AI-generated
It was another week where speedrunning managed to be simultaneously incredibly precise, deeply technical, unexpectedly wholesome, and completely unhinged.
The biggest story by far came from Super Mario Bros., where Niftski once again pushed the boundaries of what a human runner can do. Elsewhere, the community rallied around LeKukie after a devastating storm, two major documentaries revisited the Werster cheating scandal, and runners continued doing what they do best: discovering increasingly bizarre ways to break video games.
Here are the biggest stories from the week.
Niftski vs. the TAS: Human Mario Gets Absurd
The headline story this week was Niftski’s latest assault on the Super Mario Bros. TAS.
Niftski managed to stay tied with the tool-assisted speedrun from 1-1 all the way to the turnaround room in 8-4, setting a new record for the furthest point a human has ever remained on TAS pace. That’s an absolutely ridiculous achievement in a game where individual frames can separate world-record-level play from everything else.
And this wasn’t an isolated performance.
A few days earlier, Niftski became only the second human ever to tie the TAS from 4-2 onward, following LeKukie’s earlier achievement. Even more remarkably, Niftski did it without practice information.
For anyone unfamiliar with the SMB speedrunning scene, the significance is difficult to overstate. At this level, the TAS isn’t merely a theoretical benchmark sitting somewhere in the distance. It represents an almost impossibly optimized sequence of inputs, and the closer humans get to matching it, the more the distinction between “perfect human play” and “the theoretical limit” starts to blur.
The community response reflected that. Niftski’s announcement was one of the week’s most-upvoted posts, while another post documenting the TAS tie became the week’s biggest discussion.
And, naturally, there’s already plenty of speculation about what happens next.
Summoning Salt Gets Summoned
The SMB excitement also produced one of the week’s more entertaining posts: “Summoning Salt Presents….”
The joke practically writes itself. When the history of Super Mario Bros. eventually gets another chapter, Niftski’s current run of achievements is starting to look like exactly the sort of storyline that belongs in a documentary.
The combination of legendary records, TAS-level execution, rivalries, and increasingly microscopic improvements is speedrunning documentary material in its purest form.
At this point, the real question may not be whether this becomes another Summoning Salt video, but how many years of footage the eventual video will need.
The Werster Story Gets Two More Deep Dives
Another major topic this week was the release of two new documentaries about Werster and the Pokémon speedrunning cheating scandal.
Both videos approach the story from different angles.
The Werster Allegations Are Worse Than You Think by PulseEffects looks at Werster’s role as a moderator and runner across Pokémon speedrunning communities over a period spanning more than a decade.
Meanwhile, Abyssoft’s Pokémon’s Most Ridiculous Cheating Scandal focuses on the Pokémon Battle Factory streak, bringing together older findings, newer discoveries, and reactions to what happened.
The Reddit post praising the videos was one of the week’s most-discussed entries, with commenters highlighting the production quality and the amount of history involved.
It’s another reminder that speedrunning isn’t just about the timer. Communities accumulate years of records, rivalries, moderation decisions, discoveries, accusations, and forgotten context. When something controversial finally gets documented in depth, the resulting story can be considerably bigger than the original leaderboard dispute.
Speedrunning Community Shows Up for LeKukie
Not everything this week was about records.
The community also rallied around LeKukie, after a severe windstorm in Brazil damaged his family’s home and blew off the roof.
A GoFundMe was organized by Kosmic, with support spreading through the speedrunning community. Niftski, AndrewG, Summoning Salt, and others helped amplify the fundraiser.
It’s a good example of one of the less visible sides of speedrunning culture. The community can spend hours arguing about individual frames, emulator settings, route choices, and leaderboard rules — but when someone needs help, those same communities can mobilize surprisingly quickly.
After a week dominated by technical achievements and controversy, this was probably the most wholesome major story on the subreddit.
The Search for the Dumbest Speedrun Technique Name
Then there was the important scientific question:
What’s the worst name your speedrun community has ever given a technique?
