'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record

Just for fun, or to have a "theoretical optimum" to compare human speedruns to.

You could consider bicycling tool assisted running. It's just a different take on competing.

Some people also use TAS's to find, reproduce and understand glitches for use in normal speedrun.

People use them as another tool for finding glitches and exploring the possibility space of the game's systems. They're basically using debugging tools and in some cases even looking at memory allocations etc.

As for full length tool assisted runs, I just find them to be a fascinating new lens to examine these games under. It's cool (depending on who you ask...) to see what the game looks like when another computer program is piloting it perfectly towards the goal of 'finish as fast as possible'

If normal speedruns are like playing speed chess, tool-assisted speedruns are like finding the theoretically-optimal solutions to chess problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_problem). Both of them require intense devotion to the game, though the first emphasizes physical ability and execution while the second emphasizes exhaustive thinking.

Because NASCAR is fun, even if you are going at super-human speeds. And there is skill in maneuvering a car at super-human speeds.

TAS players play the game frame-by-frame and seek theoretical perfection.

If you're just watching it's arguably more fun to watch, since it theoretically represents absolutely perfect play.

It started out for pure entertainment. Now, they sometimes work with realtime speedrunners to optimize their strategies.

For many games the community create additional glitchless categories. Other common ones are warpless (don't use intended level skips) and 100% (collect/do everything).

A notable example of this is Mario 64, where the lowest stars possible category has been renamed multiple times as ways of defeating bowser with fewer and fewer stars are discovered. I believe we are at 0.

My favorite are randomized speed runs, where everyone gets the same randomized version and have to speed run it against each other. Normally these are done as real time races and the results of the randomization aren't known to the player until they start. Not all games support it (think games like Zelda and Metroid where you have to collect powerups to push get past obstacles to collect more powerups to get past more obstacles). The randomizer has to make sure the game is still beatable (so no locking a required item behind an obstacle that requires the item). It is also an area that TAS can't help and it has more to do with strategy than physical perfect button presses. Also, since every time you uncover a new randomized item it changes what is the most potential optimized path, it require a deeper knowledge of the game compared to speed running where there is normally a given optimized path that people compete against.

Any% refers to completion percentage, not the number of glitches allowed. But yes, some categories allow for glitches and some don't.

Over the years the Super Mario Bros community in particular has become more accepting of glitches, as otherwise both TAS and human runs would have hit the limit of how fast is possible. By allowing glitches there is now always a possibility that the runs can be further improved.

Same situation for Super Metroid, which seems to be one of the most popular games for speedrunning. The "anything goes" category seems to be "Any% Glitched" [0], which allows for techniques that modify in-game memory values -- the current record is 12m19s. The most popular category, and fun to watch (IMO) is "Any%" [1], which does not allow for such memory tricks and has a current record of 41m18s.

But the latter is still not quite a "glitchless" run, based on the average person's definition of "glitch". For example, I doubt it was intended behavior for Kraid to die after 4 missiles [2] based on the player shooting him during a specific animation. I never played SM much beyond beating it as a kid, but I enjoy its speedruns because besides the variety of techniques and clutch moments required, there's at least one boss who behaves randomly, and requires the player to improvise. Also, in the course of new records being set, there have been a variety of strategies (e.g. different decisions on which path to take) employed, and there still seems to be room to discover more optimal strategies.

[0] https://wiki.supermetroid.run/Any%25_Glitched

[1] https://wiki.supermetroid.run/Any%25

[2] https://youtu.be/ezFcybTLOOE?t=27m29s

Only 2^7 button possibilities on a real controller, because you can't press up and down, or left and right, at the same time.

> So instead of playing the game, he just presses what he sees on the screen. It would take a lot of work but would arguably be a lot easier than actually accomplishing the real run.

First, matching prerecorded input with the frame-precision required would be nearly as difficult as doing the run, if not more so. At this point, he's already trying to produce very specific inputs that require frame-precision; he's not reacting to what's on the screen and adapting on the fly.

Second, some TAS techniques are incredibly difficult for a human to replicate, and there'd be an expectation that he can replicate those tricks at least sometimes.

Third, some of the techniques for detecting this kind of cheating include carefully watching the inputs to see if they're ever just the slightest bit late or early.

I think part of is the nature of it. Why would you get sufficiently into this scene, care enough about this one game to post video after video of you speedrunning it, to then cheat? The challenge for someone doing it manually is to do it manually; the challenge for someone doing it TAS is to do it TAS. Without the challenge there is literally no reason to do it. So while lack of evidence can't really prove anything, there really isn't that much motivation to cheat. If it was a complete nobody claiming they had manually set a record, yeah, that's suspicious, but someone well involved in the scene either is playing the long con for something that they themselves don't care about (and which they can't really revel in since any sort of in person interaction would show they're frauds), which is unlikely, or they're legit.

I am not a speedrunner and I don't really follow any speedrunning community, but this takes me back to 1998 doing the Facility in time for the Invincibility cheat. If I still remember it 20 years later, I must have done it a few times.

Ditto! pannenkoek2012 is operating at a level that every hacker should aspire to. Piecing together that solution for that star in 0.5 A presses is a thing of beauty.

That fight was overturned due to Jones popping for PEDs, not due to improper judging.

When I said "corrupt result" I meant corrupt judging. Sorry I was unclear.

don't know, but my point is that it took a rather serendipitous global animation to expose them. There are people who think speed runs should require footage of the controller for the sake of a consistent analysis medium, and I'm sympathetic to them for the sake of the legitimacy of the sport at the expense of accessibility.

And to respond to your question, you can livestream a pre-recorded video so it doesn't matter. Some guy livestreamed a record breaking run of Yoshi's island or something but got cocky and streamed his controller, and someone trivially discovered he was miming it, pressing or skipping inputs after they were seen in the video. The Super Meat Boy wasn't doing that.

Actually, the special software you describe does exist and is often used in speedrunning. It is called an autosplitter.

It works by reading out known memory addresses of the game. At bare minimum this would be "start of level 1" and "game completion" but you'll often find more elaborate "splits" as the more popular the game is.

See this for an example: https://imgur.com/a/KDp7YFx

It shows the last three missions, the timestamp when it was completed and a comparison agains this speedrunners personal best.

It also shows the current mission and the one after that, along with a timestamp of when it was finished in the speedrunners personal best run.

Beneath that it also shows a whole bunch of stats, what the best possible time is the speedrunner could achieve at current pace based on all the best times in the earlier runs, how it compares to the world record, etc.

This works really well for PC games and emulators but is a lot harder on real hardware.