He’s done this thousands of times. Thousands of five-minute increments of quiet diligence. He’s playing a video game, Super Mario Brothers, and he’s playing it as fast as he can. Hundreds of fans and competitors are watching. Orange and cyan pixels flash in front of him. He’s the fastest in the world. But that doesn’t matter. He wants to go faster. He needs to. 

Even though he’s already charting the outer reaches of what’s possible in the game, one obstacle still separates him from transcendence: a trick called “Lightning 4-2.” It’s his boogeyman, a chain of nearly 20 button presses that need to be perfectly timed down to the one-sixtieth of a second. More than just perfectly timed, he needs to position Mario perfectly, too, down to the sub-pixels — the subatomic particles of the game. 

As Mario dances across the screen in a hypnotic discotheque, Niftski, the speedrunner, isn’t thinking about any of this. It’s all instinctual. He’s sweating now. His heart rate has blown past 180 beats per minute – but he will do it. He’s going to make history. 

Four minutes, 54 seconds and 265 milliseconds. In the 40 years since its release, speedrunning Super Mario Brothers has become almost perfectly optimized. That’s in part because it’s dead simple: it’s a side-scroller, the physical console doesn’t have many buttons, and it’s largely linear. Go forward. Jump. Duck. Slow down. Speed up. That’s it. 

Niftski is not the first person to try to play Super Mario Brothers as fast as he can. Nor is he the first to play a video game as fast as possible. Speedrunning, as a hobby, likely began back in 1993 when players started trying to play DOOM, another computer game, as quickly as they could. In the three decades since, speedrunning has blossomed into a real competition, with world records, meets, and celebrity competitors of its own. 

But unlike other athletic contests like discus throwing or marathon running, where upper limits are usually unknown to competitors and largely depend on the athletes’ physiologies, speedrunning is different. Speedrunners know how fast a game can be played. Perfection can be seen, quantified, known.

That’s because most games played by speedrunners have a parallel community of coders, and those coders often build computer programs that play the game perfectly. Every button is pressed, held, and released right on time. These computer programs, called “tool-assisted speedruns,” help speedrunners see what’s possible. For Super Mario Brothers, that time — perfection — is four minutes, 54 seconds and 265 milliseconds. That’s the time to match. But how? 

To start, speedrunners need to break the game. By today’s standards, the game’s underlying code is relatively primitive. To bring down the time, speedrunners use glitches — little errors and contradictions deep in the code that players exploit for their benefit. Most glitches, though, are useless. But a small number save time. Using glitches, players can force Mario through walls, finish levels fractions of a second quicker, and run faster. In speedruns, glitches are allowed and encouraged.

These time-saving strategies have taken years to discover. Each new strategy lowers the fastest possible time to a new low. But after 40 years, barring a new discovery, we have likely reached the true floor of the game. Four minutes, 54 seconds and 265 milliseconds.

It’s 2007. Super Mario Brothers, at this point, has been out for a little over 30 years. That April, a speedrunner known online as AndrewG posts a new world record: 5:00.355. Over the next decade and a half, speedrunners will claw, scrape, and fight for each millisecond below five minutes. For this game, change is glacial. Today, we now know there are only a little over five seconds to save. And so each second below five minutes is a towering accomplishment, the product of thousands upon thousands of hours making tiny, seemingly futile improvements. 

While speedrunners like AndrewG were scrabbling for the seconds that would one day change the arc of Niftski’s life, in 2007, Niftski was miles away from his own future. He’s just Dylan. (He asked to not share his real last name out of privacy concerns.) Back then, he was around 5 years old, filling afternoons playing Super Mario Brothers with his neighbor in his garage. She would bring over her NES console, and they’d play for hours side-by-side. He didn’t know it then, but those were the first of thousands of hours he’d spend with the game.

