I've been following the Super Mario 64 speedrunning scene for years, and a GamesRadar piece really captured how wild it's gotten. The runner Suigi currently holds world records in all five of the game's major categories, and earlier this year he put up a crowdfunded bounty — now worth over $11,000 — practically begging anyone to beat one of his times. The problem? Nobody has managed it.
That's not hyperbole. No one besides Suigi has held a major Super Mario 64 record since November 17, 2024. The scene was declared 'dead' when he swept all five categories, and unlike similar proclamations for other games, this one has basically held true.
So far the only person stepping up to the bounty has been Suigi himself, who obviously can't claim his own money. He just broke his 120 Star record again with a 1:35:25 — and the scariest part is he died mid-run in Tick Tock Clock and still improved his time by three seconds. A 1:34 run is clearly on the table.
As someone who grinds runs for fun, I find this both inspiring and a little terrifying. It's one thing to be good; it's another to be so far ahead that you're setting bounties on yourself. If anybody else wants that crown, they'd better step up soon.
Source: GamesRadar+
DTF has published the story of Yan Kotikov, who became the world's first Smuta speedrunner. His final time was 4 hours 58 minutes 3 seconds. By his account, the idea came on a whim: he saw on Speedrun.com that the category was empty and had no competitors.
The author describes speedrunning as a test of endurance that takes time management, route optimization and patience. He memorized NPC routes in the stealth missions and the positions of the wolves in the forests, and he names a separate risk: the moment the character falls through the ground or gets stuck in an endless fall. The stealth section and the many failed attempts caused the most suffering.
The funniest observation is this. The game was heavily criticized for technical problems, so Yan deliberately tried to break it to find a useful glitch or a way through a wall. He found almost no bugs, though; the game ran stably exactly where he tried to break it. The standard engine bugs didn't work either, so he finished honestly. He stresses that he is not a glitch specialist.
He designed the game's page on Speedrun.com himself and admits it is pretty but probably of interest to no one but him. There is also a rougher 9-hour version of the run, which he considers suitable only for masochists. I like the self-irony of the text and its approach: sometimes a record is just an empty category and a lot of stubbornness.
Source: DTF
Numerama tells the story of a speedrunner named apel, a pillar of the Tomb Raider community who is also active in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In a video published on YouTube on September 26, he presents an exploit called the "Olga Skip" that avoids the game's very first confrontation, a first in 25 years of the game's history.
The context: in the introduction on the Tanker, you have to face Olga Gurlukovich, then pick up her USP pistol. That weapon can remotely destroy the sensors linked to the explosives in a booby-trapped corridor, which Snake's tranquilizer pistol cannot do. Without it, there is no way through.
Apel's trick is to set off the explosives without the game re-arming them afterwards. He places a sleeping guard at the entrance of the corridor; when the guard wakes up, he triggers the bombs. At the same moment, apel rolls Snake to a passage point, so the game records the explosion. After pressing "Continue", the game considers the bombs to have gone off. Snake can then pass, as long as he enters the machine room through the same door.
Released in 2001 on PlayStation 2, the game has been dissected for a quarter century, and runs take around an hour and fifteen minutes depending on the category. Without the Olga fight, they should be improved in the coming weeks. I find it touching that such a well-studied game can still hide such a secret.
Source: Numerama
Awesome Games Done Quick 2026 ended after seven days of marathon, raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Vida Extra has put together thirteen runs that show why the event keeps surprising every year. Here are the ones that caught my attention most.
Donkey Kong Bananza fell in 1:11:06 by V0oid, using the protagonist's mobility and destroying the stages. Silent Hill f was finished in 1:39:51 on Hard difficulty, and Hollow Knight: Silksong, which many players find takes forever, was completed in 54:55 by Ceen. In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, two runners competed on Expert difficulty without skipping stages, and the time is around 2:04:31.
Then there are challenges with odd conditions. Super Mario World was played with a one-handed controller (11:58), a Resident Evil 2 remake run was done with only the knife and a Rock Band guitar as the controller (55:08), and Majora's Mask was completed blindfolded in 52:20. In Pokémon Emerald, the runner could only use one Pokémon chosen by viewers through donations, with Magikarp, Unown and Shuckle among the picks (3:12:18).
My favorite is the Super Mario 64 relay: around 70 people, each getting one star until Bowser is defeated, some of them blindfolded, in 1:55:53. The article closes by saying all of this mixes records, impossible challenges and humor, and I couldn't agree more.
