Basically, jumps and speed runs are like magic to me. The tenacity it takes to find ways to pause a game and bypass entire sections is a skill and patience I don’t have. That being said, I’m always happy to see someone just walk or drive through a wall and end up somewhere they shouldn’t already be. It’s adorable. It’s an art form that people are always picking on, and that means these jumps can sometimes be found in old games like Mariokart64. After 27 years, someone has managed to make a jump on the Bowser’s Castle course that is so difficult to perform that it is almost impossible to repeat it … until now.
For many of us Mario Kart Technique is mostly about using your items strategically and knowing when to drift off. Maybe you know a good shortcut or can pull off the drifting. But for the speedrunning community, it’s all about studying each course carefully and nailing frame-perfect maneuvers to save even the tiniest fraction of your time. For the Mariokart64 speedrunning community, Bowser’s Castle presented a white whale in the form of a skip, where you have to go through a certain wall. The technical breakdown is quite complex and boils down to building some walls in the game so that there is one tiny Gap through which players can squeeze. It’s all about hitting him at the right angle and using speed items like the mushroom. But thankfully, YouTube user Abyssoft has an entire video that breaks down the jump, the tech behind it, and how several speedrunners have suddenly been able to use it after all these years.
The first time the Skip was debuted in 2021 was by Speedrunner forest64, which started a fire in the community to try to recreate it. However, it would not be until nearly two years later that it was recreated and used in a speedrun, leading to some Shifts in the track’s speed running records. After more than 200 hours of grinding and thousands of attempts, Forest64 itself managed to implement the skip in one run on March 11, 2023, beating the previous non-shortcut time by just four tenths of a second. That was impressive because it both dethroned the original time and was the first time the jump was successfully pulled through the game rather than testing.
This reign was to be short-lived, however, as speedrunner Christian C. hit the jump and shaved off a second of his time just two days later, on March 13th. The following day also speedrunner Aaron Jablonski managed to hit the jump but could not completely overtake Christian’s time. Abyssoft’s video shows some of the ways this run can be improved by using skipping, but given how difficult it is for the pros to pull off, it may take some time before someone succeeds, to improve the run through this method.
Ironically, after all the hustle and bustle, the world record for Bowser’s Castle was broken again Beck Abney on April 4th without using the Skip. As of this writing, Abney’s record of 1:49.38 sits in the top spot, but there’s still room for the speedrunners to cut the already impressive time if skipping is implemented.
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It remains to be seen whether The Super Mario Bros. Movie Actor Jack Black can beat the record afterwards beat up his castmates Mario Kart visible for everybody.
