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Speedrunning had one of those weeks where the joke became the strategy, an ancient mystery turned out to have a blinking rhythm, and several games that had been resting quietly emerged with a crowbar and a fresh route. Niftski pushed Super Mario Bros. any% within touching distance of a TAS tie while dressed and speaking as Mario. In Ocarina of Time, the community got an answer to one of 100%’s most stubborn sources of misery: Dampe’s behavior is not random in the way runners once feared.
The wider feed was just as lively. Banjo-Kazooie lost almost nine minutes to a new skip, a human runner performed a supposedly TAS-only Final Fantasy X trick, and Inindo: Way of the Ninja suddenly found itself staring at a possible hour-plus revolution. Even the marathon calendar had news, with AGDQ 2027 revealing a games list that immediately sent viewers into speculation mode.
The common thread is discovery: sometimes it comes from painstaking reverse engineering, sometimes from a decades-old animation, and sometimes from putting on a hat and committing to the bit. Here are the biggest stories from the week.
Niftski’s Mario Method Turns a Bit Into a Two-Frame Masterpiece
The headline is straightforward: Niftski lowered the Super Mario Bros. any% world record to 4:54.299, a two-frame improvement that leaves the human record just two frames away from the famous no-left-plus-right TAS tie. The circumstances are what make it feel like a speedrunning fable. During a stream, chat hit a $1,000 donation goal asking Niftski to larp as Mario for the rest of the broadcast. The hat and moustache went on, the voice arrived, and after a few struggles with 1-2, a world record appeared.
According to the community breakdown, the run was not magical execution of every possible frame. Niftski dropped one frame in the first room and another in the second, then delivered a flawless turnaround room, water section, and final room. Even Bowser cooperated. That is the cruel beauty of a near-perfect classic-game run: the record is not just about doing everything right, but about surviving the handful of places where the game gets to vote.
Reddit supplied the two explanations that speedrunning prefers when science is unavailable: the absurdity reduced the nerves, or Mario’s spirit took over. The grounded version is still fascinating. Niftski said the performance helped keep the pressure under control, turning a novelty into a reminder that mental state is part of execution. A costume cannot replace practice, but a ridiculous constraint can stop a runner from treating every attempt like a referendum on their skill.
Now the question is whether those missing two frames can disappear. The run is close enough to the TAS frontier that every small imperfection becomes historical trivia. If it remains the record forever, it will be remembered as the run where Mario’s voice came out of nowhere and the timeline froze two frames short. If it falls, the larp will still have earned its place in the toolbox. Method speedrunning has arrived, and it apparently has a moustache.
Dampe’s Eyelids Solve Ocarina’s Great 100% Headache
For years, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 100% runners have dealt with a particularly unfriendly kind of uncertainty. The route is demanding enough without a critical heart piece being governed by an outcome that seemed like pure RNG. This week, the mystery got a wonderfully specific solution: the result is tied to how quickly Dampe, the grave digger, blinks.
The correction from the community was important as well as funny. The initial framing called the phenomenon Dante RNG; the character in question is Dampe. Once that was clarified, the real discovery could take center stage. The timing of the blink provides a visible relationship to the heart piece outcome, turning a miserable lottery into something runners can study and potentially manipulate with confidence.
That is the kind of discovery that makes old categories feel newly alive. A game can be run for decades and still contain a useful signal hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to connect an animation to a result. One commenter recalled watching Ocarina of Time 100% runs in the mid-2010s and asked whether a recent wave of discoveries was underway. It certainly feels that way: the community is not merely polishing a route, but reopening the game’s assumptions.
There is something deeply Ocarina about the solution. The obstacle is not defeated by a louder input or a dramatic skip. It is defeated by watching a tiny character blink and realizing the game has been telling you the answer all along. Future runners may treat Dampe’s eyelids as basic routing information. For everyone else, they are a reminder that even background animation may be keeping frame-perfect secrets.
The New Meta Is Simple: Become the Protagonist
Niftski’s record generated its own follow-up: could getting into character revolutionize speedrunning? The joke post argues that other runners should immediately copy the strategy, and the replies happily imagine the consequences. The strongest answer was “method speedrunning,” a phrase that deserves to be printed on a training schedule.