Source: Vida Extra
Ahead of gamescom 2026, the world's largest game event held in Cologne, Germany from August 26 to 30, AUTOMATON put together a list of live streams that viewers in Japan can watch. As an RTA fan, what caught my eye was “gamescom GDQ,” the speedrun event Games Done Quick is holding inside gamescom for the first time this year.
The streams will run on the official GDQ channels on YouTube and Twitch, daily from 12:00 a.m. JST on August 29 through 10:00 a.m. JST on August 31. The lineup includes Super Mario 64, Mario Kart DS, the first Resident Evil, and Portal 2. The article advises checking the gamescom official site for the detailed schedule.
The IGN-hosted gamescom awesome indies show also debuts this year, with an indie game showcase of roughly 60 to 75 minutes on August 27. The usual cosplay contest, the Future Games Show, and Microsoft's Xbox booth stream are also covered.
According to the article, gamescom's exhibition space was fully booked by reservations alone for the first time ever, and the event is expected to be its largest yet. Even without going to the venue, I'm grateful to be able to watch the RTA event live.
Source: AUTOMATON
Nukie has reportedly completed a nonstop RTA in which all seven 3D Zelda games, from Ocarina of Time to Tears of the Kingdom, are cleared at 100%. It is a superhuman challenge, roughly 90 hours of play without sleeping.
Nukie has long been known for the 100% category in the 3D Zelda games. In January 2023, they cleared the first six titles up to Breath of the Wild in 56 hours and 8 minutes. This time, Tears of the Kingdom was added to make it a complete run. The attempt began with Ocarina of Time on December 19 and reached 100% in about four hours. Majora's Mask was cleared at 9 hours and 18 minutes.
After that, the run changed the order and moved on to Tears of the Kingdom. It required collecting more than 130 unique armor pieces, many side quests, and an enormous number of Korok Seeds, and it reached 100% at 42 hours and 21 minutes. Skyward Sword followed at 51 hours and 21 minutes, The Wind Waker at 58 hours and 43 minutes, and Twilight Princess at 66 hours and 5 minutes.
The last game, Breath of the Wild, was played on Switch 2. Instead of using the older version's high-speed aerial travel glitch, "BLSS," the runner relied heavily on the "wind bomb" technique, combining the bow's focus mode with bomb blasts. After more than 20 hours of collecting the final "Photo Memories," the 100% clear of all titles was completed at 88 hours and 54 minutes from the start. The numbers alone are overwhelming, and I honestly found it deeply impressive.
Source: AUTOMATON
The Pokemon FireRed port released for the series' 30th anniversary has given speedrunners something to chase, and a Kotaku report describes how a discovery happened completely by accident. Swiss runner iamClemi was in Professor Oak's lab, hoping to pick up a Charmander with good stats, when he pressed the L button, which is larger on a Switch than on the Game Boy Advance. That opened the help menu, and he noticed that a sound cue normally played when picking up the Poke Ball was missing.
It did not save time right there, but he kept digging. Opening the help menu cancels many sound prompts throughout the game. When picking up items or healing at Pokemon Centers the character still stands in silence, as if honoring the missing jingles. When catching a wild Pokemon, however, the usual pause for the fanfare is skipped entirely, taking the player straight to the Pokedex entry.
Runner Gunnermaniac called it by far the largest time save found in any Game Boy Pokemon game since RNG manipulation was discovered nearly a decade ago. The skip saves 2.68 seconds for every captured Pokemon. That sounds small, but it adds up in categories with many catches. Gunnermaniac holds the record for Elite 4 Round 2, an epilogue challenge that requires capturing at least 60 unique Pokemon, and he acknowledged the find puts his own record in danger.
I like this story because it shows how a new platform can reopen settled leaderboards. A bigger shoulder button on new hardware, an unexpected menu, and suddenly old routes are up for debate again.
Source: Kotaku
Kotaku's John Walker covers a new video from Kosmic, a former Super Mario Bros. world record holder, on a question speedrunners have long treated as a joke: can the game actually be played perfectly? The answer seems to be that we are very close.
The current record is 4:54.365, set by LeKukie on June 2 this year. It beat the previous best from August 2025 by 1.5 seconds and sits just 100 milliseconds off a theoretical perfect run. What makes the story good is how he got there. LeKukie, from Brazil, started in 2019 on a PS2 emulator with a laggy controller because money was tight. In 2022 he set a Lost Levels record on an NES that was voided because a component change had made the console slightly slower, and community members then provided him with an official NES and capture gear.
More setbacks followed: he wore out his controllers after tying the record, and replacements only arrived in late 2025. In May 2026 he completed a perfect run through 8-4 but died in the lava. A few days later he nailed a perfect 8-4 and cut half a second from his personal best.
