I am nowhere near an expert on the Super Mario Brothers games but this brand new world record speedrun of SMB3 in 3 minutes is both confusing and fascinating. Before last month, the record speed run of SMB3 was about 11 minutes, but Zikubi cut the time down by 75% by actively reprogramming the game as he played it in order to open a wormhole to the ending.
In an explanation of a much earlier speed run record the blogger Kottke explains the beauty he sees in such pursuits:
In the video analysis of this speedrun, if you forget the video game part of it and all the negative connotations you might have about that, you get to see the collective effort of thousands of people over more than three decades who have studied a thing right down to the bare metal so that one person, standing on the shoulders of giants in a near-perfect performance, can do something no one has ever done before. Progress and understanding by groups of people happens exactly like this in manufacturing, art, science, engineering, design, social science, literature, and every other collective human endeavor…it’s what humans do. But since playing sports and video games is such a universal experience and you get to see it all happening right on the screen in front of you, it’s perhaps easier to grok SMB speedrun innovations more quickly than, say, how assembly line manufacturing has improved since 2000, recent innovations in art, how we got from the flip phone to iPhone X in only 10 years, or how CRISPR happened.