The answer, apparently, is that speedrunners should never be trusted with naming things.
One runner from Barbie Horse Trails offered examples including LARP, Cold Visions, S.H.I.T., and Douglas.
The post quickly turned into a showcase of speedrunning’s unique ability to transform highly technical concepts into names that sound completely ridiculous when taken out of context.
It’s one of those things that outsiders probably don’t appreciate. A speedrun can involve dozens of extremely sophisticated tricks, but after enough time, the community inevitably names one of them after someone’s cat, an inside joke, an acronym that should never be spoken aloud, or a random guy named Douglas.
And somehow everyone knows exactly what it means.
The Week’s Most Important Request: Show Me Something Horrifying
One Redditor asked for the “most schizoid, incomprehensible, out of control speedrun” imaginable.
Not the fastest run.
Not the hardest run.
Not even the most technically impressive run.
They wanted something that would make them question whether humanity had gone too far.
The resulting description called for everything from grey screens and jagged polygons to runners manipulating games in ways that look completely incomprehensible to normal human beings.
Honestly, this may be the most accurate description of the appeal of speedrunning ever written.
There’s a particular point where technical skill becomes indistinguishable from sorcery. A game stops looking like a game and starts looking like a machine being interrogated by someone who has learned its private language.
The speedrunning community, naturally, had plenty of suggestions.
More Records, Because Apparently One Wasn’t Enough
The rest of the week still produced an impressive collection of records and milestones.
A new Final Fantasy X No Sphere Grid world record was posted, continuing one of the game’s famously demanding categories.
Kosmic also released a Super Mario Bros. video titled “Super Mario Bros. is 0.1 From Perfect,” highlighting just how close the game is getting to its theoretical human limit.
Outside of SMB, there were records and notable performances in Sonic Adventure 2, Moorhuhn Kart 2, TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, Snowboard Kids, Resident Evil 2 (2019), Astro’s Playroom, and more.
One particularly striking result came in Astro’s Playroom, where Miksuwaan claimed the Any% world record in 21:45.600 — by just three frames.
Three frames.
That is the sort of margin that makes the word “record” feel almost comically inadequate.
The Scene Keeps Getting Bigger
There were also signs of the broader speedrunning scene continuing to expand.
FAST 53 applications opened, giving runners another opportunity to get involved with one of the community’s major showcase events.
A new runner also asked whether there was a community for Big Walk speedrunning, demonstrating one of the most enjoyable things about the hobby: eventually, somebody will try to speedrun practically anything.
Even games that have barely had time to establish a community can suddenly acquire routes, categories, leaderboards, and people arguing passionately about the optimal way to save half a second.
That’s how the ecosystem grows.
And Finally: The SMB Mystery Clip
One smaller post may have flown under the radar, but it fits perfectly into this week’s theme of increasingly esoteric technical discovery: a runner asked whether a strange SMB1 PAL 1-3 moving-platform clip was already known.
At the highest levels of speedrunning, these discoveries matter.
A strange interaction that looks meaningless to most players can turn out to save frames, change a route, or open an entirely new possibility. And the fact that someone can post a blurry clip and have experienced runners immediately start investigating it is one of the best parts of speedrunning culture.
The game may be decades old, but the research never really stops.
The Week in One Sentence
Niftski is getting dangerously close to doing what the TAS does, LeKukie needs a roof, Werster’s story keeps getting dissected, and speedrunners are still naming important techniques things like “Douglas.”
If there’s one thing this week’s posts demonstrate, it’s that speedrunning continues to exist at several completely different levels at once.
At the top, runners are operating on individual frames and chasing theoretical perfection.
Elsewhere, communities are documenting scandals, making documentaries, raising money for fellow runners, discovering obscure glitches, inventing terrible terminology, and asking strangers on the internet to show them the most incomprehensible thing they’ve ever seen.
And somehow, all of that is the same hobby.
See you next week.
Source: reddit.com