Super Mario 64 speedrunners thought a trick that requires landing on a spot "the width of a red blood cell" was virtually impossible - now it's been done blindfolded

gamesradar.com:

Super Mario 64 speedrunners have broken the classic N64 platformer in what seems like every way imaginable - yet they still keep coming up with new tricks. In 2024, a new glitch was discovered that could save a second or two, but this trick was so precise it was considered effectively impossible for human runners. Cut to February 2025 and legendary speedrunner Bubzia has now done it in real time - while blindfolded.

The first star in Hazy Maze Cave, the game's sixth course, requires you to navigate through most of the level and ride the dinosaur Dorries back up to an island floating in an underground lake. As it turns out, this cavern is directly underneath a conspicuously placed sign in the course's starting area, and in April 2024, tool-assisted speedrunner Alexpalix1 built a TAS that let Mario use that sign to get a double wall push and clip past the wall and fall all the way into the cavern below - a significantly faster way of reaching the star.

The problem is that this trick is so precise it would be effectively impossible for a speedrunner to do it in real time. "In order to get a double wall push here," fellow speedrunner Krithalith explained in a video breaking down the trick, "Mario has to hit the seam between the two wall triangles of the left wall of the sign. This is floating-point perfect. If you pick a random Y value along this seam, there's a 1 in 135 chance that there exists a single Z floating point value that will allow you to get the double wall push."

Things really get intense here when you consider how small those Z values are. "A single Z unit here is 1/2048th of a unit," Krithalith continued. "In real life, this would translate to roughly the width of a red blood cell. This means that if you try to completely YOLO this strat, the odds of success can be calculated to be somewhere in the range of 1 in 1 million to 1 in 10 million. Clearly, it will not be possible to find a setup for this strat that is even remotely reasonable."

Krithalith went