Completing the original Super Mario Bros. is a great achievement in itself, but there are some players out there who not only seek to increase the difficulty but also to claim a place in history, however small it may be. That said, the web has properly immortalized this Japanese player who finished his Super Mario Bros. run in less than fifteen minutes... blind.
An unforgettable gem of video games, one of the heroes that saved an entire industry, and now the target of multiple challenges, Super Mario Bros. looks great at thirty years old. This Nintendo classic is one of the most documented on the entire NES platform, and yet its fans continue to explore every aspect, discovering new tricks, bugs, and extreme ways to finish the story. In June 2014, another way to obtain infinite lives appeared, while in October 2015 and then in January, a new mark for its speedrun was established, just below five minutes. During that same month of January, Super Mario Bros. was part of another record, though completely different in its characteristics. Instead of finishing as fast as possible, its player did it blind.
I'm afraid my Japanese isn't good enough to translate the name of the channel on YouTube that this player owns (and Google Translate had a nervous breakdown in the attempt), but what we do know is that he trained for three months before publishing the video. In essence, what he does is control his game rhythm (you can hear him counting more than once) and use fire as a kind of radar/sonar to know where he is in the level. Near the end, it's evident that nerves begin to take control of the player, but we can't blame him. After all, the way he finishes level 8-3 left us on the edge of a heart attack.
One of the big questions about the last level is how he survives Bowser's hammers, but if you allow me to speculate, I think Mario still had his invincibility after touching the fire. The video ends with a player broken by emotion, which prevented him from stopping the clock, but Mario touches the axe at 14 minutes and 34 seconds. Will someone try to improve that time? We'll see...