Underneath the meme is a real performance question. Speedrunning is technical, but it is also performance under pressure. Runners build routines, manage nerves, and search for ways to keep attention in the present rather than on the timer. Speaking as Mario may sound like an elaborate distraction, yet distraction can break a cycle of overthinking. The runner still has to hit the inputs; they may simply stop hearing the internal commentator grading each one.
The community’s best jokes show how quickly speedrunning translates a personal trick into universal doctrine. Soon every game has a proposed character voice and every failed attempt has a lore explanation. A Silent Hill 2 runner joked about trying to become James Sunderland and ending up in a hole, a useful warning that not every immersion technique should be copied literally.
Whether this becomes a trend is beside the point. The story gives the scene permission to treat psychology as part of the route. A costume, a voice, a ritual, or a silly challenge may help a runner access the focus that practice built. The record is the proof, but the larger lesson is more interesting: optimization does not always look like adding intensity. Sometimes it looks like giving yourself permission to play.
Banjo-Kazooie Finds a Doorway to the Sub-40s
Banjo-Kazooie had one of the week’s biggest numerical shocks. A new any% run finished in 41:54, cutting almost nine minutes from the previous world record. The engine behind that leap is the 810 Note Door Skip, a discovery with enough force to make a sub-40-minute run look less like fantasy and more like an appointment waiting to be kept.
It is difficult to overstate what a nine-minute cut means in a mature category. This is not shaving a second from a familiar opening. A large route idea has changed the shape of the run, and the record is now a proof of concept. The runner has shown that the new line can survive an actual attempt; the next phase is making it reliable enough to survive repeatedly.
Reddit responded with excited pedantry: technically, a sub-40 run would be unprecedented because the current record is still over 41 minutes. The more revealing comments looked backward, asking for a history video because Banjo-Kazooie has changed so dramatically that any% and 100% once felt nearly identical, while now they sit about an hour apart.
Old games are not static categories waiting for nostalgia; they are living research projects. A route can remain familiar until one door, one note count, or one overlooked interaction changes the economy of the entire game. The sub-40 barrier is visible, and the race to reach it will tell us whether the new skip is a clean revolution or the beginning of a messier, more interesting one.
Final Fantasy X’s TAS-Only Wall Finally Cracks
Some discoveries make a category faster. Others change what runners believe is possible. In Final Fantasy X, the previously thought-to-be TAS-only Djose skip was performed by a human for the first time. It is not yet a route-ready replacement, but it is a major breach in a wall that had been treated as theoretical.
This is not a small convenience trick. Community discussion described a single reasonable attempt arriving around the four-hour mark, with theoretical savings of roughly twenty minutes and consequences for other parts of the route. That is an awful bargain for a casual reset and an irresistible one for a top runner: a huge reward hidden behind a late, difficult, route-disrupting checkpoint.
The gap between “performed once” and “usable in a run” is where speedrunning gets honest. A clip can prove that a human can execute an input sequence. A record attempt asks whether it can be reached with the right setup, executed under fatigue, and integrated with every downstream dependency. The discovery has cleared the first gate. Now the route has to decide whether the risk is worth building a new home around it.
The community called it the holy grail of FFX any%, and that description fits. Even runners unfamiliar with the category can recognize the shape: an old game, a trick once assigned to TAS territory, and a video that turns “impossible for humans” into “we need to test this properly.” The next world record may not use the skip immediately. But the category has been permanently reimagined.
Inindo Loses an Hour to a Walk in the Right Direction
Inindo: Way of the Ninja offered the week’s most gloriously strange route discovery. After reverse engineering and decompiling the game, a runner found an interaction involving the Tengu Wing fast-travel menu, combat exits, and a free southward input that ignores terrain flags. The practical headline is enormous: a 3:38 world record may have more than an hour available to save.
The trick sounds almost comically simple once explained. Open the menu, close it while the travel flag remains active, leave combat, and use the resulting movement in a way the map was never meant to allow. This is speedrunning alchemy: a tiny state-management oversight becomes a map-breaking machine. The route does not need a dramatic warp when the game is willing to let the runner keep walking through the rules.
