TASaturday #25: Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64)

For the TASaturday #25, we picked up Super Mario 64, which originally came out on… well… the Nintendo 64! It’s by far one of the most well-known games from Nintendo, but also one of with the most speedruns (“regular” or Tool Assisted). And it’s actually the main reason we picked it up: it has quite a bit of TAS History.

At the beginning, players had to get 70 stars, but it went down to 16 stars once they found a trick involving “MIPS the Rabbit”. Of course, they didn’t stop there: they just kept on searching and experimenting, in order to find ways to skip even more areas from the game and save even more time. They found more tricks, and at one point, they only needed one star to beat the game (the one found at Bowser’s sub).

But as you can imagine, speedrunners (TAS or not) were not satisfied with that, and actually managed to find a way to beat the game without a single star! Unfortunately, they haven’t found a way to skip the first two fights with Bowser (yet?), which implies there is still room for improvement… or is there?

After all, the TAS we’re showcasing today hasn’t been improved on since… 2012! It means that, theoretically, the time of this TAS is the absolute fastest one can beat Super Mario 64 without starting to cheat. After all, everything done in this TAS comes from controller input, and no cheat codes or anything are used.

Here’s the TAS for Super Mario 64, by snark, Kyman, sonicpacker, Mickey/VIS and ToT:

For more details about this Tool Assisted Speedrun, please click here!
Interested in this history of Super Mario 64 TAS? Please click here!

We hope you enjoyed this TASaturday #25. See you next week!