Speedrunning Super Mario Brothers was Dylan’s first real competitive effort. He played basketball growing up, but not competitively. “I just liked shooting around,” he said. “I didn’t really like playing on teams.” In the decade or so that followed, Dylan wasn’t playing Super Mario Brothers at all. He was playing flash games and other video games like Minecraft and Counter Strike, but none of them competitively. He was growing up. 

In 2019, he picked up Super Mario Brothers again, his old childhood favorite. He’d seen videos of old speedrunners and, for fun, started practicing the strategies they used years ago to bring down the time below five minutes. Instead of playing the whole game from end to end, he would play the same section over and over again, trying to master one trick at a time. He doesn’t remember how many times he did this, but eventually, he strung all of the tricks together and logged his first time below five minutes. It was four minutes and 58 seconds. 

After “not much dedication,” Niftski had logged a top-100 time on the global leaderboard. The rush was exhilarating. “That was the point where it clicked,” he said. “I knew I wanted to push it further.” In fact, he wanted to go much further. He wanted to push it all the way.

When he notched his next best time — four minutes, 57 seconds, and 660 milliseconds — in October 2019, just a few months after he cracked 4:58, that’s when his life began to change. Spectators and fellow speedrunners took notice as they watched his stream. For some speedrunners, it took years to bring their time down half a second. Still others have never cracked four minutes and 58 seconds. That Niftski had improved so much and so quickly belied everything spectators seemed to know about the arduously slow progress of speedrunning Super Mario Brothers.  

And then he did it again. 

That same day, he clocked a 4:57.277. 

At this point it must be said that Niftski is a generational talent. At 20, he’s currently the world record holder for Super Mario Brothers and holds world records in numerous other video games. Unlike athletes in other sports, Niftski doesn’t have preternaturally deft reflexes, or a mutation that makes him produce half as much lactic acid. All he has is a bedroom, a computer, and a keyboard. 

He spent the months following his low-4:57 run practicing. Like a Shaolin fighter in a monastery, Niftski sequestered himself to his dark bedroom for 12-hour stretches, practicing different parts of the game. Each day had a similar cadence. Wake just after noon, practice until after midnight. Some of those days he spent alone, the only sound the flurry of keys on his computer keyboard. Others he spent on group phone calls with fellow speedrunners, all trying to best themselves, the game, and each other. 

But his meteoric progress that had once shocked the speedrunning community was slowing down. He needed to practice more than ever before. He was making more mistakes. That included mistakes during the final level of the game, 8-4. It’s infamous for being a hard level, not because of the number of tricks but because of the absence of them. Any time saved is pure skill. It’s a monster of a level. 

“All I needed was two frame perfect jumps in 8-4,” he said, referring to jumps he had executed countless times before. “I think it was a mix of nerves and a mental block.” 

Those jumps were some of many other mistakes he hadn’t made before. 

“I did die to Bowser twice,” he told me, laughing. No one dies to Bowser, a giant lizard and the weak final boss of the game easily bested by pro players like Niftski. “I actually got a pattern where all you have to do is run under him, and I just panicked, thought it was a different pattern, and jumped into Bowser. That was the last jump of the game.” 

In baseball terms, dying to Bowser is like hitting an inside-the-park home run and getting tagged out after missing home plate. It’s a humiliating way to end a run, made all the more tragic by his being on pace for his personal best time. 

“You put all of that grind and effort, and then you get to the last room,” Niftski said. “You get a completely free pattern, and then you just choke it in the worst way ever.”

He nearly cracked 4:57 nine other times. Each time, nerves got the best of him. But his drought, fortuitously, would not last. Not long after his two deaths to Bowser, he logged a 4:56.878. 

Two months, over 6,000 attempts, and countless practice sessions, he’d finally breached the boundary that separated skill from real mastery. Remember, each second separates speedrunners exponentially. Half as many speedrunners have earned a 4:56 than a 4:57. That’s because the number of tricks runners must execute rises with every second lower. 

Niftski told me that his ratio of practicing a trick to a full attempt is 99-to-1. That means when he starts doing attempts, most of his work is already in the rearview. Getting a record is just a matter of putting it together. 

