Speedrunner beats Mario Bros. word record while wearing heart rate monitor

Going by “Darbian” on YouTube, the record-setter casually flies through the NES game, chatting with virtual onlookers throughout the video, recorded this week. It took years to shave off half a second from the world record.

The world of speedrunning is a fascinating one, and it doesn’t get any more fascinating than this. He holds a few first and second place records on several games, and this latest world record makes him the fastest to beat Super Mario Bros. with warps on a console without a computer’s help (those are called TAS, or tool-assisted speedruns).

Darbian beat his own record by 387 milliseconds, which was set last October.

As he begins to realize how close he is to achieving a new world record, Darbian’s heart rate begins to soar. The 1985 NES title Super Mario Bros. is the most obvious vintage game that people are still button-pressing through today and Kotaku points out that just yesterday, a gamer broke new ground by beating the game faster than anybody ever has. That’s right, this any percentage run is imperfect by 10 frames. We go into more detail about other common Super Mario Bros. strategies here. Darbian played a total of eight levels. Considering how the game’s optimal speed routes have already been discovered, all that’s left is for speedrunners to ideal that said path in order to achieve the best possible time. As such, he claims that he’s reached his “potential in this category”.