Mario 64 speedrunners have cracked a 10-year-old problem, turning it from a Twitch chat meme into a must-use strat using algorithms and raw determination

pcgamer.com:

The best thing about watching speedrunners is seeing just how far they'll go to break their favourite games. No matter how old a game is, no matter how 'solved' its speedrun may seem, there'll always be new surprises just around the corner.

Super Mario 64 has long been a favourite of the speedrunning community, and it's just had another massive tech discovery that'll likely be a part of any 120-star world records going forward, shaving off close to a minute of playtime. 

That might not sound like a lot, but the more perfected a speedrun gets, the more impressive saves like this get. Even a few seconds is huge when you get to the big leagues, but a whole minute? That makes this tech basically mandatory.

There's a level in Mario 64 called Rainbow Ride, which has a Star—a mission objective—called The Big House In The Sky. The typical route involves sitting pretty on a slow-moving carpet which, as you can imagine, is speedrunning poison. In 2013, a runner named Snark122 showed off a potential tactic using a bomb that allowed them to skip gaming's slowest joyride.

This, according to YouTuber Simply (who posted a fantastic summary earlier this week), «sparked a lot of discussion in the community [and] created a lot of comedians who thought it would be really funny to go into chats and spam 'do carpetless', not grasping the fact that it is nearly impossible to do.» This tech requires a whole lot of frame-perfect inputs, so it's not a reality outside of tool-assisted speedruns (called TAS in the community).

There was a non-TAS run of the strat in 2019 by runner Xiah7s (thanks Gamesradar), but runners need tech that's consistent and fast. There are a lot of things that can go awry in a 120-star run, which usually lasts about an