“I went frame-rule by frame-rule,” he said. (A frame-rule is a somewhat esoteric 21-frame increment speedrunners use to measure time in the game.) “After my 4:56 and beyond, I would just push it 0.3 at a time.” When he brought his time down to low 4:56 three months later, he was ranked fifth in the world. 

Niftski knows these milestones instinctively, down to the millisecond and the specific day he achieved each one. They might as well be tattooed on his body. 

He set his sights on beating 4:56 in late 2020, not even a year later. No one had ever beaten these benchmarks so quickly before. After another 2,000 attempts, there he was again, about to beat another personal record. Except this time, if his pace held out, it would be the world record. 

“I still vividly remember going into 8-4 telling myself ‘whatever happens, happens, but this is already good enough for me because this is the fastest anyone has entered 8-4,’” Niftski told me. “I didn’t need anything crazy in 8-4, all I needed was a good wall jump and to get past Bowser.”

And so he did. His time: four minutes, 55 seconds, and 430 milliseconds. It was his first world record in Super Mario Brothers. And he’d beaten the world record holder at the time, Kosmic. Among other veteran speedrunners like him, Kosmic was one of Niftski’s role models. “It felt absolutely surreal,” he told me, of dethroning him. He was now the best in the world.

He could have stopped there. But his sights were set on something bigger: getting the first 4:54. For years, the Super Mario Brothers speedrunning community believed a 4:54 time was impossible. It took too many frame-perfect inputs, too many tricks. A human could never pull it off.

Enter Niftski. 

On Apr. 7, 2021, a mere two years after he started speedrunning, he became the first person since the release of Super Mario Brothers to beat the game under four minutes and 55 seconds. In his livestream, which was archived and is available online, he’s overcome with paroxysms of joy. For about a minute, the only thing he seemed to muster were yelps of “oh my god.” This record sent shockwaves through the community. His phone screen did not go dark for three days. The messages just kept coming.

“This was the happiest I’d ever been achieving a speedrunning goal,” Niftski said of getting a time under 4:55. “And probably, honestly, one of the happiest times in my life.” 

What else was left? He’d already done the impossible, and he’d done it sooner than anyone else. After he’d cracked the 4:55 barrier, the only time saves were in human performance — there were no tricks left. Plus, he’d been playing and practicing for years. Perhaps it was time for a break.

It wasn’t. In mid-2022, a few coders discovered a new trick. But this one was different. It was nearly 20 sequential, frame-perfect inputs that had been Frankensteined together in a way that pushed the underlying code to its breaking point, and then beyond it. Doing one frame-perfect input per trick was hard enough. 15 in a row bordered on masochism. (“Frame-perfect” means a button must be pressed on the right frame and for only one frame, or for one-sixtieth of a second.) 

At this point, it’d taken nearly 40 years to figure out how to program a computer to do it. There was no telling how long it would take a human player to execute it live, let alone on a world-record pace. 

But Niftski was no stranger to breaking down barriers. It was time to do the impossible again. The impossible, in this case, was “Lightning 4-2”, the name speedrunners had bestowed the new trick. The trick, Niftski said, is “sub-pixel and sub-speed perfect, which are values you don’t see to the naked eye. It is perfect to a science. The fact that Lightning 4-2 even works is already crazy enough.” And if it works, Niftski will practice until he cannot miss it. 

A year passes and it’s 2023. Niftski wastes no time learning how to do Lightning 4-2 in real time. But he’s only ever done it in practice, on its own. It’s a monumental achievement but mostly academic until he’s able to implement it for an audience of thousands during a run at a world-record pace. 

September 6, 2023. He’s been streaming world-record attempts online for a few days. But Lighting 4-2 is still a challenge. Even though he’s pulled it off in practice before, doing so live, at a world-record pace, is still a massive obstacle. 

