In 1996 Nintendo released Super Mario 64, a game that revolutionized gaming as we know it and helped to usher the medium into the 3D era. Since this release, the game has garnered a hard-core following, many of whom have taken it upon themselves to create new challenges that push the game further than anyone could have possibly imagined. Such challenges include but are not limited to; beating the game with the fewest possible stars, blindfolded runs, maxing out the coin count on each level, and even trying to collect 8 red coins on each of the game’s courses while outrunning a 1-Up mushroom.
One of the more interesting challenges is the A button challenge or ABC which seeks to either complete the game or collect all of the stars with as few A presses as possible. This is extremely difficult considering the fact that the A button is how Mario jumps which serves as the player’s primary form of interaction with the game. Nonetheless, for decades players have taken on the challenge and the result has been some of the most creative strategies and exploits in all of gaming. For the most part, these tricks were considered TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun) only as they where considered far too precise to for a human to be able to execute with any level of consistency. But speedrunner Marbler decided that he would do the impossible and beat the game in real-time with 0 A presses.
From May 17 to May 21 2024 this was achieved with a total time of 86 hours, 48 minutes, and 26 seconds on the Wii Virtual Console version of Mario 64. Because all of the tricks that allow players to skip star doors such as the backward long jump require several the use of the A button, it was necessary for Marbler to collect 70 Stars as well as beat all 3 Bowser bosses. Countless glitches were utilized throughout the course of the run but some of the more common ones include frame walking wherein by constantly pausing while walking up an incline it is possible to go up normally impassible slopes, misalignment wherein the player takes advantage of the fact that some corners round off Mario’s positional value during floor detection which can be used to climb up to certain areas that are normally too high to reach without jumping. There is also cloning, and HOLP or held object’s last position, this allows for objects to be duplicated and placed where the player wants such as creating bridges of Goombas that can be bounced on to reach remote areas or in some cases even allowing Mario to collect stars which are present in a level without needing to go to their actual location.
Much of the run was spent on a single glitch in Bowser in the Fire Sea which utilizes the fact that the Wii Virtual Console is not able to perfectly mimic Nintendo 64 hardware and as a result each time the game attempts to convert a 64-bit floating point decimal to a 32-bit float a slight rounding error occurs which is normally negligible but if allowed to repeat over 3 days it causes the sinking lava platforms to rise slowly. Virtually all of these tricks require a frankly absurd amount of precision to execute correctly but perhaps the most insane is the Chuckya Drop performed in Bowser in the Sky wherein through careful manipulation of a Chuckya enemy at the edge of its activation zone it is possible to make it fall all the way to the start of the level where it can then be moved so that it can be used to throw Mario to a normally inaccessible platform. This trick takes over 10 minutes to perform with no visual indicators to show if it is being executed correctly, and even then there is only a 56% chance that the Chuckya will actually throw Mario where he needs to go with all other results leading to death and having to start the entire thing over from the beginning.
This run is quite simply one of the most impressive achievements in Video Game history, congratulations to Marbler and the entire ABC community. This is of course far from the end for the ABC, future runs will no doubt attempt to reduce how much time it takes to complete the challenge as well as trying to get all 120 stars with as few A presses as possible. The current tool-assisted run of the ABC is currently at about 13 A presses and it will be interesting to see if it might eventually be possible to get that number down to zero and then if setups can be created that will allow for a human-viable 120-star run. For a more detailed explanation of Marbler’s run, I highly recommend the video by Bismuth shown below.
