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Speedrunner beats Mario 64 with one button and quantum physics [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-10-27  

A speedrunner just beat Super Mario 64 using one button and no joystick—a challenge so absurd it requires a working understanding of quantum physics to pull off. Welcome to the current state of a game that's been dissected, deconstructed, and rebuilt more than any other title in gaming history.

Super Mario 64 is a "solved" game. Speedrunners have spent thousands of collective hours examining every corner of its eight megabytes, cataloging every glitch and optimizing every route. Most games would be abandoned at this point, left to gather dust while players move on to fresh challenges. Instead, the community keeps inventing increasingly deranged restrictions to test the game's limits. YouTuber pannenkoek has become the patron saint of these impossible runs, most famously with his speedrun that manipulated parallel universes within the game's code. His latest project makes that look straightforward.

The new challenge restricts movement to a single button press with zero control stick input. Completing it requires exploiting obscure physics interactions that border on theoretical. Pannenkoek's explanation video devolves into a lecture on quantum mechanics, complete with diagrams that would make a physics professor proud. This isn't just playing a game anymore—it's applied mathematics wrapped in nostalgia. The speedrunning community has transformed Mario's 1996 platformer into an experimental laboratory, and they show no signs of stopping. Every "impossible" challenge eventually gets solved, which only inspires someone to dream up something even more ridiculous.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/10/27/speedrunner-beats-mario-64-with-one-button-and-quantum-physics.html

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