have finally set up a database that contains everyone's scores and put together a system that allows the listing to be created automatically. This will allow me update the times much more easily, as well as allow the creation of much improved statistics, such as a point system. For now I have updated the fastest star times page to display the current world records, instead of my personal times.
In other (belated) news, shortly after the last update, DigiLuigi was able to collect all 63 coins on Tower of the Wing Cap, and make a video available. Since then Filimonas has done the same and made a video as well. Considering that for years I thought the best score possible was 53 or 54 coins, and never seriously considered that collecting every coin was possible, this is quite an amazing achievement! Also shortly after the last update, while using an emulator and playing in slow-motion, ameba2 was able to collect "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" without using the cannon, making this the 115th possible capless, cannonless star. The method uses some tricky backwards long jumping though, so it hasn't yet been duplicated on a console. On the subject of backwards long jumping, I have just put up a page with a short history of the trick.
Thanks to everyone who has supported the site! In the last two years there have been 35352 visits to the site (where a visit is counted if someone hasn't been to the site in the last 30 minutes) and 154485 pageloads.
FASTEST STAR VIDEOS & TOWER OF THE WING CAP
December 10, 2006
I just put up a new fastest star videos page, which contains video links to the fastest known videos available. Currently there are 14 from me, 2 from Steven Carlson, and 1 from GenericMan, Nate Bonnett, Filimonas Antonakis and Robert Z. (Thanks to Robert for giving me the idea.) I think this will inspire everyone to produce even more videos...
In other news, after being forgotten about for years, the "Tower of the Wing Cap" coin collecting challenge has finally seen some new competition! There are 63 coins in the level, and the challenge is to get as many of them as possible. My old highscore was 53, but in Robert's video quiz on GameFAQs, Filimonas used a new strategy and managed to get 57 coins. Then, Thiago Trujillo uses another strategy to get 58 coins, and then 59 coins. Filimonas gives it another try and gets 60 coins! It looks like even more are possible, maybe even all 63... Incredible!
NEW 120 STAR SPEEDRUN: 2 HOURS, 10 MINUTES!
October 22, 2006
The Speed Demos Archive has posted a new 120 star run for SM64, by Peter 'Dragorn' Branam-Lefkove, completed on September 14, 2006. With an outstanding time of 2:09:40, this beats Jeremy Taylor's previous time of 2:57:47 by 48 minutes and 7 seconds! As you can probably imagine, many advanced and somewhat-risky strategies were required to achieve this time (Dire, Dire Docks red coins poleless?!). I have compiled a complete listing his individual star completion times (using the same timing method as in the star times competition). You can also view his times sorted by star collection order and course order. This data should be useful to all future speed-runners, especially as it represents "real-world" times actually possible on a speed-run, compared to the times in the star times competition which employ riskier strategies and assume a completed file.
YES, I'M STILL ALIVE!
June 29, 2006
I haven't updated much for several months now, but I hope to add in some new stuff over the summer, including some challenge/glitch/trick descriptions. As well, I continue to update the Fastest Star Times Competition, and lately there has been some activity there. My latest videos are Behind Chain Chomp's Gate and To the Top of the Fortress. Thanks to everyone who have sent in times; keep it up! One year ago today I moved the site over to the www.sm64.com domain. Since then, there have been 11451 visitors browsing the site.
78 COINLESS STARS!
August 24, 2005
On 8/19/2005 Filimonas Antonakis informed the GameFAQs board that he managed to get "Pyramid Puzzle" as the 78th coinless star. Although it was already known that this star was possible to get coinless, the only way it was done previously was using save states on an emulator. Filimonas proved that it was possible to get activate all 5 checkpoints consecutively without using save states in between. The technique is to carefully jump over each of the 5 coins and kick right above them without getting the coin. With exact timing, the checkpoint will be activated but the coin will remain.
If you're a visitor of that board, you may remember that in December of last year "qqwref" had already gotten this star coinless after using many save states. He said that "...with practice I think it could be doable", but no one wanted to spend the time and attempt it because it seemed to require too much luck. Well, after Filimonas succeeded, I decided to give it a try myself. After several hours of practising and a lot of mistakes, I finally did it as well. I had 4 checkpoints activated about 10 times before finally getting all 5. Here is a video of each checkpoint activation. Good luck if anyone else wants to give it a try!
