On October 23, 2025, Niftski, a streamer on Twitch who has been speedrunning Super Mario Bros. since 2019, obtained the world record in the original Super Mario Bros game, getting a 4:54:448 (4 minutes, 54 seconds, and 448 milliseconds), improving on his previous record of 4:54:482. This progress is extremely impressive, given the massive number of frame-perfect inputs required to achieve such a highly optimized speedrun, where improvement is measured based on sixtieths of a second.
Now, we can discuss what makes Niftski so goated. First, he achieved the first-ever sub 4:55, which was considered the final second barrier in the entire speedrun. At the time, no one believed that further improvements were even possible to reduce the time further. The impressive part is not just the fact that he has the world record, or the fact that he performed so many world record speedruns: it’s the fact that he is able to achieve them at such a fast pace. For example, the time between his world record and his previous world record is a whopping time of two weeks. Two weeks! Given how hyper-optimized this game is, being able to improve so much in the span of two weeks is a massive indication of skill.
As the runs become more optimized, however, each following run becomes harder. Each trick becomes another opportunity for failure, but with enough attempts, it’ll only be a matter of time before he successfully performs each trick in succession while perhaps even discovering new developments. Through these refinements, he hopes to eventually match the Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS), which incorporates every optimization that we know of, with a time of 4:54:265.
So, how have humans basically managed to edge so close to the time achieved by a TAS, even with all of the tools that the TAS uses that allow it to perform gameplay that would be impossible to do in real time? Simply put, Super Mario Bros. has an internal clock, which ticks every 21 frames. Because of a programming quirk, the game can only load a new level once the clock ticks. Therefore, even if a human technically completes the level a few frames after the TAS, as long as they do so before the next tick occurs, they will start the level at the same time the TAS does. Through this method, speedrunners have managed to tie all of the levels that lead up to the final level. However, speedrunning time ends as soon as the game’s end cutscene begins, which does not rely on this internal timer. Therefore, in this level and this level alone, a human needs to perform all of the same inputs as the TAS in order to tie with it. Surprisingly, on March 16, 2022, Niftski demonstrated that humans can actually match the TAS on the final level. This is super important because it shows us that humans can get the theoretically perfect time, and it’s within reach if we only we had good enough execution.
Given how quickly he’s been breaking world records one after another, it might not be long before Niftski gets another world record. In fact, right now, Niftski is constantly streaming his attempts to shave even more frames off, with his next attempted milestone being a 4:54:3xx. It’ll be very difficult, but for the goat, it might not be impossible at all.
