In the early years of Twitch, when game streaming was still a rough experiment, a single Nintendo 64 platformer became a full time spectacle. Super Mario 64 already had a decade of speedrun history on Speed Demos Archive, but it was on Twitch that one runner, known as Siglemic, turned 120 star runs into appointment viewing. Through marathon practice streams, world record grinds, and detailed route guides, he helped push the game’s 120 star category into a modern form and showed that a single player speedrun could hold an audience for twelve hours at a time.
From 2011 through 2014 his name appeared again and again on leaderboards and in world record progression charts. His 1:44:52 120 star run on 2 September 2012 became one of the touchstone performances in speedrunning history, later cited in retrospective lists of the most significant runs ever recorded. Years later, after repetitive strain injury in his hands forced him away from regular competition, he returned for a single featured race at PACE 2019, a brief reappearance that reminded viewers how much of the early Super Mario 64 streaming era had been built around his channel.
This profile traces Siglemic’s run through the early 2010s, from SDA records to Twitch marathons, and follows the arc of a career that helped define how speedrunning would look on stream.
From SDA Records To Twitch Chat Flying By
Before Super Mario 64 became a pillar of Twitch, it lived on Speed Demos Archive as a tightly edited showcase of single segment records. By mid 2011, SDA listed “Mike ‘Siglemic’ Sigler” with the best 70 star time at 49:43 and the best 120 star single segment time at 1:48:05 on original Nintendo 64 hardware, marks that placed him at the top of the established Super Mario 64 scene.
Those SDA records show that his skill and routing work were in place before the explosion of Twitch viewership. What changed in 2012 was the platform and the presentation. Instead of releasing occasional segmented or single segment videos, he began broadcasting his attempts live. Viewers could now see the reset chains, the practice sessions, the small improvisations when a trick failed.
A later interview with an esports writer captures how those streams looked from the outside. Game developer David Wiers recalled that a friend introduced him to Twitch by showing him Siglemic’s speedruns, not only for the gameplay but also for the chat, which he remembered as “insane” with messages flying by constantly. The gameplay mattered, but the pace and volume of viewer interaction turned a solo practice grind into something that felt like a live event.
“This Is The Run”: The August Marathon And 1:44:52
The defining experiment of that era came in the summer of 2012. In early August, a Super Mario 64 board on GameFAQs spread word that Siglemic had pledged to stream twelve hours a day for the entire month in an attempt to reclaim the 120 star world record. Posters shared his schedule and summarized his plan as a month of daily streams from noon to midnight Pacific time, inviting others to tune in and watch the grind.
Twitch’s own social channels helped promote the idea. A Facebook post from Twitch invited viewers to “join world class Super Mario 64 player, Siglemic, for a month of speedrun marathons,” again emphasizing that he would be live twelve hours every day throughout August. The plan was simple: practise on stream, reset aggressively, and work the time down in front of a constantly refreshing audience.
Out of that month came a phrase that has followed speedrunning ever since. Urban Dictionary records “this is the run” as a chat slogan that began in Siglemic’s channel, spammed by viewers who claimed that each fresh attempt would finally be the world record after long strings of resets. The words eventually spread across Twitch, applied to any repeated challenge, but their first home was in a Super Mario 64 grind that ran from reset to reset across long August days.
The payoff came shortly afterward. A Twitch VOD, archived on YouTube, shows his 120 star stream from 2 September 2012, with the title noting the date and a time of 1:44:52. Timelines of the 120 star world record list that run on 2 September as part of a streak in which he repeatedly lowered his own mark.
Years later, a GameFAQs feature on “The Top 10 Historically Significant Speedruns” listed that 1:44:52 performance as one of the most important runs ever, placing it fifth on their list and pointing both to the time itself and to the visible popularity of the broadcast. In that sense, the world record was both a number and a proof of concept: a twelve hour per day grind for a retro game on a young streaming site could draw a loyal, noisy audience.
Chasing Lower Times In 120 Star
The 1:44:52 run did not mark the end of his push. A public timeline of Super Mario 64 120 star records shows multiple entries for Siglemic across the next two years, with improvements to 1:44:23 in October 2012 and 1:44:01 at the end of January 2013.
Those numbers tell only part of the story. Each new mark represented slight refinements in routing and execution. Small decisions in stars such as Whomp’s Fortress, shifting ground in Bowser in the Fire Sea movement, and riskier strats in courses like Tick Tock Clock or Rainbow Ride all carried a cost in consistency. Viewers watched him juggle those choices, deciding when to push a new trick into full runs and when to fall back to safer options.
The final major step in his public world record progression came in April 2014. Nintendo Life reported that he had set a new 120 star world record with a time of 1:43:54, achieved by collecting all 120 Power Stars in one continuous run. Speedrun.com, which later became the standard leaderboard for Super Mario 64, lists a 1:43:53 120 star run by Siglemic in the same period, reflecting either retiming or a separate but closely related performance.
In either case, the combined record trail shows that he was part of the group that pushed 120 star from the late 1:40s to low 1:43, establishing a strong foundation for later runners who would eventually drive the time far lower. His work turned 120 star into a refined category with established routes and a known ceiling, rather than a loose collection of strategies.
Guides, Routes, And Teaching The 70 Star Game
One part of that foundation came in written form. During the same period in which he was grinding world records, Siglemic produced a detailed guide to the 70 star category, which functions as the main any percent route for Super Mario 64. Speed Demos Archive’s knowledge base notes “Siglemic’s 70 star guide” as the standard document for new runners, highlighting that it includes videos with both beginner and advanced strategies for each star.
