In a scene where most world records fall within months, the Mario Kart 64 leaderboards have spent years orbiting one name. For more than a decade, German player Matthias Rustemeyer was the standard by which non shortcut Mario Kart 64 racers measured themselves. On the community’s Players’ Page he appeared simply as a competitor from Germany who joined in January 2008, but within a few years he had become the dominant force in the game’s time trial history.
Rustemeyer’s specialty was the non shortcut side of Mario Kart 64. The game’s time trial scene treats each of its sixteen tracks as two separate challenges: one record for a single lap, and another for the full three-lap run. Together they create thirty two possible world records, a compact universe of races that has attracted dedicated runners since the late 1990s.
Over seven years as champion of those thirty two records, Rustemeyer built an extraordinary résumé. At his peak he held more non shortcut world records than any other player, came within a single record of “32 out of 32” multiple times, and turned his grind into one of speedrunning’s most famous long form stories.
That story reached far beyond the MK64 forums in 2020, when YouTuber Summoning Salt released the documentary “Mario Kart 64: The Quest for World Record Perfection,” a forty seven minute history of Rustemeyer’s attempts to claim every record at once. The video has accumulated millions of views and introduced Matthias to a much wider audience as the player forever chasing a seemingly impossible clean sweep.
Growing With The Mario Kart 64 Community
By the time Rustemeyer appears on the Players’ Page in early 2008, Mario Kart 64’s time trial scene was already more than a decade old. The community had grown around a simple structure: runners submitted verified times to a centralized leaderboard and earned “points” based on their ranking across all tracks. Over time, those totals defined a world champion.
Rustemeyer entered that ecosystem as a young German player and steadily climbed. The official site lists him as a non shortcut specialist, and his own streaming and video channels focus almost entirely on clean racing rather than the game’s more extreme shortcut categories.
Through the early 2010s Matthias began collecting track records. Single laps on courses such as Yoshi Valley and Royal Raceway fell to carefully routed lines, precise drift boosts, and frame tight mini turbos. His YouTube archive is filled with uploads labeled “World Record” or “Former World Record” that document the climb: runs like a 55 second Royal Raceway lap and a 30.91 second flap on Yoshi Valley stand as concrete examples of the pace he was setting for the rest of the field.
What separated Rustemeyer from many other leaderboard climbers was how broadly he pushed the game. Rather than specializing in a few favorite tracks, he chased improvements across the full slate of sixteen courses. That breadth gave him the points lead that defines the MK64 champion and set the stage for a more ambitious goal.
The Quest For Thirty Two Out Of Thirty Two
By 2013, Rustemeyer was not only champion by total points but also clearly moving toward something the community had never seen: ownership of all thirty two non shortcut world records at once. Student journalist Sunny Li, drawing on MK64 records and community testimony, describes him during this period as “a legend” and notes that he held more records than any other player for seven consecutive years.
The number that defined this era was 31. According to community write-ups, Rustemeyer reached thirty one out of thirty two records on eight separate occasions. Each time he stood one course away from perfection, another player would improve the remaining track or reclaim an earlier record, forcing the champion to regroup.
Part of that resistance came from an informal alliance of top players who called themselves A1A. Rather than focusing only on their preferred tracks, they deliberately spread out their efforts so that different runners held records on the courses where Matthias was closing in. The alliance treated the chase as a long form competition and, in effect, turned the entire community into his rival.
Summoning Salt’s documentary distilled this five year struggle into a narrative arc. It follows Rustemeyer through successive near misses, board shuffles, and incremental improvements, rendering what might otherwise be a list of times into a story about endurance, motivation, and the psychological toll of chasing a perfect board. Viewers who had never opened a Mario Kart leaderboard suddenly knew the names of tracks, rival players, and the German champion who could not quite close the final gap.
On November 26, 2018, after another failed push toward 32 out of 32, Rustemeyer stopped actively pursuing the clean sweep. He remained champion in overall points, but the all-records dream that had defined his mid 2010s finally came to a halt.
Rivalry With Daniel Burbank And The Unhoard
Throughout Rustemeyer’s climb another name was gradually rising: Daniel “RacingStone” Burbank, an American player from New Jersey who joined the Players’ Page in 2013. Burbank became Matthias’s closest rival in non shortcut competition, trading records with him on key tracks and emerging as the only player with a realistic chance of overtaking his points lead.
For years the rivalry played out in the open. Rustemeyer would set a time, submit it promptly to the leaderboard, and wait for others to respond. Burbank and other top runners did the same. NA Eye’s reconstruction of the period emphasizes Matthias’s habit of immediately posting new records, giving competitors maximum time to counter.
That rhythm changed in 2019 and 2020 when Burbank began privately stockpiling unsubmitted records. Community explanations describe how he sometimes posted weaker “personal bests” to the leaderboard while holding faster times in reserve on a separate cartridge. On June 11, 2020 he revealed those hidden runs in one dramatic “unhoard,” submitting seventeen new world records at once and instantly passing Rustemeyer for the overall non shortcut championship.
