A VIDEO HISTORY OF THE A BUTTON CHALLENGE
April 25, 2021
Bismuth has just posted a comprehensive video of the early history of the A Button Challenge which may be of interest to those visiting this site. I didn't create the challenge but I was one of the first people to promote the challenge and record my scores.
As the video notes, in 2008 I set up a page where people could upload their scores which were added into an automatically-generated leaderboard. However, it never really took off; perhaps in part because I didn't integrate it into the site well. In 2009 I planned to unify the database for the star times and ABC scores and make complete competition pages for both of them. However, a few computer failures in addition to working full-time on a Master's degree resulted in me neglecting the site. Around this time some players became frustrated with the slow site updates so they created their own site—resulting in less of a need for this site and further decreasing my motivation.
I'm a bit sad that I dropped the ball but I'm keeping the site archived for posterity. In 2019 a server upgrade broke my old PHP scripts so I converted all dynamically-generated pages to static pages. This included the Video Quiz run by Robert Z and the Star Time Competition run by ameba2. A long overdue congratulations to Myles and Filimonas for winning those! I hope keeping these pages up might bring back some happy memories for some people. Thanks everyone for your support over the years. :)
P.S. One inaccuracy in Bismuth's video—I was a high school student when I started this site.
MYLES BUKRIM CHEATED IN HIS 16-STAR SPEED RUN
April 3, 2015
Regrettably, it has come to my attention that Myles Bukrim's speed run which has been advertised on this page for nearly 7 years was recently discovered to not be recorded in a single take. Responding to the discovery, Myles said:
The video was spliced. The allegations are true. The evidence speaks for itself.
Formerly one of the most well-respected SM64 players, this is truly unfortunate news. While explaining himself, Myles gave the reasoning that he thought "cheating was growing out of control in this game". As one of the primary people responsible for verifying SM64 records over the timeframe in question, I take such allegations personally. To the best of my knowledge, none of the records archived on this website were achieved by cheating, although some were accepted on the honor system. If anyone has any evidence of cheating that I was not aware of, please contact me (cbright).
I have also updated the 16-star record page with the times of the current world record as recorded by MarioRuns. A lot has happened in the intervening time, and the current record is almost 3 minutes faster than Myles' claimed time!
THE IMPOSSIBLE COIN OBTAINED
July 23, 2014
I've been informed that the impossible coin has been obtained.
NEW 16-STAR SPEED RUN RECORD: 17 MINUTES, 31 SECONDS! [UPDATE: FAKE]
June 2, 2008
Last month the legendary Myles Bukrim completed an amazingly clean 16-star run, finishing the entire game (from first gaining control of Mario to Bowser's final star) in a mere seventeen and a half minutes. You can watch the video on YouTube — a symphony in three parts — or download the run (courtesy wrvids.com). The run should also be available on SDA in the near future.
This is the first known improvement to the record since Marius 'Holy Moly' Mollenhauer and Jacob 'LeCoureur103' Cannon battled over the record during the summer of 2005. Marius claimed to have a time of 18:14 and Jacob claimed a time of 18:08, but the battle fizzled out after spezzafer's 16:25 tool-assisted test run was released. Except for a 19:01 video from Marius, their videos never made it online. [Update July 6, 2017: Marius' video was also discovered not to be recorded in a single take.] Thus, Myles' video beats the fastest available video by a minute and a half. Star choices and times for various videos are available on this page, including an old run Myles himself made in 2005.
We've already seen how Myles dominates the races, but his star times are also top notch and on the last update he passed Thiago in our points ranking. Congratulations Myles!
On an unrelated note, the http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cbright/sm64/ link is going to stop working shortly; simply stick to www.sm64.com.
"What if everything you see is more than what you see - the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things."
-Shigeru Miyamoto, SM64 Game Director and Producer