TASaturday #8: Super Mario Bros. (NES)

For the TASaturday #8, we went for a classic among classics: Super Mario Bros.. Not only is it one of the best-selling video games of all times, it’s also one of the games with the most TAS. The Tool Assisted Speedrun we picked up isn’t the classic “finish the game as fast as possible”, but its “walkathon” variant.

What this means is that the entire game is beaten without ever pressing the B button (which is used for running)… which makes the “Push Button B” message at the very end rather ironical. It’s as if the game itself couldn’t accept it was just beaten without the player using one of the main gameplay mechanics (running).

Of course, the TASers don’t do things the easy way, and go through all the levels while avoiding all the warp pipes… which makes the whole run even more impressive. Just imagine a traditional FPS where the player beat all the levels without firing ever once!

Unlike some previous TAS we showcased, this one is rather easy to understand, and the glitches used are pretty straightforward. Therefore, even if you don’t know much about Tool Assisted Speedruns, you should be able to enjoy this run.

Here’s the walkathon TAS of Super Mario Bros., by Mars608 & HappyLee.:

For more information about this TAS, please click here!

And if you’re interested, here’s a comparison video with the previous best TAS, so you can see how the TASers managed to save 9.31 seconds:

Next week, we’ll bring you the surprising “game” we promised last week!