Almost perfect glitchless run with warps. There were a couple of times I had to slow down, and World 7-4 was a little bit tricky, but it was amazing besides that.

Warps used. Perfect run, no deaths, no save/reset, 1 character controlled. Attempted to get fastest possible score VS. Super Mario Bros is a game made by Nintendo in 1986. It's like Super Mario Bros but harder and this VS SMB is the arcade version. Doing a TAS was hard at times, especially in World 7-4.

Samsara: Judging #232.

Samsara: Welcome to the site.

As pointed out in this post, there are a number of problems with this run, but I'd like to point out two other major flaw that haven't been brought up in the thread. First: Glitchless is not an acceptable goal for Super Mario Bros 1 submissions. This extends to every possible version of SMB1: Lost Levels, VS, ROM hacks, All Night Nippon, you get the idea. As you can see from the judgement notes on the listed glitchless submissions, the glitches in SMB1 do not drastically change the gameplay enough to warrant separate publications. I don't see us ever accepting a glitchless SMB1 submission, even one that's as highly optimized as one of our published runs.

Second, and along the same lines: I don't consider VS SMB1 to be different enough from SMB1/Lost Levels to warrant publication when we already have both of them published. This is the full set of differences between SMB1 and VS, and most of these changes don't really mean much in the long run. Over half of them aren't even seen in the TAS because of the warps, and whatever IS seen is already in our warpless SMB1 and Lost Levels publications. Any further level layout changes are trivial to the point where they're unnoticeable to casual viewers, or even people like myself who are more intimately familiar with the games.

If I had to give a recommendation that isn't "don't TAS SMB1", it would be to spend more time experimenting with each level. You want to be as fast as possible in every single stage. Compare frame counts between your run and other runs as you go so you're absolutely sure you're never losing time, and go through each stage several times trying new things in order to make absolutely sure that you're using the fastest strategies. Good TASes take time, some published runs have been known to take upwards of years to make and most tend to be done over the course of weeks or even months. Take your time, especially for SMB1, which I'd argue has one of the highest barriers to entry for getting a run on the site. You're going to have to work extremely hard to get an SMB1 run published.

Alternately, don't TAS SMB1. Hone your skills on other games before tackling it again. SMB1 looks simple, but it's surprisingly complex, and a lot has to be accounted for over the course of a run. It's not new TASer friendly. It leads to a lot of false senses of security and a lot of suboptimal, rejected submissions and a lot of people with promise being turned away from the scene because, well... Second time I'm linking this, but we've seen so many SMB1 submissions. So, so many of them. It tends to make us a little unnecessarily harsh when we see new ones. At the end of the day, we don't want to turn people away. We want the community to grow, we want to take new members under our wings and teach them a craft that some of us have been doing and enjoying for over a decade now.

Some people take their submissions getting rejected personally, and I want to make it clear that the community is always judging the submission itself, not the TASer. We point things out about the submission to help the TASer improve by letting them know what to look out for in their future works. Some people start off fairly weakly, missing things they should have seen during their submission-making processes, but later go on to make easily some of the best TASes on the site and win site awards just by sticking around the community and continuing to work. That's the beautiful thing about TASing, really. It's incredibly accessible, meaning the next great TASer can be literally anyone making their first submission, regardless of whether or not it's accepted.

I do hope you keep trying and stick around the community. You can post on the forums (direct link to the SMB1 thread) or join our Discord to gather feedback and support for your next submission, or just hang back for now and watch our other runs to get a feel for the craft. For now, though, I have to reject this submission for suboptimal play and bad goal choice.