For a few crucial years in the mid 2010s, the name Brad “Darbian” Myers sat at the center of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning. In an old Nintendo game that had already been dissected frame by frame, he became the player who showed how far human hands could really push it. Between 2015 and 2017 he set multiple world records in Super Mario Bros. Any percent, broke long standing psychological barriers around 4 minutes 58 seconds and 4 minutes 57 seconds, and helped define what “perfect” looked like for an entire community.
By the end of that run he was more than a leaderboard name. He was an educator, a face of the scene on Twitch, and one of a small handful of runners whose world record videos would later be cited in books, academic work, and histories of speedrunning itself.
From AGDQ Viewer to Full Time Grinder
Myers did not start out aiming to be a world record holder. Born in 1986 and raised on Mario, he found speedrunning in 2013 after stumbling onto a marathon stream of Awesome Games Done Quick. Watching people beat games in front of a live audience, on real hardware and without tricks behind the scenes, changed how he understood those cryptic “world record” videos he had seen on YouTube.
Soon after, he dug his childhood Nintendo Entertainment System out of storage, set up a capture card and a small CRT television, and began practicing Super Mario Bros. He used emulators and save states to drill specific rooms and levels until he could hit them with near automatic precision. He joined SpeedRunsLive races, then created an account on speedrun.com on 3 September 2014, and by late 2014 he was already trading times with other top runners.
By day Myers worked as a software engineer in Virginia. Evenings became a loop of attempts, resets, and quiet conversation with chat. In a FiveThirtyEight profile he described streaming and speedrunning as the thing that replaced television for him, a nightly ritual that fit around his job, chores, and everyday life.
Chasing Five Minutes in a Game That Already Had It
By the time Myers appeared on the scene, the five minute barrier in Super Mario Bros. had already fallen. Andrew “AndrewG” Gardikis had pushed the record under five minutes in 2011 and held some version of that record for years, while later runners like Blubbler continued to shave small fragments of time off his work.
Myers entered that world as an outsider who was willing to grind. In October 2015 he set his first Any percent world record on original NES hardware, clocking a time of 4 minutes 57.627 seconds that sliced 66 milliseconds off Blubbler’s best. The run was clean, confident, and played on a real console, which helped it catch coverage from outlets such as Time, Polygon, IGN, and NME.
That first record did more than add one more line to a leaderboard. It signaled that there was still room to push a game many people thought was near solved. Myers kept going. Through late 2015 and early 2016 he lowered his own mark several times, into the low to mid 4:57 range. A podcast interview recorded around one of those records captures him calmly explaining the difference between a 4:57.427 and a 4:57.260 and how a single new trick could change the shape of an entire run.
Building a Blueprint: The Any Percent Tutorial
While Myers was carving out those times, he was also turning his route into a kind of textbook for the community. In early 2016 he released a roughly two hour tutorial on Super Mario Bros. Any percent, breaking down level by level how top runners approached the game, what tricks they used, and where the biggest time saves were hidden.
That video, hosted on his YouTube channel, has since become one of the most influential pieces of “primary” material in Super Mario Bros. speedrunning. Scholars who study streaming culture and speedrunning communities point to it as an example of how expertise is shared, negotiated, and standardized. It is part lesson and part archive, preserving the state of the route just before the next revolution arrived.
The Flagpole Glitch and the First Human 4:56
The revolution came from elsewhere in the community. In September 2016 glitch hunter Chris “sockfolder” Milling published a method that allowed human players to perform the “flagpole glitch” in real time, skipping the flag lowering animation at the end of certain levels and saving twenty one frames at a time. Tool assisted speedruns had used versions of this trick for years, but until then it was considered essentially impossible for human play.
Myers was one of the first top runners to successfully integrate the glitch into a full Any percent run. After a short period where fellow runner Kosmic briefly claimed the record, Myers reclaimed it in early October 2016 with a time of 4 minutes 56.878 seconds, the first verified human completion of Super Mario Bros. in under 4 minutes 57 seconds.
The record run, preserved on Twitch and mirrored on YouTube, shows Mario sailing through familiar sections and then flickering in and out of level transitions with near impossible smoothness. Myers plays on his childhood NES, with a small heart rate monitor readout on his layout that spikes as the later levels stay on pace. Vice noted that by that point he had logged more than twenty thousand recorded attempts in the game. FiveThirtyEight counted nearly twenty two thousand. Both sources emphasize the same theme: at this level, a world record is less about one lucky session and more about a mountain of disciplined failures beneath it.
Although later runs by other players would improve on the time, his 4:56.878 stood as the official world record for about a year and became the symbolic start of the “4:56 era” in Super Mario Bros. history.
