In the early years of organized speedrunning, long before frame-by-frame analysis and Discord servers turned world records into a group project, one college student in Massachusetts kept pushing a single Nintendo game lower and lower. Andrew Gardikis, better known as AndrewG, became the first player known to beat the original Super Mario Bros. in under five minutes and then held the any percent world record for roughly seven years, a tenure no one else has matched on that game.
From 2006 through the mid 2010s, his name sat at the top of the leaderboard while his strategies became the blueprint for an entire generation. He was not only the player who finally broke the five minute barrier. He was also the runner who treated Super Mario Bros. as a laboratory, pioneering tricks such as the level 4-2 wrong warp and the 8-4 wall jump that every serious runner now studies by default.
This profile traces AndrewG’s path into speedrunning, his dominance of Super Mario Bros., his wider body of NES work, and the legacy that still shapes one of the most studied runs in gaming history.
From Track Runner To Speedrunner
Before he became a Mario specialist, Gardikis was literally a runner. As he later recalled, he had competed in track and field until lung issues forced him to stop. That ended one kind of racing but opened the door to another.
In 2004, at fourteen years old, he happened to see a televised Super Mario Bros. speedrun on the gaming channel G4TV. It was the first time he realized that people were competing to finish games as fast as possible. Watching that broadcast, he decided he could do better and set himself a simple goal: beat Super Mario Bros. faster than the run he had just seen.
He practiced on a real Nintendo Entertainment System that his older sister had bought in the early 1990s. There was no emulator, no save state training, and no modern capture card. He experimented on a console wired into an old television, and when he wanted to show his runs to the world, he recorded them to VHS tape.
By 2006 he was submitting those tapes to Speed Demos Archive and Twin Galaxies, the main record keepers of that era. In March of that year he uploaded a VHS of a new any percent record run, beating the time set by Scott Kessler and putting his own name on top of the chart.
What followed was not a single breakout performance but a slow burn. Gardikis would spend the next several years shaving away small fractions of a second, rebuilding his route whenever he discovered a new trick, adjusting his expectations of what was possible each time.
The Glitch Revolution In 4-2 And 8-4
In those early days, Twin Galaxies disallowed significant glitches in Super Mario Bros. categories. Many players believed that the existing records represented the limit of what was possible without heavy exploitation of the game’s internal systems. Gardikis refused to treat that assumption as permanent. In his 2007 world record run, clocked at 5:00.35, he went ahead and used a glitch heavy route anyway, setting a new standard for what an any percent category could look like.
The heart of that revolution lay in level 4-2. While planning his route, Gardikis noticed an odd behavior. If Mario jumps into certain blocks while facing backward, the game subtly shifts his position on the screen. Because Super Mario Bros. determines where pipes and other entry points send the player based on the scroll position of the screen, that extra forward displacement can confuse the game about which destination to use.
By chaining three of those backward bumps in 4-2 and then entering a pipe, he could trick the game into sending Mario directly to the warp zone area without triggering the normal vine cutscene. That “wrong warp” saved several seconds in a game where the record would eventually be measured in hundredths. Gardikis later described it as a minor bug that no normal player would notice, but in his hands it became the pivot around which his whole any percent route turned.
He applied similar thinking to the final stage, 8-4. There he combined another wrong warp with a wall jump that let Mario appear to leap straight out of thin air. The trick involves clipping Mario’s foot on a very specific pixel of a block and jumping on the exact frame that contact occurs, creating the illusion of a midair jump.
Alongside those headline tricks, Gardikis made smaller optimizations everywhere else. He learned where he could safely pass through piranha plants, firebars, and Bowser’s axes by exploiting the game’s hitbox detection. He practiced hammer brother patterns in 8-3 until he could kill both with one jump. He rewrote his sense of danger, repeatedly jumping into spots where most players only expect death.
The result was not just faster times. It was a new vision of what Super Mario Bros. speedrunning could look like, one where knowledge of the code, not just reflexes, separated ordinary play from world class runs.