He starts a new run. The first level is 1-1. He’s been doing it forever, could probably do it blindfolded. Perfect time. Ditto the next two levels. Heart rate? 111 beats per minute. (Niftski’s heart rate is visible on the livestream.)

Now it’s time for 4-2. He’s gotten the trick three times already in this string of runs, but keeps missing tricks in a harder level later on in the run. His fingers fly over the keys. Mario moves like an Olympic figure skater over the blocks, forward and backward through the air, through the oranges, blues, and greens of the screen. It’s almost art.

He’s got it. Another Lightning 4-2. In real time. For the fourth time in a row. This could be it. His heart rate is 140 now. He’s shouting in disbelief as he plays. 

8-1. Another hard level, but he’s been here three times before after nailing 4-2. Gets 8-1 perfect too, as he does the next level. His heart rate rockets past 170. Ragged breaths. “I’m going to pass out,” he says, as the next level, 8-3, the run killer, begins. But this time, where his other runs have failed, he’s perfect. 180 beats per minute now. It’s time. 

50 seconds left. As he enters 8-4, Niftski is tied with the tool-assisted speedrun. He’s playing it as fast as a computer. On all of the other levels, there is no more time to be saved. He’s perfect.

In Niftski’s telling, this is when he turns his brain off. He’s been playing the game for four years, and he’s the best to ever do it. 8-4 is a different kind of challenge. Again, unlike other levels, there’s only one real trick and it’s easy to pull off, even at a world-record pace. The only time to be saved comes by making as many frame-perfect button presses as possible. It would be akin to doing as many Lightning 4-2s as possible. Niftski decides to play it safe. 

A few rooms in the final level separate his run from perfection. During the first three rooms, he’s silent. “For lack of a better phrase, I became one with the game,” Niftski said. Meaning that it’s all muscle memory at this point. 

184 beats per minute. He’s in the second-to-last room. He’s played the game so many times, he calls out aloud the hexadecimal code corresponding to Bowser’s unique movement pattern in the final room. It’s as if he can see the future. 

Final room. Bowser might as well have not been there. He was exactly where Niftski expected him to be. Mario is in the air now, coasting over Bowser’s head, about to touch the axe, which will end the speed run. Precious milliseconds melt away as Mario descends from the inky blackness and down onto the axe.

The final time is four minutes, 54 seconds, and 631 milliseconds. 

He’s done it with time to spare. 

In those final moments, his heart rate topped out at 190.

He jumps up from his keyboard and starts screaming yes. His howls sound barely human. “It felt like I was watching through someone else’s point of view scream ‘oh my god,’ ‘oh my god,’” he said. After the yelling subsides, he starts to cry, overwhelmed by what he’s accomplished. 

4:54 might never be beaten. Soon after posting his 4:54.631, Niftski wrote online that, “only 22 frames, or 0.366 seconds, separate this run from absolute perfection. As much as I’ve stressed how amazing this run is to me, this is not my end goal, and I will not be stopping here!” It still stands as the world record. The upper limit, barring any new tricks or developments, is 4:54.265. 

Niftski took a break from speedrunning Super Mario Brothers after posting his world record. In the year since, like a free agent, he’s been setting records in other games. The only thing left to do is shave off a few more frames in the final level, 8-4. 

The itch, however, has returned. He’s been playing again. This January, he lowered the time again, to 4:54.565. He’s not done speedrunning Super Mario Brothers. He wants to bring down the time even more. 

“When I can fully retire,” Niftski told me, “is 4:54.300.” That’s less than a tenth of a second away from the computer’s perfect time, which is 4:54.265. 

He falls silent for a moment after he tells me his retirement time. For a moment I wonder if we’re thinking the same thing. In his world record run, he’d played every level but the final one perfectly. In a different run, he’d played only the final level perfectly. That means, in the aggregate, he already has what he’s looking for. 

“In two segments,” he said, as if reading my thoughts off a teleprompter, “I have a perfect speedrun of Mario.” 

He means the perfect time, the computer time.

He just needs to put them together.