Super Mario Bros. is 0.1 seconds from a perfect run
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
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
Comments 0
Leave the first comment, in any language.
Log in to comment