In late 2003, a video called “11-Minute Mario” hit eBaum’s World—the Stuff Magazine of video sites—and stunned the world with an act of unprecedented video-game dominance. In it, an unseen master plays Super Mario Bros. 3 with baffling precision, completing the quest in a little over 11 minutes.

“Eleven-Minute Mario” worked NES diehards into a froth not seen since Jenny Lewis accused Will Seltzer of touching her breasts. There was enough of a frenzy that the Internet’s global squad of Pubescent Moron Reactionaries was called in to evaluate the footage, and as with all past and future cases, they declared the video ONE HUNDRED PERCENT FAKE. Thus the PMRs again rescued audiences from potential enjoyment.

But wait—it turns out that in this one single instance, message-board trolls made a mistake! “Eleven-Minute Mario” was no fraud. It was the coming-out party for a new art form: the tool-assisted speedrun.

As the author, “Morimoto,” explained on his website, “11-Minute Mario” was created by playing SMB3 at a very slow rate—frame by frame—in an emulator. Morimoto recorded his input, and whenever he made a less-than-optimal decision, he backed the recording up and tried again. This painstaking method yielded a sequence of timed button presses that, when played back through the emulator at full speed, turned Mario into a demigod.

Building a tool-assisted speedrun is like crafting a player-piano roll, except somewhat less honky-tonk. Also, the performance generated by a TAS could never be achieved by mortal hands. This superhuman quality is the source of controversy. Either tool-assisted speedruns are the work of cheating cheaters who ruin everything for everyone, or they are engrossing flights of fancy that explore the limits of familiar worlds. Allow me to make the case for flights of fancy.

Super Mario Bros. 3 in 10:34.55
by Jean-François Durocher a.k.a. “Genisto“

Intentionally or not, the TAS community has kept a pretty low profile since the “11-Minute Mario” backlash. Beyond TASvideos.org, a de-facto headquarters of the movement, tool-assisted speedruns receive only scattered mentions. So you might not be aware that Morimoto’s seminal work has been “obsoleted” —i.e., beaten by a faster speedrun—three times in the years since.

This SMB3 run is about 30 seconds faster than "11-Minute Mario." But in the TAS world, it’s one thing to be fast; it’s something more to convey your genius. Genisto is an able showoff, demonstrating every bug exploit and sleight-of-hand in his repertoire. Mario is crammed into tight spaces, penetrated by countless projectiles, and forced through brick walls. I know he’s the selfless hero and all, but by World 8-2, he’s got to be thinking, “No princess is worth this shit.”

Mega Man [Rockman] in 15:38.07
by Joel Yliluoma a.k.a. “Bisqwit“ & “FinalFighter“

“Abuses programming errors in the game,” notes the description page for this video. “Abuses”? Bisqwit outright dismantles Mega Man on the way to creating a speedrun that plays like an avant-garde film: it’s shocking, it’s cutting edge, and half the time you have no idea what’s going on.

The so-called abuse is inflicted by exploiting glitches in the game’s programming. With a thorough knowledge of the game’s under-the-hood mechanics, a speedrunner can often uncover bugs that allow him to sidestep inconveniences like the laws of physics. (Such bugs are so myriad in the Mega Man series that they’ve gotten their own page on TASvideos.) In this Mega Man run, oddities abound as the game is stressed to the verge of collapse by a glitch-pounding stream of controller input. My favorite visual non-sequitur comes when a couple of hapless Picket Men are rendered as alphabet soup.

I used to imagine how embarrassing it would be for the original Mega Man programmers to see their mistakes laid bare by amateurs who seem to know the game better even than they did. On further reflection, though, I think that the game’s ability to cope with this mess is actually a testament to the resilience of the code.¹

Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! in 17:50.0
by Andrés Delikat

This is one of those videos that makes you want to dust off the old cartridge because damn, it looks easy now. But then you get out the game and start playing, and it’s even harder than you remembered, and FOR CHRIST’S SAKE THE SUPER MACHO MAN ATTACK IS JUST COMPLETELY UNFAIR, COME ON!! and so controller meets floor.

With optimal strategy, it takes longer to defeat The Sandman (2:18 in game-clock time) than Mike Tyson (1:58). This makes sense, as The Sandman had the tightest fundamentals of anyone in the game, whereas many of the other boxers resorted to cheap tricks. Coughcoughsupermachoman.

In addition to his TAS exploits, Delikat has recorded a sweet cover of the Punch-Out!! fight music. More details at his site.

U.N. Squadron in 18:33.27
by Ryan E a.k.a. “georgexi“

This entry is only here because my list of “best” TASes is shaped by the games I played a lot back in the day. Yours will be, too. Still, this is a polished run, and a good example of speedruns in the side-scroller genre.² The pilot can’t make the scenery crawl by any more quickly, so in the meantime, he taunts the enemies, letting their bullets, missiles and whatnot come this close to his ride before darting away to blow their sorry, artificially intelligent asses off the screen.

In its original Japanese release, U.N. Squadron was called Area 88, based on a manga/anime series of the same name.³ For the U.S. version, Capcom’s marketing gurus tapped into the United Nations craze that was sweeping America’s youth in the late 1980s. United Nations: the public-domain fighting force!

Watching the Videos

The links above direct you to TASvideos.org. Unfortunately, viewing a video can be a haphazard process, as the site uses a maddening array of emulators (out of necessity) and video codecs. There are generally three ways to acquire a video; they’re listed below in the order that I usually try them.

• Use BitTorrent. Each video’s description page includes a torrent link. This works well for the most popular videos, but, because of the nature of BitTorrent, less so for more obscure entries. Patience usually pays off; I rarely have to wait longer than an hour or two to locate seeders. Once the torrent is finished, use MPlayer or VLC to play the video, which is usually an AVI encoded in DivX, XVid or H.264. (Annoying outliers like MKV and OGM pop up from time to time, though.)

• Play back the key-input movie. It’s the purist method: Load the button-sequence file into the emulator and watch it play the game. The trouble is that you need the same ROM used by the speedrunner, and TASvideos doesn’t supply these for (il)legal reasons. Even if you’re willing to wade through skeezy ROM sites to find the one you need, it may be a slightly different version from the one that the speedrunner had, in which case the speedrun won’t play back. Burn. There’s a bit more info on the TASvideos Downloads FAQ.

• Look elsewhere. Google the video name or, even better, the game name + video author. Sometimes this works and you turn up a YouTube page or the like, but often it comes up empty. Be careful, too, because even if you get results, they may point to an obsoleted movie.

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1. Of course, there are many glitches in Mega Man that will cause the game to crash, but Bisqwit and FinalFighter avoid those in their run, for obvious reasons. (Return to text)

2. The definitive side-scroller TAS is Andréls Delikat’s Gradius run. (Return to text)

3. Despite its name change, the American version of the game still places a big “88” marker on any area you’ve cleared, which makes no sense without the original reference. (Return to text)