God, we love speedrunners. Not only are they performing incredible feats of glitchery, skill, and mad code manipulation, but they’re also just breaking games and having a great time with it. It’s basically a middle finger in the face of the designers, proving that the way the game is “supposed to be played” is not the only way it can be played.
Relatively new YouTube channel Lowest Percent is a great source for some of the weirdest speedruns you can find, including the one where Link stares at rupees for 17 hours, and how to beat the entirety of Super Mario 64 All-Stars with one star.
The channel is run by two people: SmallAnt, a Twitch streamer and speedrunner who holds several world records for Super Mario Odyssey speedruns; and Linkus7, who is also a Twitch streamer and speedrunner, who has a ton of world records for Wind Waker speedruns. Needless to say, they know their stuff.
Their latest video, narrated by the speedrunner AverageTrey, is about the “Max% Pre-Peach” run, which is a speedrun that involves getting as many “things” – blue coins and Shine Sprites – as possible, without unlocking the Delfino statue that leads to Shadow Mario kidnapping Peach. This involves a lot of precise jumping, glitch usage, and clipping into walls that you’re not supposed to go into, including something called a “Yoshi Skip” – which is just going behind the orange juice walls without Yoshi there to blast them away.
It turns out that a large part of the speedrun is magical bananas. Lots of magical bananas. Also, barrels that float in mid-air. Probably because they’re full of magical bananas.
In case you’re wondering, the current Max% Pre-Peach record is 25 Shine Sprites and 40 blue coins, by speedrunner NokiDoki, at 1 hour, six minutes, and four seconds. There is a run by Orange 117 that takes only 58 minutes, but it uses illegitimate strats – having positional data on the screen – so despite being extremely cool, it’s not the record-holder.