Pushing His Own Limits
Even after his world record was surpassed, Myers kept refining his play. Speedrun.com records show him achieving a 4 minutes 56.528 second Any percent run on NES, a time that no longer sits at the very top of the leaderboard but still fits within a tight cluster of near perfect human performances.
He also broadened his portfolio. At different points he held the world record in the warpless category of Super Mario Bros., which requires clearing all levels in order rather than using warp zones, and he later turned his attention to Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels. In 2017 he captured a warpless world record there as well, prompting Polygon writer Allegra Frank to describe him as one of speedrunning’s most engaging figures, someone whose streams combined technical excellence with an easy, conversational presence.
Academic work on speedrunning and livestreaming has used Myers’s runs and commentary as case studies. In a 2023 dissertation on streaming culture, Tsung Han Sher cites his tutorial and record attempts as examples of how communities negotiate optimal routes and treat streams as both performance and collaborative research. In another scholarly book on games and politics, his 4:56.878 video appears alongside charts and technical breakdowns of how human runs approach the tool assisted theoretical limit.
Beyond World 8 4
Although Super Mario Bros. defined Myers’s public image, his speedrun.com profile reads like a tour of retro gaming history. He has competitive times in games like Super Mario Land, Earthworm Jim, DuckTales, Airwolf, and a long list of other cartridge era titles for NES, SNES, Game Boy, and even Atari systems.
In 2018 he joined the “twelve hour challenge,” an event where runners attempt to learn and complete a new category in a single day. Myers picked Wii Sports Resort Golf, learned an 18 holes route, and briefly held the record. Twin Galaxies covered the run and credited his popularity with sparking a surge of new players in that once obscure category.
Those side projects mattered because they showed that Myers was not only a one game specialist. He had an eye for finding timing quirks and optimizations in very different engines, from simple NES platformers to golf games with wind variance and terrain physics.
The Streamer Behind the Records
If world records and leaderboards are one layer of Myers’s legacy, the other is how he appeared on camera. Viewers of his streams saw a runner who was calm, methodical, and occasionally self deprecating, resetting again and again while explaining what went wrong and what he was trying to improve.
Pieces in outlets like FiveThirtyEight and Polygon describe streams where he would patiently coach other runners through difficult tricks such as the fast version of World 4 2 or the newly learned flagpole glitch, offering small adjustments while dozens or hundreds of viewers watched.
Interviews paint the picture of someone who understood the grind but did not romanticize it. He talked openly about how often the game forced him to reset, how slim the odds were of getting all the necessary tricks in a single attempt, and how much of speedrunning at the top level involved keeping a clear head through endless failure. At the same time he framed it as something that fit naturally into his life, a structured way to relax after work and stay connected to a community of friends.
Stepping Back from the Grind
The years after 2017 mark a gradual shift in Myers’s public presence. His YouTube channel lists primary activity from 2013 to 2018, with a smaller return from 2020 to 2022. His speedrun.com page shows a burst of variety runs in that same period, then fewer new submissions as other players took over the front lines of Super Mario Bros. Any percent.
He never posted a dramatic retirement announcement, and there have been occasional streams or appearances, but the long stretches of inactivity suggest that his priorities moved elsewhere. That pattern matches something he told FiveThirtyEight at the height of his grind. Asked whether he would ever stop, Myers answered that “it will happen someday” and framed that future as an inevitable part of the speedrunning life cycle.
From the outside, it looks like he reached that point after accomplishing much of what there was to accomplish in his game. The world record moved on. New players like Niftski and others pushed Any percent into the 4:54 range. The theoretical limit shrank a little further, and the community evolved into a new era.
Legacy in the Super Mario Bros. Hall of Fame
Even as the numbers on the leaderboard change, Myers remains a central figure in how people talk about Super Mario Bros. speedrunning. His name appears in histories of the game, in news articles about subsequent records, and in an entry on Niftski that identifies him as one of only four players ever to hold all of the main Super Mario Bros. category records simultaneously at some point in their careers, alongside AndrewG, Kosmic, and Niftski himself.
In practical terms his legacy lives in the routes runners still use, many of which trace back to his tutorial and his record attempts. It lives in the way commentators explain flagpole glitch and fast 4 2, in the way new players measure their times against “a 4:57” or “a 4:56,” and in the scholarly work that treats his streams as evidence of how digital communities share expertise.
In a broader sense, Brad “Darbian” Myers represents a particular moment in speedrunning history. He arrived when Super Mario Bros. already had a long tradition of records behind it, pushed the game through another set of barriers that once seemed unreachable, and then quietly stepped back while others took the next steps. For the Speedrun Legacy Profiles on esportshistorian.org, his story is the story of a security minded engineer who turned a childhood platformer into a nightly experiment in human precision, and in the process helped define what mastery looked like for one of the most important speedrunning games ever made.