It’s a me, muscle memory!

At SoraNews24 we often like to celebrate great accomplishments in gaming, whether it’s a giant otter mascot playing semi-pro Street Fighter or the man who managed to create a video play-through of the original Super Mario Bros. in Minecraft.

This time, the superhuman feat was done by a gamer using the handle Gorou on Niconico Douga on 4 December, 2019. It was recently highlighted by Niconico’s news platform, and rightfully so because as of this writing, his video only had a little over 100,000 views, which is far too low for such an undeniably impressive accomplishment.

The following video is an example of a speed run, which is an open competition to complete a game as fast as possible. In the case, the game is classic speed run fodder Super Mario 64, but Gorou takes things to a whole other level by doing it blindfolded.

In the end, Gorou completes the game in just 24 minutes and three seconds. To put that in perspective, the current speed run record is 14 minutes and 59 seconds with full use of vision. By the way, this particular run is a 16-star real time attack which uses an external timer and allows certain glitches to be exploited so that one can complete the game with only 16 stars.

Considering Gorou is doing this without the sense of vision, it actually sounds harder, but he manages to not only navigate Mario through hidden cracks in the walls, but also pull off some hair-raising jumps.

▼ Gorou gets star number 8 by jumping from a bird in mid-flight onto a tiny platform…blindfolded.

On a lot of classic 2-D games, this kind of play is still very impressive, requiring a complete memorization of the levels and enemy characters in order to navigate. But with Mario 64, the added third dimension and floating camera make things exponentially more difficult.

For instance, after about 11 minutes Gorou comes up against Bowser for the first time. In this battle, he must grab the Koopa king by his tail, swing him in a circle, and then release at just the right time so that the momentum sends him right into a spiked iron ball.

To accomplish this Gorou has to listen carefully to the swishing sound to get his split-second timing right, a technique he credits to former blindfold record holder zserf.

Gorou also performs exploits like the MIPS clips in which he uses a rabbit to force his way through locked doors, and the endless staircase backwards long jump, also known as the “ketsu warp” (ass warp) in which Mario must quickly and repeatedly jump backwards up a staircase to power through another otherwise locked door.

▼ In order to perform the MIPS clips, Gorou must first catch a moving rabbit…blindfolded

He does this all without sight and in over a minute less than his previous record, which can be viewed in the bottom left corner of the screen simultaneously. Watching all this, you might have thought that Gorou was cheating since the towel-like mask over his face might be at least partially see-though. However, once the final move is performed he pulls it off to reveal another blindfold underneath!

The accomplishment was met with universal praise online.

“That guy must be amazingly disciplined.”
“He played the game through his mind’s eye.”
“I can see it being done in 2-D. But in 3-D you need ultra precision with the analog stick and smoother frame rates.”
“I wonder if he instinctively tenses up every time he hears ‘Yahoo!'”
“I’m speechless. This is too good to be real. Sick strats!”
“That triple jump wall kick in Sky… I can’t even do that with my eyes open!”
“In a long time I haven’t been amazed by something. This definitely amazes me, so much. Very good job man. You deserve recognition.”

He certainly does, and while getting props in the media is certainly nice, it seems like Gorou deserves more. If Takahashi Meiji could become the guy in Hudson’s Adventure Island back in the ’80s, why can’t Nintendo throw Gorou a bone and toss him in a game as a goomba or something?

Source: Niconico Douga, Niconico News, My Game News Flash
Images: Niconico Douga/Gorou
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