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Speedrunning had a little bit of everything this week: a gigantic Mario Kart milestone, microscopic Super Mario Bros. improvements, old games getting fresh attention, and enough charity marathon energy to make the calendar feel like a route map. It was the kind of week where the front page could jump from a serious world-record announcement to a sandwich joke without missing a beat.
The headline story belongs to Logan, who completed the remarkable tour of Mario Kart World by claiming a world record on all 40 tracks. Elsewhere, KingofJonnyBoy reached a new low in SMB1, yelia64 matched TAS-level precision on a controller, and a four-year grind paid off in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. The community also gathered for marathons, welcomed a new Tribes-inspired game, and continued proving that “speedrunning” is less a genre than a particularly determined way of looking at games.
There was even room for a questionable BLJ setup involving bread, bacon, and a fork. We’ll get to that. Here are the biggest stories from the week.
Logan Completes the Mario Kart World Map
Logan has now held a world record on every track in Mario Kart World, reaching a perfect 40-for-40 sweep after the game’s 1.8.0 update added ten new courses. The achievement has a pleasingly clean shape: first 30 tracks, then the new batch, then one final record that reportedly demanded more than 40 hours of streaming before the last piece clicked into place.
The wording sparked the week’s most useful bit of pedantry. Several commenters pointed out that “40/40 world records” can sound like Logan currently holds all 40 records, rather than having held each record at least once. That distinction matters in a leaderboard game, where a record can change hands while the achievement remains permanently meaningful. The accomplishment is still extraordinary; the debate simply illustrates how carefully speedrunning communities measure claims.
There is also something wonderfully old-school about the feat. A new game arrives, runners map its corners, and one player decides to visit every single category at the top. It is part route development, part endurance test, and part stubborn refusal to leave a box unchecked. Whether the records stay in Logan’s name is a separate question. The map has been conquered, and the receipt is forty separate entries in the history of the game.
SMB1 Keeps Turning Tenths into Events
KingofJonnyBoy put up a 4:54.498 in Super Mario Bros. any%, shaving 0.167 seconds off the previous personal best and becoming the fourth player to reach the low 4:54 range. On a casual stopwatch, that is barely a blink. In SMB1, it is a statement about movement, consistency, and the willingness to repeat a run until an entire chain of tiny decisions lines up.
The Reddit reaction was brief but telling: one commenter called it a long time coming from an SMB1 legend and immediately looked toward a top-three finish. That is the strange scale of elite Mario running. A sub-five-minute run is already incomprehensible to most players, yet the meaningful conversation happens inside fractions of a second and around the exact ordering of a handful of specialists.
What makes the run compelling is not just the number on the end screen. It is the accumulated history behind it. Every “small” PB carries a ledger of failed attempts, rescued levels, and routes that were once considered too demanding. KingofJonnyBoy’s 4:54 is another reminder that in a mature category, progress rarely arrives as a dramatic breakthrough. More often, it arrives wearing the disguise of 0.167 seconds.
A Controller Joins the TAS Conversation
Yelia64 tied the 8-4 individual-level TAS time in SMB1 while playing on controller, following an earlier keyboard tie from a few months ago. The accomplishment is notable even before the leaderboard context arrives: this is one of those end-of-game segments where every input seems to have been polished until there is no visible room left for a human hand.
The comments supplied the useful perspective. Yelia64 is only one of four players to achieve the feat, and the other three are the top three SMB runners in the world. That turns a technical “tie” into a snapshot of the category’s summit. A TAS is not a mystical standard so much as an aggressively optimized target, but matching it on human hardware still feels like walking into a room where the furniture has been arranged by mathematics.
There is a satisfying contrast between this and the broader any% race. A full-game run asks for hundreds of decisions to survive in sequence; an IL asks you to isolate one slice and make it nearly immaculate. Both are hard in different ways. This week, yelia64 made the isolated version look almost casual, which is speedrunning’s favorite trick: presenting an absurd achievement as a clean line through a familiar level.
Four Years Later, Buzz Lightyear Gets Its Moment
In a corner of the speedrunning world far away from Nintendo’s spotlight, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command received a new-game-plus all-bosses world record at 37:46.540. The post’s title says “after four years,” and that timeline is the real hook: this was not a record picked up on a launch weekend or discovered during a trend cycle. It was a long conversation with one game, finally ending in a sub-38-minute answer.
The runner described choking three potential 35-minute paces earlier in the same session before finally getting the record. That detail is more revealing than any superlative. A speedrun is often a contest against the game, but late in a grind it becomes a contest against the memory of what almost happened. The successful run has to carry the knowledge of those misses without letting it turn the next mistake into a catastrophe.
Reddit’s response was delightfully simple: “hell yeah,” followed by someone remembering the game. That is the magic of these smaller categories. A record can be technically demanding and historically important without needing a giant audience. Sometimes the victory is shared by the runner and the handful of people who still remember exactly where they were when a licensed game took over their afternoon.