By Kosmic's count, only six frames remain to be gained in 8-4, assuming everything before it is perfect, and other runners have already done a perfect 8-4 hundreds of times in practice. The hardest moves need Mario to change direction once per frame; runners had turned to keyboards for that, but controller techniques, including LeKukie's unusual controller angle and flicking inputs, have caught up.
Kosmic's conclusion is that a perfect run, long thought impossible, may be only days away. I find the idea of a game nearly forty years old being squeezed down to its last frames very moving, and I am watching the leaderboard.
Source: Kotaku
Forty years after release, the original Super Mario Bros. still has secrets. Kotaku reports that speedrunner Kosmic posted a video about a major new glitch found by the game's speedrunning community, first covered by Polygon. It uses arbitrary code execution (ACE), an exploit that lets players input custom code through the game itself. ACE has been used to skip large parts of other games, including The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Final Fantasy and many Pokemon titles, and appeared in other Mario games, but never in the original.
The trail began when a playthrough of The Lost Levels on Nintendo Switch Online crashed, shared by a user on X. Community members found the footage, tried to understand the crash and worked out whether it could be reproduced in the original game. After a lot of guesswork they found a loophole, and ACE is now officially possible in SMB1, letting players jump straight to the ending.
For now it will not change how people run the game. Kosmic told Polygon that the trick is limited and needs many pixel-perfect inputs, and even then skipping to the ending is slower than beating the game normally. If players did make it faster, it would probably count as its own category rather than replace current records, because it is such a significant exploit.
Kosmic framed the find as an achievement of making it possible and solving it. His quote stuck with me: you can now reach not just the Minus World but any world or level you want, with no hacks or cheats. After a stretch of drama in the Mario running scene, it is nice to see a story about collaboration.
Source: Kotaku
Summer Games Done Quick ended with more than two million dollars raised, all of it going to Médecins Sans Frontières, but the end of the week got complicated. Vida Extra reports that after the last race, an additional stream aired with games like Dark Souls and Cuphead, and that it was later decided to play several titles from the Metal Slug series.
The problem is that this schedule was sponsored by SNK, a studio 96% owned by a Saudi Arabian investment fund. The community found that combination unacceptable given GDQ's values, which support LGBTQ+ rights and human rights, and the criticism came quickly.
The organization responded by canceling the remaining games and cutting the broadcast off abruptly. In a statement on X, it acknowledged that it did not carry out the review its community expected and took full responsibility. It said it will not accept funds from that sponsorship or work with the company again, and it apologized to the speedrunners and the host, who had nothing to do with the decision and saw their runs affected. It also announced it will strengthen its sponsor evaluation process, with a more detailed analysis of company ownership.
The article calls the case a serious failure to vet sponsors properly and notes that the damage to its image is already done. I find it interesting how a speedrunning community, known mostly for its records, ends up demanding transparency from the organization that represents it.
Source: Vida Extra
I read an article about Suigi, a speedrunner of Super Mario 64, and couldn't help laughing. The Canadian runner has been running since 2020 and holds the world records in all five main categories: 120 stars, 70 stars, 16 stars, 1 star, and 0 stars. In March 2023 he finished the 16-star RTA in 14 minutes 35.500 seconds, and he is also known for the phrase "16 star is dead."
It all started with a video on 9 February 2026. Suigi said that he had held the all-categories title for 15 months, that runners were getting close to his records but nobody could surpass them, and that both runners and viewers were starting to lose interest. He called this the "curse of 5 out of 5." So he declared that he would personally pay 1,000 dollars (about 150,000 yen) to anyone who broke any one of the five records. Later, viewer donations raised the cap to 10,000 dollars, and at the time of the article about 8,000 dollars (about 1.2 million yen) had been collected.
But right after that, he himself began to improve his records. On 15 February he ran the 70-star category in 46 minutes 23 seconds, cutting about three seconds off his personal best, and in the 18 February stream he went down to 46 minutes 11 seconds, a gain of more than ten seconds. He also got past "Snowman's Land," where he had made a mistake before, and reportedly built a lead of over 20 seconds. He can't take the prize money himself, and he is disappointed about that. When he got the star, he cried silently, and after the stream he said, "I broke down because I was released from the pressure."
Personally, I found it very RTA-like that a plan to attract challengers with prize money ended up with the king himself raising the bar. The wall got higher for challengers, but seeing the person at the top still pushing to the limit is inspiring for everyone watching. I'm looking forward to the follow-up: who will be the first to take the 8,000 dollars.
Source: AUTOMATON