Chasing The Five Minute Barrier
From 2007 onward, Gardikis kept revisiting Super Mario Bros., always looking for another frame to cut. The Uproar’s reconstruction of world record history shows him stepping down his any percent time in a series of milestones: first a 4:59.69, then 4:58.89, then 4:58.34, and finally a 4:58.09 in 2014. Each improvement came from fine tuning the same route, tightening his handling of 4-2 and 8-4, adjusting flagpole touches, and cleaning up movement in the earlier worlds.
Somewhere along that progression, in 2011, he achieved the landmark that defined his career. He became the first player known to finish Super Mario Bros. any percent in under five minutes. Reporters who later covered the run noted that he reached that sub five milestone at twenty one years old and that he would remain world record holder for seven straight years, the longest single tenure anyone has had on the game.
Gardikis himself has described the grind as a long term project rather than a sudden breakthrough. In a 2010 interview, when his best published run was still just at the edge of five minutes, he estimated that he had logged thousands of attempts and spent months at a time focused on nothing but refining individual stages. He explained that his usual method was to track his best split times for each level in writing, then replay problem sections until they no longer felt like a risk. Speedrunning, in his view, was a way to give a finished game a new challenge and to test the upper limits of his own skill.
By the time he reached his final record of 4:58.09, he had improved his Super Mario Bros. time by about seven seconds in total. On paper that number seems small. In context it represents almost a decade of experimentation, the invention of multiple route defining glitches, and a bar that future runners would spend years trying to clear.
Other NES Records And A Broader Library
Although Super Mario Bros. defined his public reputation, AndrewG did not limit himself to a single cartridge. Contemporary coverage and later retrospectives credit him with world records in the NES versions of Track & Field and Super Mario Bros. 2 as well, achievements that reflected the same fondness for eight bit games and the same willingness to push into obscure mechanics.
In interviews he often mentioned growing up with a small library of Nintendo games that he replayed over and over, beating some of them daily. That repetition made him sensitive to tiny time saves long before he knew the language of frames and optimization. Once he was firmly part of the speedrunning scene, he applied that mindset to stranger titles. By 2010 he was already experimenting with runs of Werewolf: The Last Warrior and planning projects for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the kind of obscure games that only a specialist would bother to route.
He also dabbled in tool assisted speedruns, using emulation tools to probe glitches and optimize theoretical routes. A prominent interview with a tool assisted runner at TASVideos singled him out as both the console record holder for Super Mario Bros. and an active TAS creator whose glitch work heavily informed later TAS movies.
What united these efforts was a consistent philosophy. He preferred original hardware when running in real time, relied on repetition rather than emulator save states for practice in those early years, and treated each game as a puzzle where movement, glitch discovery, and enemy manipulation were pieces to be solved.
Meeting Miyamoto And Crossing Into The Mainstream
Gardikis’s dominance did not go unnoticed outside the small forum threads and leaderboard pages where speedrunners first gathered. In 2010, as Nintendo celebrated the twenty fifth anniversary of Super Mario Bros., the company invited him to the Nintendo World Store in New York City to run the game live while Shigeru Miyamoto watched.
He played on the Wii Virtual Console, wearing a Super Mario Bros. 2 shirt, with an audience of spectators and cameras trained on the screen. According to coverage from the time, he could not reproduce his record pace in that moment. The nerves of playing in front of the game’s creator and a crowd of strangers proved harder to manage than the Piranha Plants and firebars he had mastered at home. Even so, the visual of Miyamoto smiling while a young American speedrunner tried to re-enact years of optimization in front of him quickly circulated through gaming news sites.
By the middle of the decade, mainstream outlets were holding him up as the face of Super Mario speedrunning. A New York Magazine feature on Super Mario Run’s success on mobile explained that the current generation of record holders stood on foundations laid by players like Gardikis. The article emphasized that he had held the console record for seven years and that he gained “legend” status when he first completed the game in under five minutes. It also repeated the detail that Nintendo had flown him to New York to play beside Miyamoto, implying that his speedruns were part of what sparked the company’s interest in designing games around fast completion and time trials.