SEVERAL NEW VIDEOS
August 17, 2005
There are several new videos available that I've made recently, including a 16"0 Footrace with Koopa the Quick. A big thanks to Scott Kessler of www.vortiginous.com who has provided me with some webspace to host these videos. Also, please note that all of the videos require the DivX codec to view. A few highlights: 16"0 Koopa 1, 10"3 Koopa 2, and getting onto the castle roof from both the right and left side. The full collection of my videos is found here.
"STAR TIMES COMPETITION" PAGE UP
August 4, 2005
I've collected all the fastest star times of those that have posted them, ranked them, and put them all on this page. The following people submitted times: Pablo Acevedo, Filimonas Antonakis, Curtis Bright, Myles Bukrim, Jacob Cannon and Rob Cloutier. A big thanks to everyone! Hopefully now that they're ranked it will motivate some new improvements... I plan to work on some of my lacking times.
PRESENTING... SOME NEW TIMES!
July 16, 2005
It's been rather quiet this year in the koopa/slide races, besides several improvements from Myles Bukrim (that put him in the lead). But recently, Alex Penev has been playing again, and within a few days dropped his rematch time from 11"1 down to tie Myles' 9"9! He also tied the world record 80-coin slide time of 20"4. (Perhaps he is going to try and take back the lead from Myles?) Because these new times, I was motivated to start playing rematch again, and set 10"5.
How have we both made an improvement in the rematch? This has to do with Myles revealing in detail (with video) how he sets up the koopa shell in this race. (One of those "why didn't I think of that?" tricks.) By continually punching out the koopa towards the water, and continually letting the koopa return back into the shell, you can place the shell higher on the beach than normal. Now, after talking to koopa, hold right and watch where Mario falls... that's where you want to place the shell.
Also, if you haven't seen LeCoureur103's 70-star speed run yet, then I recommend that you take a look. There are still a few more things I want to say, but overall this is a very well put together run. Even if you've seen a lot of the tricks before, it is still worth watching because so many of them are done flawlessly, even in the risky parts! (It is a lot harder than it looks to play so consistent for an hour, because of the sheer number of easy mistakes that you can make...) Also, I have put up a listing of all his star times in this run. These should be helpful when planning new runs.
SITE UPDATE... WWW.SM64.COM
June 29, 2005
Finally, the site update that I have been talking about for a while is up! The layout has been re-done internally, although it was designed to look quite similar to the old layout. Also, I've moved the site away from geocities because it was starting to outgrow it. I also picked up the simple domain name www.sm64.com, which redirects to the site at www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cbright/sm64. Pages for the "other courses" have been put up as well. Now that the update is finished, I would like to add extra content to the site, for example, pages on various challenges, and more detailed pages about some of the bigger glitches. I've noticed that there really aren't that many Super Mario 64 pages on the web, and many of them are quite outdated now. Thus, my plan is to try to fill that void. I hope you enjoy it!
On another note... there's a new 70-star speed run video available by LeCoureur103, which beats the previous record by over 10 minutes! I'll probably be posting some more detailed comments about it coming up.
FASTEST STAR TIMES WEEKLY VIDEO COMPETITION
May 12, 2005
The first round of a challenge started by Rob Cloutier in this topic has just concluded. The first challenge was to record a video of your fastest time for "Red coins on the floating isle" in Whomp's Fortress. There were three entries the first week: Rob Cloutier, Myles Bukrim and Curtis Bright. I have uploaded each of their videos and they are currently available at http://members.shaw.ca/supermario64/. Although the videos cannot be compared with perfectly, you can draw some conclusions by examining the videos. I'll count the last complete white screen (in the opening) as frame 0, and count the video finished on the frame that shows that star has been touched. Here are the results:
Curtis - 1017 frames - 33.90 seconds
Myles - 1453 frames - 48.43 seconds
Rob - 1520 frames - 50.67 seconds
All the videos were recorded at 30 frames per second, although Rob's video was done on an emulator. These times are not completely accurate, but a fairly good indicator of what the actual time was.
Personally, I was surprised that everyone chose a different route! I've seen lots of Myles' videos in the past and was actually expecting him to use a route similar to or the same as mine. By the way, there are some new videos of Myles' in the records section. Right now Myles holds the record for every SM64 race recorded by N64HS!