A Reddit thread from 2013, where a new runner asked for help learning 70 star, shows how deeply that guide was embedded in the community. Respondents recommended “Siglemic’s 70 star guide,” linking directly to a Google Docs file and emphasizing that beginners should start with his conservative strats before attempting more dangerous tricks.
In combination with his streams, the guide gave viewers a way to move from watching to running. They could study a written route, watch his archived runs to see how those lines looked in full motion, and then bring the same patterns into their own practice. Even as world records moved on to other names, his document remained a teaching tool.
From World Records To Marathon Stages
As his stream grew, marathon organizers also began inviting him to showcase Super Mario 64 on charity stages. The schedule for Awesome Games Done Quick 2013 lists a “120 Stars by Siglemic” block on Saturday 12 January, with the forum thread where the schedule was posted highlighting him as the runner for an N64 game that many expected to be the run of the event.
Videos from later Games Done Quick events, such as a Super Mario 64 run at Summer Games Done Quick 2014, preserve at least one of these marathon performances, with commentary from the runner and from couch analysts explaining tricks and movement to a live audience.
These appearances mattered for his legacy in two ways. First, they introduced his style of play to viewers who might not have been regulars on Twitch, connecting the marathon charity audience to the daily grind of 120 star streams. Second, they helped fix Super Mario 64 itself as a default marathon showcase, a game that would appear again and again at Games Done Quick across multiple categories and runners.
Injury, Burnout, And Stepping Away
Behind the records and marathon appearances, speedrunning remained a demanding physical and mental routine. By the mid 2010s, community discussions began to mention that Siglemic was wrestling with repetitive strain injury in his wrists or hands. In a widely read Reddit thread asking why he had stopped speedrunning, one commenter summarized the situation by saying that he had been forced into a long break due to developing RSI in his hands, and that later he streamed more relaxed games such as Old School RuneScape instead of high intensity Mario runs.
Other community discussions about carpal tunnel and tendonitis in speedrunners reference his situation as a cautionary example, pointing to the way long hours of high precision play can cause cumulative damage. Medical overviews of repetitive strain injury, including carpal tunnel and related conditions, describe exactly the kind of symptoms and risks that long term speedrunning can bring to the hands and wrists.
There is no single public statement in which he lays out a step by step explanation of his decision to leave, but the pattern is clear in community memory and in his reduced activity. The intense Super Mario 64 sessions that defined the 2012 and 2013 era gave way to quieter, less frequent streams, and eventually to long periods of silence.
One More Race At PACE 2019
That silence broke briefly in 2019. The Global Speedrun Association’s PACE 2019 event in the United States hosted a Super Mario 64 120 star race featuring a lineup that included Siglemic alongside Puncayshun, Cheese, and Dwhatever. A YouTube playlist titled “Everything Siglemic” leads with the VOD of that race, while a reupload of the broadcast describes it simply as “Super Mario 64 120 Star Race | PACE2019,” preserving the moment he returned to a live stage.
Social media posts from the organizers cast the race as the return of a legendary figure. One Facebook clip remembered it as the time “the speedrunning God Siglemic blew our minds,” promoting early bird tickets for the following year’s event. A Reddit thread from the same weekend remarked on his “return to the scene at PACE,” noting both the risky strategies he brought to the race and his choice of controller.
The race did not mark the start of a new full time grind. The description on one reupload notes that he “hasn’t really done anything online since December 2019,” capturing the sense that PACE was a final encore rather than a fresh chapter. For viewers who had watched him in 2012, seeing him back on stage, even briefly, was a closing loop in the story.
Legacy In Super Mario 64 And Speedrun Streaming
Today, the Super Mario 64 120 star world record belongs to other runners, and modern times sit far below anything recorded in 2014. Yet when retrospective pieces look back at the history of the category, they still stop at his 1:44:52 run on 2 September 2012 as one of the turning points, both for Super Mario 64 itself and for speedrunning as a streamed performance.
His legacy rests on several overlapping contributions:
He proved that a single player speedrun of a 1996 platformer could fill a Twitch schedule and hold a large, active audience. Game developers and esports writers who came to Twitch in that era often point to his channel as one of the first they were shown, in part because of how “insane” the chat looked during record attempts.
He helped solidify 120 star as a prestige category by pushing times down through a string of world records, shaping routes and strats that would be refined by later runners.
He wrote and shared a 70 star guide that gave hundreds of aspiring runners a concrete starting point, and that remained a recommended reference long after his own active career had ended.
Finally, he brought certain elements of Twitch culture into speedrunning. Phrases like “this is the run” began in his chat and then spread across the site, becoming shorthand for any long series of attempts in any game.
In later years, his story has also become a reminder of the limits of the human body. The repetitive strain injuries that helped end his run as a top level speedrunner appear in community discussions as a warning to new players who hope to grind long hours of high precision gameplay.
For the purposes of speedrun history, however, he stands as one of the central figures in the first age of Twitch. When modern runners load up Super Mario 64 and begin a 120 star world record grind live on stream, they are stepping into a format that Siglemic helped invent: a long form broadcast of a single game, framed not only as a test of skill but also as a shared story told attempt by attempt, reset by reset, all the way to the final Bowser throw.