Seconds after calling his run “sloppy,” Super Mario 64 speedrunner sets new world record in one of the game’s most notorious levels
“I dunno, it was overall pretty sloppy”
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Super Mario 64 speedrunner Dwhatever has set a new world record in the notorious Tick Tock Clock stage despite what he called a “sloppy” effort - and proved that there was room for improvement by breaking that record just three days later.
In Super Mario 64 runs, speedrunners typically pair the Tick Tock Clock star ‘Stomp on the Thwomp’ with the star for collecting 100 coins in the stage. Grabbing both of them together is an efficient path, but it’s also an extremely challenging one. Not only is the level filled with extremely precise movement, there are also multiple spots where the game’s randomness can get in the way.
The way the coins fly out of boxes is randomized, so they might go in a random direction and send you off-route to collect them. Even worse, the Thwomp you need to climb at the end of the stage takes a random starting position, so you can never be sure if it’ll be in the right place on any given run. And that’s not even getting into the occasional roadblocks with invisible walls, an issue that would takeliterally three hours to fully explain.
That’s what makes Dwhatever’s record,set on July 5, so impressive. He grabs the 100 coin star without much enthusiasm, saying “I dunno, it was overall pretty sloppy” - then seconds later, he grabs the other star, realizes his time, and gives a proper pop-off, exclaiming “I can’t believe I said that!” He had just set a new time of 56.16 - beating his previous PB of 56.33 and the actual world record of 56.26 all at once.
TTC100+Thwomp 56.16 (xcam rekky!!!)gna work on getting a better blue coin section and ending tj too, that one was actually sloppy LMFAO pic.twitter.com/h3RglVW2WKJuly 5, 2024
The thing is that Dwhatever wasn’t wrong about there being room for improvement. Just three days later,on July 8, he got cleaner movement and managed another new world record of 55.80 - the very first time this combo of stars had ever been collected in under 56 seconds. And there’s still room for further improvement - Dwhatever took a very slight detour to collect an extra red coin in an effort to mitigate the randomness of the coin boxes. Who knows how low the record can go from here?
THE 55 TTC100 HAPPENED!!! pic.twitter.com/FfiBDojYIiJuly 8, 2024
For the first time in 28 years, Super Mario 64 has been beaten without using the A button – and it only took 86 hours.
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.
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