77 COINLESS STARS!
March 26, 2005
Wow, I didn't think this would happen... the "Behind Chain Chomp's Gate" star is now possible without opening the gate, and therefore possible coinless! It was just discovered by "MarioSuperFan" on the GameFAQs SM64 board. Here's a video that I just made of the glitch. I used a slightly different method... instead of dropping him, I jumped with him, and he pushed me through in the air. Like I said on the board, my only problem is that now I can never say anything is impossible in this game ever again! In the past I had tried to get into his gate, of course, but after many failures I had to dismiss it as being impossible. I guess it's a good thing that some people will just never give up! Thanks to MarioSuperFan!
MYLES BUKRIM SETS 9"9 ON REMACTH!
March 7, 2005
Yesterday, Myles Bukrim became the first person to break the 10 second barrier on "Rematch with Koopa the Quick". This improves on his previous best of exactly 10"0. Myles has repeatedly improved his time on this race, despite little competition from other SM64 players. The second best time of 11"1 has been held by Alex Penev for quite some time now (at least two years). Late in 2004 Andrew Kent matched his score of 11"1 after I had improved my own to 11"2. As you can see, Myles has dominated this race by a wide margin. He plans on creating a webpage to list some useful tips on this race, to hopefully help other players improve on their times. Great work, Myles!
2386 COINS OBTAINED [FAKE]
February 9, 2005
Congratulations to "DarkPhoenix84" from the GameFAQs SM64 message board, who just reported that he has collected all 255 coins from all three known infinite coins glitches, as well as every other coin in the 15 courses, bring his total up to 2386. Great work!
113 CAPLESS/CANNONLESS STARS!
February 5, 2005
Dom Dunc just released his trick to get Chuckya into the pipe... you have to slide along the sloped wall while carrying Chuckya! Awesome! I managed to do it, and now have 113 cc-less stars. Check out this page for more info.
YET ANOTHER NEW COIN GLITCH!!!
February 4, 2005
Dom Dunc has done it again! Back in December, I found a strange glitch in Wet-Dry World: if you brought Chuckya into the pipe to the town in Wet-Dry World, he would transform into random items. However, I was only able to get Chuckya into the pipe on an emulator using gameshark codes. But now, amazingly, Dom Dunc has done the impossible and managed to bring Chuckya into the pipe! He will be posting his method tomorrow, and has commented that the vital trick is "devilishly simple". In the mean time, I've been searching for ways to get Chuckya into the pipe to no avail. I can't wait to find out how he did it...
So what good is this trick? Well, for one thing, as long as the cannon and the caps in the town are not required, then another cap/cannonless star is possible - "Quick Race Through Downtown", because Chuckya can transform into the star itself. Secondly, the glitch makes coin duplication possible. Thus, it is theoretically possible to get 255 coins in the level. It would require you to perform the Chuckya Trick perfectly 52 times. This is required so that you can bring Chuckya into water. Here is a quick video I made of this trick. Here is the topic where Dom Dunc posted about the trick. Tomorrow should be very interesting...
A NEW TOTAL COIN SCORE TO AIM FOR: 2283!
February 3, 2005
It's official... with the new piranha plant coin glitch discovered by "Master Of Majora", Tiny-Huge Island becomes the second of the 15 courses with an infinite supply of coins. Now comes the hard part... actually getting 255 coins in the level on my file. At the very minimum, the glitch has to be done 32 times in a single run, and there are only 5 piranha plants to use. There is a little room for error, luckily, but since if you punch the plants too soon they will stop giving you coins, only 4 errors are allowed. So far I haven't been able to do the glitch as consistently as required, but I think it's just a matter of practising the timing. "Master Of Majora" has also completed the 255-coin money bags glitch, and currently has the highest known coin total of 2283 coins.
ANOTHER INFINITE COIN GLITCH?!
February 2, 2005
I don't have any time to try it out right now, but I thought I should post a quick note here anyway since it now looks like 255 coins will be possible in Tiny-Huge Island. Discovered by "Master Of Majora"... check out his topic on the GameFAQs SM64 board.
FINALLY: MY 70-STAR SPEED RUN
January 10, 2005
Today I finally completed that 70-star run that I've been meaning to do. Some info on the run as well as my star choices can be found here. Also, I've put up a new page that lists my fastest star times. On another note, I now have a Nintendo DS and Super Mario 64 DS. It's nice portable, but the game is not better than the original in my opinion. I may post some stuff about this game later... Happy new year to everyone!