Super Mario 64 is one of the few games that seems to draw people to this site by the thousands. The ability to beat the game with only 16 stars was jaw dropping. We are now down to 0 stars.

This was the first published Super Mario 64 run. In its day it was an astonishing demonstration of breaking the game: MIPS the Rabbit and poor collision detection were used to get the second key early, and a "Backwards Long Jump" trick was used to get up the supposedly-infinite staircase and access the last level early. This "Backwards Long Jump," or BLJ, became one of the most important moves in any% Super Mario 64 speedruns, while MIPS is now, sadly, entirely missing from them.

(Almost) Exactly a year later AKA (Mitjitsu) produced a run that was 46 seconds faster than Spezzafer's orginal run. It was largely improved by better precision via use of version 0.6 of the TAS input plugin, which introduced a "virtual analogue stick," as well as new glitches and strategies.

As soon as Mitjitsu's run was published, Rikku submitted a run that was 7 seconds faster. The improvements largely came from better precision and new strategies. The was the lead-off of what became known as the "SM64 wars".

Mitjitsu quickly responded with another 7 second improvement. Most of the time was saved by not saving after collecting a star and taking a new overworld route. Rikku then posted a 3 second improvement, which was the subsequently published version.

The rules of the SM64 wars were about to change. It seems if you can't beat them join them: that is, team up with someone else. Mitjitsu, teaming up with Swordless Link, managed to come up with new stars, strategies, routes and optimizations, which lowered the previous time by 16 seconds.

MIPS became obsolete, so to speak, with the new-found ability to use the BLJ to bypass the door he used to guard. Not needing MIPS meant not needing the first 15 stars of the 16 star run, resulting in an astonishing 1 star run. This was a kind of Holy Grail for players, and the new movie by Mitjitsu and Swordless Link sparked shock waves of awe.

Well if you need 1 star, why do you need any? This was the question answered later by the authors of the 1 star run, with their new 0 star run.

After a number of published improvements to the 0 star branch, various Super Mario 64 TASers discovered a series of tricks that would forever change how the game was TASed. With those tricks in mind, the resulting movie saved 24 seconds off the previous movie.

Eventually, even the idea of having to collect two keys was considered too slow, resulting in yet one more major improvement.

Five years go by as Super Mario 64 TASing got more and more advanced, and bits and pieces of each level of the game got optimized as much as they could, saving a number of frames here and there. 1 key was still required to beat the game, but a new technique was then discovered that could save seconds off the run instead of just frames. This is the result.