If you’re a retro gamer, you know “Takahashi” is not a name to be taken lightly.
The Mario Party games are filled with fan service for those who are deeply familiar with the Nintendo mascot’s lore, but the series is also welcoming and accommodating for people who ordinarily don’t play video games at all. Mario Party is basically a board game with quick, easy-to-understand mini games between movement turns, and its pick-up-and-play nature makes it fun for players of any age.
So, demographically speaking, it’s not such a shock that Japanese Twitter user Toshiyuki Takahashi (@meijin_16shot) was playing some Mario Party Superstars for the Switch the other day. Choosing Mario as his character might also cause some to suspect Takahashi isn’t a particularly avid gamer, maybe someone who’s only familiar with the biggest star in video games, and none of the rest of the cast.
But any doubts as to Takahashi’s hard-core credentials vanish in seconds when watching his gameplay video.
▼ 5.21 seconds to be exact
That’s the Pokey Pummel minigame, in which you have to repeatedly hit the A button as fast as you can to make your character swing a hammer and knock away segments of the cactus-like creature in front of you. It’s not clear whether Takahashi is playing against other human payers or the game’s A.I., but either way he’s done with his pummeling before his opponents are even halfway through theirs.
Now, if you’re much of a video game historian, your brain might be making a connection between “incredibly fast fingers” and “guy named Takahashi.” Toshiyuki Takahashi is better known as Takahashi Meijin, or Master Takahashi, the legendary figure from the Famicom/NES era whose fast fingers earned him so much fame that Hudson Soft, the game developer he worked at and handled promotions for, immortalized him as the in-game star of the Adventure Island series (though his name was changed to “Master Higgens” for overseas versions of the games).
The only thing more impressive than watching the speed with which Takahashi’s Mario hammers the Pokey is watching the speed with which Takahashi hits the button, and thankfully he’s also posted a video with a view of his controller, in which he achieves an even faster time of 5.16 seconds.
Commenters were quick to pay their respects to the master:
“I’d expect nothing less from him.”
“The master is still the master.”
“He’s the real deal.”
“A true legend.”
“It’s like he’s in a whole different dimension.”
“This is the kind of person I want to be when I’m his age.”
For those wondering just how fast he’s hitting the button in the 5.16-second video, each of the Pokey’s 13 segments takes five hits to clear, for a total of 65 button presses, so the math works out to 12.6 presses per second. While that’s not quite the 16 presses per second Takahashi was capable of in his prime, it’s still incredibly fast, and he says that he’s also managed to pull off a time of 5.13 seconds in Pokey Pummel and thinks he can get it down to less than 5 seconds with some more practice.
Source: Twitter/@ meijin_16shot
Top image: YouTube/Nintendo
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