In 1996, Super Mario 64 arrived on the Nintendo 64 as a proof of concept for 3D platforming. It cast players into Princess Peach’s castle with an analog stick, a hundred and twenty Power Stars, and a camera that tried to follow along as Mario flipped, slid, and wall kicked his way through open worlds.
That same freedom turned the game into something else over time. Long after its retail peak, Super Mario 64 became one of the most competitive speedrunning games on record, with thousands of runners and tens of thousands of submitted runs on modern leaderboards.
This entry in the Speedrun Game Chronicles traces how a 1990s launch title became a twenty–plus year laboratory for routes, glitches, and world records, and why Super Mario 64 still defines what a “speedrun game” can be.
A 3D Playground Built For Movement
Super Mario 64’s speedrunning story starts with its basic design. Mario’s move set in 3D was unusually rich for its time. He could chain long jumps, triple jumps, wall kicks, slides, and ground pounds with full analog control, while the castle’s hub and painting worlds encouraged players to improvise their own paths rather than follow a strict linear route.
That freedom cut both ways. Casual players experimented with shortcuts to stars the developers expected to take longer. Glitch hunters discovered ways to move Mario faster than intended or push him through collision. The game’s famous Backwards Long Jump, where Mario builds impossible speed by long jumping into stairs, escaped the bounds of normal physics and sent him flying through locked doors or into Bowser stages long before he had enough stars to be there.
By the early 2000s, scattered forum posts, early video uploads, and Speed Demos Archive recordings had coalesced into an informal record culture built around beating the game “as fast as possible” under various self–imposed rules. That loose culture hardened into the set of categories that now define Super Mario 64 on modern leaderboards.
The Five Pillars: 0, 1, 16, 70, and 120 Stars
Today, Super Mario 64 speedrunning is organized around five main full–game categories on the Nintendo 64 version. Each is defined by how many Power Stars Mario collects and which sequence–breaking tools are allowed.
120 Star asks runners to obtain every star in the game before the final Bowser fight. It is the purest marathon category and the one that most closely matches how many players experienced the game casually, but executed at a pace and precision that casual play barely hints at.
70 Star mirrors the intended minimum star count to unlock Bowser in the Sky without using the Backwards Long Jump to break the star doors. It balances traditional progression with aggressive routing, leaving almost no room for mistakes over a sub fifty minute run.
16 Star was the original “major skip” category for years. It requires enough stars to reach and grab MIPS the rabbit, then uses the famous MIPS Clip and the Backwards Long Jump on the staircase to bypass the thirty star door and the final star requirements.
1 Star and 0 Star push the game’s logic to its breaking point. Through chains of clips, precise camera setups, and extreme manipulations of Mario’s speed, runners can reach and defeat Bowser with almost no stars at all. These categories are short in length, but demand some of the hardest tricks in the entire game.
Together, the five categories form a ladder of commitment. New runners often approach 70 or 16 Star first, then branch into 120 Star marathons or the brutal 1 and 0 Star routes once they understand the game’s movement and glitches.
Early Experiments And The First Routes
The earliest recorded structured runs of Super Mario 64 circulated in a different era of video sharing, long before speedrun.com existed. Communities clustered around message boards, IRC channels, and streaming platforms that were still finding their identity.
In that landscape, runners like ilu_dude established early 16 Star benchmarks in the mid 2000s, routing a path that picked up stars quickly and exploited the now–famous MIPS Clip and staircase Backwards Long Jumps. The goal at this stage was simple: finish a full game run that used the new tricks at all, let alone perfectly.
Routing in 120 Star evolved more slowly. Runners weighed the order of stages, when to visit the basement versus upstairs, and whether to grab certain slow stars or replace them with harder alternatives. The result was a long process of trial, error, and gradual refinement that set the stage for one of the first great personalities in Super Mario 64 speedrunning.
The Siglemic Era And The Birth Of A Spectator Scene
In the early 2010s, Siglemic’s 120 Star streams helped push Super Mario 64 into the broader speedrunning spotlight. He already held the world record when, in 2014, he lowered it to around one hour forty three minutes, consolidating years of routing and movement into a fluent, highly watched performance.
Siglemic ran during the rise of Twitch as a dedicated live streaming platform, and his 120 Star sessions became appointment viewing. Viewers watched him attempt full runs, reset early after small mistakes, and push individual stages ever closer to their theoretical limits. The drama came not from the game’s story, which many viewers already knew by heart, but from whether he could maintain a near perfect pace over more than an hour of unforgiving movement.
From a historical standpoint, the Siglemic era did two things. It proved that a long 3D platformer could sustain a dedicated live audience, and it crystallized key 120 Star routing decisions that later runners refined rather than reinvented.
Cheese, Simply, And The Race Into The 1:30s
As the decade continued, a new wave of runners took those routes and pushed them further. Cheese, Simply, and others drove 120 Star out of the mid 1:40s and toward the mid 1:30s through thousands of attempts and a constant willingness to adopt riskier stars and tighter movement.
On January 28, 2021, Cheese set a new 120 Star world record with a time of 1:38:25 on Nintendo 64. Coverage emphasized not only the raw time, but how close the run came to collapse in late game stages like Tick Tock Clock and Rainbow Ride, where a slip can erase an otherwise world record pace.
That record did not stand forever, but it marked a psychological milestone. A category once thought nearly impossible to optimize past the mid 1:40s now sat comfortably below one hour forty, with the community openly speculating how low the time could go.
