Meet the Fastest Gamer Alive
push to talk #44 // featuring the 19-year-old canadian gamer who just made speedrunning history
Last Saturday, in the early hours of the morning, the world’s fastest Super Mario 64 player was having a bad run.
The speedrunner, a 19-year-old from Canada who streams under the name Suigi, was 37 minutes into a game, and he’d just fallen into a pool of hot lava.
On the screen, Mario screamed in agony, grabbing his butt with both hands and flying high into the air, smoke trailing behind him. Time was wasting.
Suigi swore bitterly and clenched his jaw. “This run is pretty over,” he told his Twitch viewers.
On a call with me this week, Suigi told me he came very close to smashing the reset button then and starting a new run. But instead he shrugged it off, said “whatever,” and got back into the game.
What happened next will go down as one of the most incredible speedrunning performances ever played. The kid simply locked in.
He stopped making mistakes, and his time began improving. As the run neared the 1 hour mark, Suigi’s Twitch viewers started to get excited—he was on track for a personal best time. Suigi stopped speaking, and began using a towel to dry his hands in between segments. His posture changed, his shoulders tightened—he literally did the “gamer lean-in” meme.
With every segment that Suigi completed, he gained more and more time. “I think this might be a run now,” one viewer wrote. “Holy moly,” another posted.
As the 1-hour and 20-minute mark neared, the mood changed. Suigi’s movement through a level called “Tall, Tall Mountain” was so obviously fast that the chat turned giddy.
“wtfffff”
“schmoovin”
“Imagine being able to play like this…”
With 93 stars to his name, Suigi turned his head to look at Twitch chat on his second monitor, and a viewer posted:
“dont read chat king”
Suigi finished the segment having gained another 13 seconds, and the chat exploded.
This had suddenly become a world record attempt.
Suigi remained silent, and chat took to spamming praying pepe emojis. For the next 17 minutes, he played a near-perfect game. He made no serious mistakes until the run’s final moments, when he missed a throw in the last encounter with Bowser. When it happened, you could see Suigi wince, but he said nothing. A few seconds later, he successfully threw Bowser into a bomb, and the run was over.
At this point he screamed—an involuntary, primal sort of yelp. He fell forward in his chair, visibly weeping. “Oh my God,” he sobbed. “What did I just do?”
He’d beaten the world record by 29 seconds.1
The History of Super Mario 64 Speedrunning
For as long as people have competed to beat games quickly, they’ve been playing Mario games. And Super Mario 64 is the grandaddy of speedrun-friendly games.
You can go down a real rabbit hole with this stuff. There are excellent, hour-long YouTube documentaries covering literally 20 years of speedrunning history just for individual subsections of the SM64 leaderboards.
And the stories are fascinating because of how collaborative the process is. For every heroic breakthrough record that gets set, there are dozens of runners, streamers, and theorycrafters who’ve built upon each other’s discoveries to break the game in new ways.
One famous glitch that’s long been mandatory for runners to learn is the “backwards long jump” or “BLJ,” a way to rocket backward up staircases at such an incredible speed that Mario breaks the physical limits of his virtual world, enabling runners to glitch through doors and even reach the top of the “infinite” staircase that leads to the game’s final boss fight.
One of the most impossible-seeming breakthroughs was achieved just last year, when runners discovered a method to reach a particular star in the late-game “Rainbow Ride” level without relying on a slow-moving magic carpet put there by the game’s designers.
This was the “holy grail” of SM64 speedrunning. Runners had been trying—and failing—to figure out a way to get a “carpetless” run for well over a decade. And in 2023 a programmer posting under the name Krithalith discovered the secret.
Using a program of his own creation, Krithalith ran millions of simulations using bots to discover possible movement patterns that would allow players to jump from a windowsill to the top of a building in “Rainbow Ride.”
The YouTuber Karl Jobst tells the story better than I could. But the gist is this: one of Krithalith’s countless Mario bots uncovered a viable path. By smashing the N64 controller’s analogue stick in exactly the right directions and pausing multiple times while in-midair, players could reliably glitch-bounce their way up the side of the building without riding the magic carpet.