FiveThirtyEight’s examination of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning went further, crediting him with pioneering or perfecting central pieces of the modern route, particularly the 8-4 wall jump and the 4-2 wrong warp. By the time that article appeared, newer runners like Brad “darbian” Myers had already pushed the record past his marks, but the statistical analysis of the category still treated Gardikis as the architect whose work everyone else built upon.
Team Ludendi, Marathons, And Community Presence
Away from record attempts, AndrewG helped speedrunning transition into its charity marathon and streaming era. He joined Team Ludendi, a European based group of runners that organized the early European Speedrunner Assembly events and other charity marathons.
He appeared at Games Done Quick marathons and similar events, both as a runner and as a presence in the community. Viewers saw him not only grinding Super Mario Bros., but also leading or participating in races of other classic titles, serving on commentary couches, and occasionally demonstrating tricks that blurred the line between skill run and party trick, such as playing while juggling or using his feet. Later runners have recalled those performances as part of what made him seem almost mythical in the early 2010s.
His Twitch and YouTube channels became repositories for full game runs, world record submissions, and strange side projects alike. Even after he stepped away from constant world record grinding on Super Mario Bros., he continued to stream challenge runs, obscure NES games, and new experiments, keeping a link to the community that had grown up around the routes he helped create.
Stepping Back From The Top
By the mid 2010s, the Super Mario Bros. any percent category had become far more competitive than it had been when Gardikis started. New technology made frame perfect strategies more practical to practice. New discoveries like the Bullet Bill glitch in 8-2 and the flagpole glitch reshaped the route again. Runners like Saradoc, darbian, and later Kosmic and Niftski took the record into the high 4:56 and then 4:55 range.
Gardikis’s final world record in the category, a 4:58.09 achieved by 2014, remained an important stepping stone rather than the endpoint. As later writers have noted, he effectively functioned as a one man top tier for nearly seven years before Saradoc finally surpassed his time in 2014 with a 4:57.69 that used a new, previously tool assisted only trick.
Around that same period, he began to step away from nonstop record attempts. A production overview for the documentary “Running With Speed,” which profiles several prominent runners, describes him as someone whose peak came before full time sponsorship or content revenue were common in speedrunning. It notes that he had to juggle his hobby with a conventional career, limiting how much time he could continue dedicating to world record grinds.
On social media he has occasionally talked about speedrunning once feeling like a part time job on top of full time work, and about shifting toward a more sustainable balance where runs are something he enjoys rather than a constant obligation to chase hundredths of a second.
Legacy In Speedrun History
Within the Super Mario Bros. community, AndrewG sits at a crossroads between eras. He belongs to the VHS and Twin Galaxies generation, when runs were mailed in or uploaded slowly and communities were built on message boards. At the same time, his innovations in glitch usage, his long record tenure, and his willingness to appear at marathons and filmed events helped pull speedrunning into the public eye.
Modern analytical pieces on Super Mario Bros. any percent almost always refer back to his work. They credit him with showing that a seemingly straightforward platformer could hide enough exploitable quirks to sustain almost limitless optimization, and they trace the modern flagpole glitch routes and 4:55 records back through the wrong warp and wall jump discoveries that he brought into human play.
In a New York Magazine feature about the Mario speedrunning scene, Brad Myers summed up what Gardikis accomplished. He argued that AndrewG’s dedication was an early proof that even a simple looking game could become an incredibly complex problem, one that no one would ever truly perfect. That statement reads even more true today.
Through the lens of a Speedrun Legacy Profile, his core achievements are clear. He was the first to break the five minute barrier on Super Mario Bros. any percent. He held the world record longer than anyone else in that game. He pioneered core techniques that remain at the center of modern routes. He brought speedrunning into contact with Nintendo itself and with mainstream coverage long before it was common. And he did all of it on a cartridge that many players thought they already knew.
For runners who load up Super Mario Bros. today and chase a theoretical 4:54, AndrewG’s ghost is unavoidable. His routes, tricks, and philosophy underlie much of what they do, whether they learned them from his original VHS derived runs or from the many explainers and documentaries that came later. However much the leaderboard has changed, his place in speedrun history is secure.