One commenter noted that it was the third “just keep walking back and forth” skip discovered in a couple of weeks. That is both a joke and a useful description of how old games continue to surprise us. The mechanism may be sophisticated, but the result can look banal: a character crosses a space in a way that should not be possible, and suddenly the leaderboard’s scale changes.
Whether the full hour materializes will depend on route development, not just the discovery. Still, a possible run more than an hour faster than the current record can recruit an entire scene. Inindo has gone from obscure route to active laboratory, and the next chapter will be written by runners figuring out which parts of the game’s old logic can be politely persuaded to move south.
The Long Run Renaissance Goes Full Sonic
Not every achievement this week was about compressing a game into fewer minutes. Sonic Adventure‘s 100% category, an astonishing eight-hour undertaking, got a new world record holder for the first time in the 2020s. In a scene where a speedrun is often imagined as a sprint, this is an endurance event with a leaderboard attached.
The post framed the category’s resurgence as a complete change in understanding. What once looked like an obsolete version and relic of the past has become a thriving scene with dedicated runners, glitch hunters, and new talent. That evolution is easy to miss if you only check the top line of a leaderboard. A category can be transformed not only by a faster time, but by people deciding its weirdness is worth studying again.
The comments landed on the obvious irony: a Sonic run taking eight hours. They also landed on the less obvious achievement, which is stamina. Keeping high-level execution together for that long requires a different discipline from a four-minute classic. There are more opportunities for fatigue, more chances for a mistake to become a reset-worthy disaster, and more time for attention to drift.
That makes the new record a celebration of category diversity. Speedrunning can be finding a perfect line through a tiny game, or carrying a complicated route through an entire day. The timer measures both, but it does not describe the same challenge. This week, Sonic’s enormous 100% marathon reminded us that “fast” is only one form the hobby can take.
AGDQ 2027 Sets the Stage for the Next Generation
The AGDQ 2027 games list is out, and the first reactions captured a familiar mixture of excitement, surprise, and the slightly melancholy realization that the scene keeps moving. A standout comment called out Sekiro on a dance pad, while another noticed how many familiar names were missing and wondered whether a new generation was taking over.
That is what a games list does at its best. It is not just a schedule; it is a snapshot of what the community wants to watch now. Returning classics share space with experiments, unusual peripherals, and games whose communities have grown outside the traditional spotlight. The absence of an anticipated Ocarina of Time co-op randomizer disappointed some viewers, especially with the remaster in the conversation, but omissions help make a showcase feel curated rather than inevitable.
The dance-pad Sekiro tease is a perfect example of the marathon’s magic. A run can be technically excellent before the runner even begins, but presentation gives it a second life. The audience wants mastery, of course; it also wants the strange, theatrical, and unexpectedly difficult ways people choose to express that mastery.
With the list public, the waiting game begins: runners refine explanations, communities debate anticipated blocks, and viewers discover games they did not know they needed to learn. The schedule is still a promise rather than a performance, but it already tells us something important. The speedrunning future is not replacing the past so much as inviting it onto a bigger stage with new people holding the controller.
Put together, this week’s stories argue against the idea that speedrunning is merely about squeezing the last fraction from a solved game. A runner used a character voice to reach a record almost touching a TAS boundary. A blinking animation converted mystery into information. A note door, a travel flag, and a formerly impossible Final Fantasy X input opened routes that had not been visible before. Meanwhile, an eight-hour Sonic category and a new marathon lineup showed that the community keeps expanding sideways as well as getting faster.
The most encouraging part is how many stories leave the door open. The Mario record has two frames of suspense. Banjo-Kazooie has a sub-40 barrier. FFX still needs route surgery, and Inindo may have an hour waiting in the wings. Even the Dampe discovery is a beginning: once runners can see the game’s logic, they can ask what else has been hiding in the animations.
That is the weekly speedrunning cycle at its best: a record, a mystery, a joke, and a breakthrough feeding into one another until the impossible becomes a practice routine. Keep the moustache nearby, watch the grave digger’s eyelids, and never assume an old map is finished. See you next week.
Source: reddit.com