Super Mario 64 speedrunners find the biggest time save in 20 years with a legendary trick thought to be a meme

gamesradar.com:

Super Mario 64 speedrunners have finally found a way to consistently perform a trick that's eluded the community for years, and it might just be the biggest time save in over two decades.

Autoscrollers - levels where you have to simply wait for the game to take you to your goal with no way to speed up the process - are the bane of speedrunning, and there's a big one in Super Mario 64. In the game's final world, Rainbow Ride, there's a mission called The Big House in the Sky, which forces you to ride a magic carpet up to the top of a big house in order to collect a Star. Even world record speedruns in Mario 64's 120 Star category have to take that long, slow carpet ride, such that runners often use this stage as the venue to grind other objectives while waiting for the carpet.

But it's not theoretically impossible to skip the carpet ride. There's a trick where you can pick up a Bob-omb in a glitchy state where it's constantly at the beginning of an explosion, pushing Mario away without actually hurting him. You can ride that momentum to reach otherwise impossible speeds that will give you just enough height to do a few very precise wall kicks to climb up the exterior of the house and grab the Star, saving nearly a minute off the normal route.

However, that trick requires so many precise inputs that it's nearly impossible to pull off, and at the end of a lengthy 120 Star run, for which the current world record sits at 1:37:35, it's far more trouble than it's worth. The carpetless trick has basically always been the realm of tool-assisted speedrunners, who program uber-precise inputs to create runs that are out of the realm of human possibility.

Carpetless was actually performed by a human runner named Xiah7s in 2019, who