Hoarding was not forbidden by written rules, but many players felt that releasing such a large set of records at once violated the spirit of transparent competition. In interviews with Kotaku and in posts quoted by later writers, Matthias described the unhoard as something that “destroyed the place [he] liked to visit almost daily” and said that players left the scene or shifted to other categories in the aftermath.
Burbank, for his part, acknowledged in an apology post that his actions had hurt the community and offered to accept any punishment the moderators considered appropriate. The community chose to keep his records but implemented new expectations, including a requirement that he stream future world record attempts live to prevent another long term hoard.
The rivalry continued into 2021 under those new conditions, with both players chasing records at a furious pace. Where the earlier quest for 32 out of 32 had been a broad contest between Matthias and a rotating cast of challengers, the post-unhoard era narrowed the focus to the duel between Rustemeyer and Burbank. Contemporary accounts from both Kotaku and NA Eye describe it as the most intense battle in MK64 history.
Retirement After Perfection
On August 8, 2021 Burbank finally achieved what Matthias had spent years chasing. During a Sherbet Land three lap run he secured the final missing non shortcut record, becoming the first player in Mario Kart 64 history to hold all thirty two non shortcut world records simultaneously. The milestone was immediately reported by gaming outlets such as Kotaku, GamesRadar and student press, which framed it as “absolute perfection” in a game more than twenty years old.
Four days later, Rustemeyer posted a retirement message on the MarioKart64.com forums. In comments later quoted by Kotaku he explained that he had “lost the key value to go on: fun” and that, after the hoarding controversy, he felt he was forcing himself to play rather than enjoying the grind. One of his closing remarks contrasted “sportsmanship” and “gamesmanship” and made clear that he saw Burbank’s approach as crossing a line of competitive honor.
The decision marked the end of an era. Forum responses collected by reporters and bloggers show fellow players thanking him for years of work on the game, calling him the greatest of all time, and recognizing that his presence had raised the level of play for everyone.
From the outside, it looked like a clean break: the long time champion stepped away just as his rival claimed the perfect board he had chased for so long.
Streaming, Comebacks And A Different Kind Of Competition
Retirement in speedrunning is often less a permanent exit than a shift in focus. In the years after 2021, Rustemeyer’s public activity changed shape. Rather than grinding every track in search of another points crown, he leaned more heavily into streaming, commentary, and occasional record attempts.
His Twitch channel, under the name MK64MR, remains active and is explicitly framed around his status in the game. The channel’s current description introduces him as “Matthias from Germany, current non-shortcut champion in Mario Kart 64,” and lists thousands of followers who continue to watch MK64 content.
Recent uploads on Twitch and YouTube show that he is still capable of field-leading pace. In one prominently featured video he records a three lap world record on Royal Raceway with a time of 2 minutes 51.01 seconds on PAL hardware, decades after the game’s original release. Other uploads document further Royal Raceway improvements and fast laps on courses such as Yoshi Valley, evidence that the skills which once made him champion have not faded.
Taken together, those platforms suggest that Rustemeyer’s 2021 retirement was less an absolute departure from Mario Kart 64 and more a step back from the particular psychological grind associated with chasing Burbank in the 32 out of 32 race. He remains an active figure in the community, but the center of gravity has shifted toward streaming, sharing highlights, and occasionally reclaiming individual records rather than fighting for every single point on the board.
Legacy In Speedrunning History
Matthias Rustemeyer occupies a rare space in speedrunning history. Within the Mario Kart 64 community he is remembered as the long term non shortcut champion, the player who held the most records across seven years and pushed the game to the brink of theoretical perfection.
Beyond that small circle, his story has become one of the defining narratives for the broader culture of speedrunning. Summoning Salt’s documentary about his quest for 32 out of 32 and later videos that revisit the rivalry with Burbank present Matthias as a central figure in what some commentators call one of the most compelling competitive arcs in any game.
Journalistic coverage has also highlighted what his career reveals about community norms. Articles in outlets like Kotaku and NA Eye use his experiences to explore questions of sportsmanship, transparency, and the line between clever strategy and perceived betrayal. In those tellings, Rustemeyer stands for an ideal of open competition in which every new record is shared immediately and rivals are given full information to respond.
For speedrunning historians, his legacy lies in more than the times themselves. It is in the way his decade on the Mario Kart 64 leaderboards illustrates the emotional cost of chasing perfection, the power of a small community to create enduring stories, and the tension between winning and how one chooses to win.
Even as new players and new games reshape the wider speedrunning landscape, the image of a German racer quietly submitting yet another world record time and immediately inviting the rest of the world to beat it remains one of the clearest portraits of what competitive speedrunning can be at its best.