Within weeks, Suigi and other speedrunners were successfully pulling the maneuver off many times in a row in practice runs.
The game had changed. Every viable 120-star SM64 run from here on would have to be carpetless.
2023 was a major year for SM64 for another reason as well: the unstoppable rise of Suigi. The Canadian gamer first began posting runs on his YouTube channel in 2020, and by the end of 2021 he’d clutched the #1 spot in the 16-star category. Throughout 2022 Suigi climbed the ranks in other categories and repeatedly defended his 16-star record with increasingly perfect runs.
But 2023 was the year the brakes came off.
In February of that year, Suigi managed to snag the #1 spot on the leaderboard for the 1-star category. In March he ran a 16-star run so quickly that many observers believe that category is now “dead,” meaning it may never be topped. A month later, he snagged the world record in the 0-star category. He then repeatedly improved upon his 0-star and 1-star records, before shocking the speedrunning world in June by setting the world record in the 70-star category.
There are only five major categories in Super Mario 64 speedrunning, and Suigi held the world’s fastest time in four of them. The only record that remained was the hardest: the 120-star category. But Suigi’s legend was already established.
“This Guy Is The Greatest Super Mario 64 Player Ever,” Karl Jobst declared.
The Fastest Gamer Alive
When I got on a call with Suigi earlier this week—just a few days after he set the new record for the 120-star category—he was feeling sick.
“I could already feel it coming on the day of the run,” he said, “but I used up so much energy and then slept really late, so I’m sure that didn’t help.”
After setting the record around 3am eastern time, Suigi says he couldn’t sleep. “I had a really bad headache and the adrenaline was just coursing through my body at that point. So I stayed up until 7am,” which was when his mom—who’d briefly been startled awake by his screaming—normally gets up for work.
“I told her I got the 120 record and she was like ‘Shut up. That’s awesome.’ She knows if I’m screaming like that it’s probably because I got a record.”
Suigi estimates that his total playtime in Super Mario 64—a game that came out nearly a decade before he was born—is “around 5,500 hours.”
He graduated high school last year, and has been taking some time to focus on speedrunning before heading off to college. “I’m not planning on relying on speedrunning as a career,” he says. “It’s more just for fun, and the money is a bonus.”
But there has been money, thankfully, mostly from his Twitch streams. “I do have a fund for university that'll have it all paid for,” he says.
So in the meantime, he’s doing a lot of speedrunning and practicing for runs. In various interviews over the years, people have asked Suigi what he thinks separates him from other speedrunners. He tends to answer humbly but definitively that it comes down to his approach to practice.
“I always have a goal in front of me,” he says, “whereas a lot of people—when they practice—they just go through the motions until they feel sort of good about it.”
Suigi’s approach to practice is more deliberate. He sets specific targets for his performance and repeatedly tries to hit that target on the same star or segment, over and over.
“Having proper goals set for yourself is just really helpful,” he says. “It keeps you motivated.”
In the early days, when Suigi first started seriously attempting to speedrun in the 16-star category, he says he obsessively watched recordings of the speedrunner Weegee, a longtime top player across multiple categories (and the world-record holder in the 120-star category until last Saturday).
Suigi recalls feeling impressed by Weegee’s aggressive approach to the game: “He would set his standards high and find out what he could and couldn’t get away with. And for a long time he was a pretty inconsistent player. But eventually he got used to this style of just going as fast as he possibly could, trying to time everything perfectly, taking the tightest lines he could.”
The result: “He was getting faster stage exit times than everyone else. It was blowing everyone’s mind. It blew my mind too.”
Suigi made a decision. He had to learn to play like Weegee.
He recalls watching recordings of all of Weegee’s best segments and becoming determined to match or beat each of his best splits. In his own practice sessions, Suigi played in “streaks,” doing small chunks of levels over and over until he could match the world-record times consistently.
“That's just something I've kind of maintained ever since,” he says.