The Marathon Calendar Is Absolutely Packed
Two major community events were live this week. NSG Fall 2026 brought a Norwegian marathon to Twitch in support of NRK TV-aksjonen and the Norwegian Refugee Alliance, while the ZeldaSpeedruns community revived its charity marathon after a break dating back to 2021. The ZSR event promised more than 65 hours of Zelda runs, randomizers, and challenges from runners around the world.
The posts did not need much salesmanship. A simple “there’s a Norwegian speedrunning marathon going on?” captured the pleasant surprise of discovering an event that might not be on every runner’s default radar. That is one of the best things about marathon season: the schedule becomes a tour of communities, categories, and commentators that you would not necessarily find by following only the biggest records.
ZSR’s return carries an extra bit of weight because it is both a fundraiser and a reunion. Zelda speedrunning has always had room for spectacle—randomizers, challenge runs, and the occasional route that looks like it was designed by a mischievous puzzle box—but a marathon turns that variety into a shared room. The weekend’s real record was the community itself showing up again.
Minecraft Finishes in 1:37, with a Footnote from Physics
A Minecraft random-seed run finished in 1:37 with “radiation assisted” in the title, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes speedrunning feel like it has wandered into a laboratory. The clip drew attention not only for the wild time, but because viewers thought the explanation was unusually clear. The runner did not just demonstrate an improbable result; they made the improbable legible.
That distinction matters in technical categories. A fast run can be impressive from a distance, but an explained fast run gives the audience a way into the machinery: why the seed works, what the unusual assistance changes, and which parts are repeatable rather than miraculous. The best educational speedrun videos leave you feeling that you have learned a route, even when you have absolutely no intention of attempting it.
At 1:37, there is not much time for Minecraft’s usual sightseeing. The run is less a journey through a world than a controlled detonation of favorable circumstances. That is precisely why the explanation matters. When the clock is this small, the story has to expand around it.
RIDGERUNNERS Wants to Be Your Next Movement Game
A new personal best in the demo for RIDGERUNNERS clocked the first tutorial level at 43.36 seconds. The game is pitched as a Tribes-inspired time-attack racer, combining skiing, rockets, grapples, and an unusual hammer. In other words, it arrives preloaded with the ingredients that make a speedrunner stare at a level and immediately wonder how much of it can be skipped.
The runner’s own description made the invitation explicit: there are already plenty of ways to approach the route, and surely someone out there can go faster. Reddit answered with a small chorus of “this looks sick” and “I miss Tribes,” which is about as healthy a launch signal as a movement-focused game can ask for. Nostalgia may open the door, but a time-attack course still needs enough mechanical depth to make people stay.
The tutorial being the current benchmark is part of the charm. New games do not begin with a settled meta; they begin with a rough sketch and a lot of unanswered questions. Where is the fastest grapple? Can the hammer preserve momentum? Is the intended line actually the slow line? The first leaderboard is not merely ranking players—it is a public record of a game learning what it wants to be.
The Week’s Most Important Setup Was Lunch
And then there was the post asking whether a particular BLJ setup was good, accompanied by an image that turned out to involve bread and bacon. The top comment immediately identified the problem: “The fork makes this tool-assisted.” Other replies escalated into a mock technical review, worrying about assembly areas, pre-stacked toast, and whether stuffing ingredients between slices counted as pre-assembly.
It is a perfect example of why speedrunning communities are fun even when nobody is setting a record. The joke works because everyone understands the language of legality, setups, and tool assistance. A sandwich can become a TAS, a route can require an assembly area, and suddenly lunch is being evaluated with the same suspicious precision as a controller input.
There is no meaningful leaderboard lesson here, unless you count “do not report bacon as spam.” But the post did something the biggest world records sometimes cannot: it got hundreds of people to collaborate on a shared bit. In a week full of heroic grinds, microscopic gains, and marathon schedules, the community also found time to ask whether a sandwich was legal. That feels like a healthy split.
This week showed speedrunning at several scales at once. Logan’s 40-track campaign was broad and cumulative; SMB1’s best moments were measured in frames and fractions; the Buzz Lightyear record was a private endurance battle finally made public; and the marathon events turned individual runs into collective momentum. Even the new-game posts were looking toward the future, inviting more runners to find routes that are not finished yet.
That range is what keeps the scene from becoming a simple parade of numbers. A world record matters, but so does the fourth-place runner finally breaking a barrier, the player matching a TAS on a controller, the obscure game getting its moment, and the beginner-friendly event making room for another viewer. Speedrunning is a competition, but it is also an archive, a workshop, a charity show, and occasionally a sandwich tribunal.
Keep an eye on those Mario Kart leaderboards, enjoy the marathon streams while they are live, and give the emerging movement games a chance before their routes harden into doctrine. The next week will probably bring another record nobody expected, another argument about wording, and at least one setup that needs peer review. See you next week.
Source: reddit.com