At the same time, rule debates and technical questions showed how mature the scene had become. Discussions on whether mapping the analog stick to digital buttons should be allowed, and how that might change certain tricks, spilled into long forum threads, illustrating how even small changes in allowed input methods could ripple through the category.
GreenSuigi And The Clean Sweep
If the Siglemic and Cheese eras were defined by marquee 120 Star rivalries, the mid 2020s belong to GreenSuigi. A Canadian runner who streams under the name Suigi, he methodically climbed the leaderboards across all five main N64 categories.
By late 2024, Suigi had become the first person in the history of Super Mario 64 speedrunning to hold the world record in 0 Star, 1 Star, 16 Star, 70 Star, and 120 Star at the same time. A feature on his rise to prominence noted that nearly eight thousand contestants had submitted close to fifty thousand Super Mario 64 runs to modern leaderboards, underscoring how remarkable it was for a single runner to sit at the top of all five.
Current world record tables maintained by the Super Mario 64 Speedrun Wiki show the state of that sweep as of early 2026. On original Nintendo 64 hardware, GreenSuigi holds 120 Star at 1:35:28, 70 Star at 46:26, 16 Star at 14:35, 1 Star at 6:56, and 0 Star at 6:14.
Those numbers are not just footnotes. They represent the outer edge of what has been achieved after decades of routing, input refinement, and execution practice on a single game.
New Tricks Nearly Thirty Years Later
Super Mario 64’s codebase is old, but its discoveries are not finished. New techniques continue to reshape what is possible, sometimes unlocking entirely new styles of run.
In 120 Star, the long quest to perform “Carpetless” in Rainbow Ride – reaching a red coin star without using the slowly moving magic carpet – became both a technical challenge and a symbol of high–level optimization. A 2023 report highlighted how a perfected method for this trick contributed to a wave of record–level runs and pushed the category into yet another era of refinement.
Only a few years later, a different breakthrough landed in the shortest categories. A long–standing bottleneck in 1 Star and 0 Star categories was the Side Backwards Long Jump, a notoriously precise sequence required to bypass a star door efficiently. Late in 2025, runners Crackhex and FramePerfection unveiled a new technique, nicknamed “crackslide”, that uses a simpler series of backflips and a C–up butt slide to cross the barrier. Demonstrations showed that this method was far more consistent than the classic approach, with top runners and blindfolded specialists immediately discussing how it might change the entry barrier to the hardest categories.
For a nearly thirty–year–old game, the idea that a single discovery can alter the landscape of whole categories underlines a recurring theme in Super Mario 64: the game keeps revealing depth long after most titles would have settled into static routes.
Blindfolded, Co–op, And Randomizers
Super Mario 64’s speedrunning culture has also broken away from traditional “see everything” runs. Blindfolded categories challenge runners to beat the game using audio cues, memorized timings, and a mental map of every room.
The community maintains independent leaderboards for blindfolded runs, and in 2025 a blindfolded specialist named Bubzia set a landmark 1 Star record at ten minutes thirty two seconds, becoming the first to break the eleven minute barrier. Coverage emphasized how this came after months of near misses, and how random elements at the end of the game had ruined at least one previous historic attempt.
Elsewhere, community mods like Super Mario 64 Co–Op and Super Mario 64 Randomizer have turned the base game into new canvases. Co–op runs place two players in the same world and track shared progress, while randomizer runs shuffle star locations and requirements, forcing on–the–fly routing rather than rigid muscle memory.
These categories do not always sit at the center of world record discourse, but they show how flexible the game’s core design is. Super Mario 64 can support a blindfolded race, a multi–person co–op route, or a randomizer marathon without losing its identity as the same 1996 launch title.
Marathons, Charity, And Cultural Reach
Super Mario 64’s speedruns also live in front of live audiences. At Games Done Quick events, 120 Star showcases, 16 Star races, and blindfolded runs have introduced new viewers to speedrunning’s blend of technical skill and performance.
In January 2026 at Awesome Games Done Quick in Pittsburgh, a relay known as the “70–person 70 Star” run had seventy different runners each collect a single star, chaining together a complete route in under two hours. It was both a practical routing challenge and a demonstration of how deep the bench of Super Mario 64 runners has become.
Articles, academic work, and longform videos treat the game as a kind of cultural text. One scholarly piece, for instance, reads its “cosmic” glitches and noisy, reset–heavy attempts as a form of posthuman performance, arguing that the speedrun is less a clean race than a tangle of player, console, and chance. Popular features in mainstream outlets describe the dedication required to shave frames off records and present Super Mario 64 as the archetypal example of a game that has been studied and optimized almost beyond belief.
Through marathons, documentaries, and profiles, Super Mario 64 has moved from “just another classic game” into a symbol of speedrunning’s endurance as a hobby and performance art.
Legacy In The Speedrun Game Chronicles
For the purposes of the Speedrun Game Chronicles, Super Mario 64 stands out not only for its raw numbers but for the template it offers.
It shows how a game with expressive movement, an open hub, and a variety of objectives can support multiple meaningful categories rather than a single “any percent.” It demonstrates how community–driven rules, from discussions over analog mapping to category definitions, shape the competitive landscape as much as new glitches do. It illustrates how personalities – from Siglemic and Cheese to GreenSuigi and Bubzia – can turn abstract times into narratives that draw outsiders into a niche scene.
Most of all, it proves that a game’s lifespan does not end with its retail sales. Nearly thirty years after release, runners are still discovering new ways to bend Peach’s castle to their will, and entire new records and categories still emerge from its walls and staircases. Super Mario 64 is not just a historic game. In speedrunning terms, it is still alive.