Meet Allan Alvarez. He’s the greatest Super Mario 64 player who has ever lived. He’s memorised all of the thousands of strategies, shortcuts and glitches required to traverse Princess Peach’s castle in the fastest possible time; he can backwards long jump with the best of them, bounding across stages in ways that an overweight plumber really shouldn’t be able to, and legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto certainly never intended.
He’s so good, he’s able to speedrun Mario 64 for a living, subsisting off revenue from his growing Twitch stream. He’s set the world record for a complete 120 star speedrun of the classic N64 game not once in the last month, but twice. He’s the first player to go below one hour and forty minutes for the feat, which is considered the speedrun equivalent of the triple crown, the heavyweight championship, or the 100 metres dash. Of course, it’s more of a marathon than anything. He says his new time of 1:39:28, set last weekend, “is the one I’ve been waiting for for a very long time.”
Even still, he can’t stop making mistakes.
“This run I did, I would say, about 80 percent of the run I did almost perfectly – I didn’t make any mistakes. And the other 20 percent, I made really big mistakes on,” Alvarez estimates, speaking to Red Bull Games from his home in Spain this week.
“So let's say you have 16 segments in the run, about 12 I did almost perfectly, and the other four, I lost 15 seconds on on each of them.”
The 22-year-old knows this all too well because he’s practised each segment thousands of times (he estimates he’s played Super Mario 64 for more than 5,000 hours since he began streaming his speedruns in 2014). There are 15 courses in the game, plus stars hidden in the castle itself and three Bowser boss battles. Add his best times up for these segments, and he can theoretically 100 percent complete the game in a staggering 1:37:35.
Theoretically, that is. As he explains, the chances of the stars and moon aligning, of one player nailing every frame perfect technique across one full run and the thousands upon thousands of button inputs required, are remote. And that’s before you even factor in the lottery of the game itself.
“Technically, there’s about a minute and 15 seconds that I lost on mistakes [in my last run],” he says. “The rest of the time lost is to do with luck based stuff.”
The biggest factor shoving that asymptotic curve of progress up towards infinity is how coins spawn in the game. Butt stomp a fallen Whomp block or bop a Goomba on the head on your way up the mountain in Bob-omb Battlefield and it’ll explode in a shower of golden coins – 100 of which you need to collect in each course in order to grab a crucial star. Which way they fly out, however, is unpredictable, and the cause of much Reset mashing for Mario 64 speedrunners. Errant coins can even derail entire runs if they should fall off a ledge.
“You could lose a lot of time depending on where they go,” Alvarez explains. “And sometimes a coin would fly in a different direction at such a high speed that you’re unable to get it, so you have to use a backup strategy. I would say on average in every 120 star run about 30 seconds of the entire run is based off of luck in general.”
As the thought experiment goes, if an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters were left to their own devices, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, word for word. By that same logic, if he just keeps speedrunning, that perfect run ought to be possible. Can he go under an hour and thirty-nine minutes? What about 1:37?
“Under 1:38 is definitely impossible,” he says before lobbing in a quick addendum. “At least for a while.”
Inside the mind of a Mario master
Alvarez is nothing if not cocky. The description of the YouTube upload of his most recent run begins “Omg i'm a f**king legend”. When he beat speedrunner Puncayshun to reclaim his world record time, he actually Skyped the speedrunner live on his Twitch stream, and proceeded to mercilessly taunt him (good naturedly, it must be said). “You got f**king wrecked dude,” he goaded.
Still, he’s got the skills to back it up. Alvarez, only a baby when Mario 64 was first released, never completed the game as a child and only began playing it in earnest three years ago when he started copying other speedrunners’ methods on Twitch. He beat the 120 star speedrun record one year later. Stars seem to gravitate towards him out of nowhere on his attempts in a way the child version of you could only once dream of. He also speedruns The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on Twitch, and after playing for just a few months, is already ranked seventh fastest in the world for the 100 percent category. And after Puncayshun snatched the Mario 64 world record last week, Alvarez sat down and broke it back less than 24 hours later – beating it by a full twenty seconds.
Surely, it’s not just coincidence then that the two fastest Mario 64 speedruns happened in the same weekend? Motivation and competition, friendly or otherwise, must be just as important a factor as whether your cartridge decides to send a coin one way or another?
“I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if me getting my world record beaten gave me a huge jump of motivation,” Alvarez admits. “You need consistency, you need speed, and you need patience. You need lots of things to go perfectly to get a time like that.”
You don’t need everything to go perfectly just yet though. Alvarez says that recently he’s stepped away from the practice of immediately resetting and ending a run following an early error.
“That is actually probably the most controversial part about speedrunning Mario 64. Most people always reset when you make a mistake at the beginning because no one likes to start a run with a bad beginning. But recently I’ve changed my mindset.” Indeed, a few early slippages still didn’t stop him from smashing the record this week.
Though Alvarez has confessed to smashing more than one of his Hori Mini Pad game controllers in frustration since he began running professionally, he says speedrunning is the only way he can play games now – he has no interest in the latest releases, or online multiplayer games. He bought a Nintendo Switch last month and hasn’t touched it.
“Speedrunning has made me changed my view on video gaming forever, I think. It’s so fun and so challenging and so competitive. Casual gaming just isn't – I feel like I'm just wasting time.”
99 minutes: The new milestone
Though the record is still changing hands rapidly, it’s hard not to wonder how much longer the trading can continue. The days of legendary Mario 64 speedrunner Siglemic innovating with each run are long gone. The game has been played over and over to death (of many controllers, at least) and the new breakthroughs in strats and shortcuts are drying up.
Alvarez points out that not a single effective new trick has been uncovered by the community since 2015 – a sneaky backwards long jump in Hazy Maze Cave that can save six seconds on a run, but he doesn’t actually try because he “can’t mash buttons fast, consistently.” He’ll have to master it in order to improve his time much further, he admits.
“Every time saving strat in a 120 star run surely has been found, because Mario 64 has been speedrun for more than 10 years. There are thousands and thousands of tricks that everyone knows already. New strategies are just very, very rare.”
Now more than ever, it comes down to technical ability, stamina – it’s essential to grab a quick breather as Mario leaps out of a painting and takes off his hat to wipe his brow – and willingness.
Can Cheese05 keep going, keep driving that record down? Or will his Mario fall back on his laurels, workman’s overalls and a belly from consuming too many mushrooms the size of his face crushing his wreath? Can he dip below 1:39:00?
“That’s the question that everyone asks me. I don't know how to answer it. I'm not sure – I actually think that 1:38 might be a goal for me in the near future. A lot of people were saying ‘Oh, I think the best time can be a mid 1:39 this year’, but it’s already been achieved halfway through the year. I would definitely say yes if I continue grinding like I am right now.”
“The only question is: Will I have the motivation to do so? It gets very stressful and hard after months of doing it every day. So it’s all up to me and if i have the motivation to do so. If I do I will definitely say that yes, 1:38 can be achieved this year but it’s all up to my motivation.”
It sounds to us like Cheese05 needs his competitors to keep up with him still. “I need Puncayshun to keep playing the game for me to have motivation.”
There is, however, one new game that could distract him from his goal. “When Super Mario Odyssey comes out I will definitely be speedrunning that game. I bought a Nintendo Switch because of that. I would love to speedrun a new Mario game.”