Legendary Mario Kart 64 speedrunner saves a lost run with a nearly impossible YOLO strat and breaks his own year-old world record

There's a new world record in Mario Kart 64 speedrunning, and while the name of the runner who set the time won't come as a surprise to anybody who's looked into the scene, the way that record was set was absolutely wild.

Beck Abney, aka abney317, is arguably the top runner in Mario Kart 64. He held the record for all cups with skips category straight from 2015 through 2021, and while there've been a few interruptions to his reign as world record holder, the time of 22:58.680 he set on July 27, 2023 had gone untouched for a full year.

That is, until Abney July 28, when Abney was streaming a run that seemed fairly unremarkable by his standards. He'd been falling behind in the game's mid-level tracks, and by the time he reached the Special Cup that ends the game, he'd fallen behind by a full 24 seconds - a massive margin in this type of speedrun.

So Abney did what any self-respecting speedrunner would do - took a wild, YOLO-type shot at a wildly inconsistent strategy so difficult that even he, arguably the best runner in the game, almost never attempts. There's a particular spot on the Yoshi Valley map where you can run off the course and hit a specific spot in a wall that essentially fools the game into thinking you've completed a lap when you've barely even started it.

Normally, runners do the Yoshi Valley skip by grabbing an item box and crossing their fingers to get a triple mushroom boost item, allowing them to easily pick up the speed necessary to hit the position necessary to do the skip. The alternate, extremely difficult strat sees you ignoring the item boxes and careening down the track to hit the skip without a big setup. That's exactly what Abney did in this run - three times in a row, without missing a single attempt.

Abney ended up setting a new world record of 22:57.240, exactly one year and one day after his previous record had been established. The Special Cup alone was 17 seconds than the next best he'd ever done in a run, and he notes in the description of the record video that this is "one of the craziest comebacks ever." Another speedrunning legend, SummoningSalt - whose video on Abney's records provides a fantastic breakdown of the Mario Kart 64 scene - agrees that it's "one of the craziest world records I've ever seen."

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