Bubzia, the Super Mario 64 speedrunner known primarily for running the game blindfolded, has just embarked on a new challenge. Now run Super Mario 64 blindfolded on a dance platform. The first try didn't exactly go well, but I guarantee it turned out better than you or I could have achieved.
All of Mario's controls were mapped to the dance platform, but these things don't have quite enough buttons to handle a full N64 platformer, so Bubzia also kept a standard controller to manipulate the camera and pause the game. He also needed to keep one hand free to hold on to a piece of furniture so he wouldn't fall during all the ridiculous movements he needed to make. “I need to multitask,” he explained. “I need to hold with one hand, play with my feet, and operate the camera with the controller. It's a mess.”
The challenge was meant to be a 16-star race, and Bubzia started the race without much confidence. “I'm very sure we won't make it to 16 stars completely, but we'll do our best,” he said. That insecurity turned out to be quite justified when the first stellar challenge made him forget the most basic mechanics of the game. “Wait, how do you hit the ground?” Bubzia asked out loud. “My understanding of Mario physics is gone. What do you do to hit the ground? What button do you press? Just A and Z, right?”
He finally figured out how to grab that first star, and several more, but none of them were easy. It turns out that Mario is hard to control with your feet, and rewiring your brain to convert all those analog controls into toe taps is no joke. “This requires a lot of brain work,” Bubzia noted at one point. “This is much more mentally exhausting than it is physically.”
I played Super Mario 64 on a Dancepad… – YouTube
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The finishing touch came when, one hour and 45 minutes into the race, Bubzia thought he had gotten the eighth star he needed to enter Bowser's first level. The disappointment on his face when he realized he was only seven was immeasurable. It took him almost two hours to get that eighth star, and by then he had already given up. “We're about to finish this challenge because I'm mentally devastated,” he said. He removed his blindfold to defeat the first Bowser (still no easy feat on a dance platform) and called off the effort.
Beating Bowser's first battle took over three hours and 33 minutes. Bubzia's 16-star record while blindfolded and using a normal controller is just 19 minutes and 43 seconds. If you're wondering if there's a speedrunning record for beating Mario 64 on a dance pad without a blindfold… well, of course there is. That record belongs to PeekingBoo, which surpassed the 16-star category in 20 minutes on a DDR platform in 2022.
However, it seems that combining dance pads and blindfolds just makes for a bad time. “I knew it was a bad idea and it turned out to be even worse than I initially thought,” Bubzia said.
After Super Mario 64's new GOAT speedrunning sparked rumors about the game's death, another runner says it's “not dead and won't be for a long time.”