“I am a bit different than most glitch hunters in that I love to use tons of tools to help me investigate tricks,” Milling told me. Milling, through Herculean Mario due diligence, found a way for humans to do the same. For years, the best tool-assisted speedrun (basically a computer trying to find the optimal route through the game) grabbed the flag through the block at its base - a glitch in the game - bypassing the animation of the descending flag and shaving off valuable milliseconds. But ain’t no speedrunner got time for that. has leapt off a tower of blocks, grabbed a flagpole and shimmied down to glory and even fireworks. “Now someone can come along and use that as their starting point.”Īny civilian who’s beaten the first level of Super Mario Bros. “Everything in my run, so many people contributed so much knowledge at various points in the game’s history,” Myers told me. The results are then dutifully recorded, cataloged and published, the canon grows and the record falls. It even has a kind of peer review - viewers on Myers’s Twitch streams have occasionally noticed something interesting, and Myers has incorporated it into his runs. And there are the experimentalists, such as Myers, who test the theories in game after callus-creating game. There are the theorists, such as Milling, who study the math of what’s possible.
Speedrunning is a collaborative and cumulative endeavor, academic and scientific in its ideals and division of labor. He’s a glitch hunter, combing the minutiae of games’ code and memory for tiny edges and passing the details on to his speedrunning friends. Milling - known online as sockfolder - is central to the Mario speedrunning community. Really, this is all Chris Milling’s fault.
Witness the very shape of human progress. In this 31-year-old video game, there is a full-on, high-speed assault on Bowser’s castle under way right now. It is entirely possible that, soon after you read this article, someone will go just a little bit faster, and topple the Mario record again.
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