It’s a mindset, Suigi says, that carried over well from the 16-star category to the other categories. “A lot of people think that you have to have a balance between consistency and speed,” he says, “and that if you're going too fast, you just won't be consistent. But after a while of trying to go as fast as you possibly can, it just becomes normal to you in a weird way.”
Sidebar: An Intro to SM64 Speedrunning Jargon
Super Mario 64 speedrunning is so well-established that competitors have developed a shorthand language to talk about their runs. The acronyms and jargon can sound like nonsense to outsiders.
Below is a transcript of one part of my interview with Suigi discussing some of the challenges he faced in the first half of his 120-star miracle run, with my own explanations of terms added in bracketed, bold text:
PUSH TO TALK: In the first half of the 120-star run you were getting so frustrated. I mean, talk me through it. What was going through your head?
SUIGI: Yeah, it was bad. I was doing a lot of practice for lobby stars beforehand. Specifically the Wing Cap tower [an early bonus level that unlocks a critical item which allows Mario to fly]. I was missing coins there a lot earlier that day. So, I did a bunch of practice and then I made the same mistake I’d been making the whole day again in that run.
PUSH TO TALK: Oh, man.
SUIGI: Then in Bomb-omb Battlefield 100 coin [a level], I missed a lot of coins and then at the end I got pretty bad coin RNG [referring to the game’s “random number generator” that determines how coins spawn and move] and it all just ran away from me, which was frustrating. But also I'm going for a 136 at this point [a total game completion time of 1 hour and 36 minutes]. And I got a high 22 BOB exit [he collected all the stars in Bomb-omb Battlefield with under 23 minutes of total game time on the clock], which to me is pretty good.
PUSH TO TALK: Right.
SUIGI: Then in SSL [Shifting Sand Land, an in-game level], a lot of stuff went wrong. It was kind of frustrating. In HMC100 [a level called Hazy Maze Cave, specifically the part of the run when he’d try to get a star by getting 100 coins] there was a big mistake there where there's a BLJ [backwards long jump] the second half of the stage and you're supposed to long jump on this platform that's rising for 15 seconds… and I miss it. So I have to go down, and up. It loses 20 seconds.
But I pushed through that because I didn't need that good of a run and I knew I could get a pretty good second half. I just didn't think I'd get that good of a second half.
I wanted to know: what was going through his head in the second half of that run, particularly as he started to realize the world record was in reach?
“I wasn't really thinking too much,” Suigi says. “I was just trying to calm myself down and think of the next inputs I was going to do… I was just thinking to myself: When am I going to mess up? But it just didn’t happen for so long.”
The run wasn’t perfect, of course: “I had to reset for carpetless once. Then I kind of fumbled the maze movement in 100 coins, so that was another few seconds, but it was a pretty decent Rainbow Ride.”
The worst part of the run’s latter half was in the final boss fight against bowser. “I lost 13 seconds in throws, I think,” Suigi says.
So what about the 70-star category? A couple of months after taking the #1 spot on that leaderboard last year, he was knocked down to #2 by a Japanese player named ikori_o, so as of now he’s once again the fastest SM64 player in four of the five possible categories. Will he go for 5/5?
He says right now his plans for returning to the 70-star category are undecided. What, then, about pushing even harder in the 120-star category?
“I'm not going to push for it right now cuz I still have a lot of work to do,” he says. “Especially in the early game, I just haven't really gotten a good early game split yet. My best Vanish Cap split is almost 40 seconds worse than the best one. I just haven't done enough runs to get to that point. My total attempt counter in 120 is like 1,000. That sounds like a lot, but it's really not a lot.”
He says he may take a break, though he’s not done with the 120-star category yet. Next week there’s an in-person speedrunning competition in Maryland called PACE. Suigi qualified for the event and will be competing there live in the Super Mario 64 120-star category.
I’d wish him luck, but I think the other competitors might need it more.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna see how quickly I can run to my kitchen and back without breaking anything in my house.
I’ll see you next Friday.
You can browse the leaderboards for most speedrun-friendly games on speedrun.com
Great article!