Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels is a 1986 side-scrolling platform game developed and published by Nintendo as the first sequel to their 1985 bestseller Super Mario Bros. The games are similar in style and gameplay, apart from a steep increase in difficulty. Like the original, Mario or Luigi venture to rescue the Princess from Bowser. Unlike the original, the game has no two-player option and Luigi is differentiated from his twin plumber brother with reduced ground friction and increased jump height. The Lost Levels also introduces setbacks such as poison mushroom power-ups, counterproductive level warps, and mid-air wind gusts. The game has 32 levels across eight worlds, and five bonus worlds, each of which also has four levels.
A speedrun is a play-through of a video game performed with the intention of completing it as fast as possible. Speedruns may cover a whole game or a selected part, such as a single level. While all speedruns aim for quick completion, some speedruns are characterized by additional rules that players promise to obey, such as collecting all key items. Players attempt speedruns mainly to challenge themselves, to entertain and compete with others.
A tool-assisted speedrun or tool-assisted superplay (TAS) is a set sequence of controller inputs used to perform a task in a video game. The input sequence is usually created by emulating the game and using tools such as slow motion, frame-by-frame advance, memory watch, and save states to create an extremely precise series of inputs. The idea is not to make gameplay easier for players, but rather to produce a demonstration of gameplay that would be practically impossible for a human player. Tool-assisted speedruns often feature gameplay that would otherwise be impossible or prohibitively difficult to perform in real time. Producers of tool-assisted speedruns do not compete with "unassisted" speedrunners of video games; on the contrary, collaborative efforts between the two groups often take place.
Speed Demos Archive is a website dedicated to video game speedruns. SDA's primary focus is hosting downloadable, high-quality speedrun videos, and currently has runs of over eleven hundred games, with more being added on a regular basis. SDA used to host two annual speedrunning charity marathons, Awesome Games Done Quick and Summer Games Done Quick before Games Done Quick LLC started holding the event in 2015. It hosted 9 marathons, and has raised over $2.7 million for various charities, with the most successful one being AGDQ 2014 which raised just over $1 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Live-streaming refers to online streaming media simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real time. It is often referred to simply as streaming, however this abbreviated term is ambiguous due to the fact that "streaming" may refer to any media delivered and played back simultaneously without requiring a completely downloaded file. Non-live media such as video-on-demand and YouTube videos are technically streamed, but not live-streamed.
Mychal Ramon Jefferson, better known under the screen name Trihex, is an American professional gamer and speedrunner. Active at the semiannual Games Done Quick events, Trihex is best known for his runs of Jet Set Radio and Yoshi's Island. He is a very popular livestreamer, with over 300,000 followers on Twitch. He is also known to be the face of the Twitch emote, TriHard.
Games Done Quick is a semiannual video game speedrun charity marathon held in the United States, originally organized by the Speed Demos Archive and Speedruns Live communities. Since 2015, it has been handled by Games Done Quick, LLC. Held since 2010, the events have raised money for several charities; the most common two being the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders.
Narcissa Wright is an American speedrunner and co-founder of the website SpeedRunsLive, which allows speedrunners to race with one another in real time. She has previously held the records for the fastest completion of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on the GameCube, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the iQue Player, Paper Mario on the Wii using Virtual Console, and Castlevania 64 on the Nintendo 64.
Aaron James Loder, professionally known as Bananasaurus Rex, is a Twitch streamer and a video game speedrunner.
Kaizo Mario World, also known as Asshole Mario, is a series of three ROM hacks of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game Super Mario World, created by T. Takemoto. The term "Kaizo Mario World" is a shortened form of Jisaku no Kaizō Mario o Yūjin ni Play Saseru. The series was created by Takemoto for his friend R. Kiba.
Piotr Delgado Kusielczuk, better known as The Mexican Runner or TMR, is a speedrunner who specialises in Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games. After three years, on February 26, 2017, TMR was the first player to complete the entire NES catalogue, playing all 714 officially-licensed titles in a project he called NESMania, which earned him a Guinness World Record. TMR is also known for his speedrunning accomplishments in Contra, Battletoads, and Cuphead.
Alex Tan, better known under the screen name PangaeaPanga and formerly Penangbenny, is an American ROM hacker and tool-assisted speedrunner. He created what are known as the most difficult Super Mario fan levels, various ROM hacks such as Item Abuse 3 and Super Dram World, and has also played through Super Mario World blindfolded.
Scott Buchanan, better known under his username pannenkoek2012, is a Super Mario 64 analyst and YouTube personality. Pannenkoek2012 is known for creating highly technical videos detailing the mechanics of Super Mario 64, in which he explains techniques he uses to beat levels of the game while completing various self-imposed challenges such as not using certain buttons or the joystick when completing objectives in the game. In 2014, he collected a coin previously thought unobtainable in the "Tiny-Huge Island" level. In 2015, he offered a US$1,000 bounty for anyone who could recreate a specific glitch in Super Mario 64.
SethBling is an American video game commentator and Twitch video game live streamer known for YouTube videos focused around the 1990 side-scrolling platform video game Super Mario World and the 2011 sandbox video game Minecraft. He created original and derivative video games, devices and phenomena in Minecraft, without using Minecraft mods. He created an interpreter for the programming language BASIC and an emulator for the 1977 home video game console Atari 2600 in Minecraft. In addition to Minecraft builds that run without mods, he created plugins for the game.
SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell is an independent video game developed by Pine Studio and published by Headup Games. It was released on Steam in July 2016, on Xbox One in September 2017, on PlayStation 4 in October 2017 and onto GOG.com on October 12, 2018. It is a first person platformer where you race against time using a variety of power-ups, inspired by speedrunning sessions in games like Quake or Super Meat Boy. The name "SEUM" was derived from ColloSEUM, the working title of the game.
Harry Brewis is an English YouTube personality and essayist. Under the pseudonym Hbomberguy he runs the eponymous YouTube channel, "one of the more popular ones countering the growing tide of the manosphere and alt-right". Brewis produces critical video essays on a variety of topics, such as film, TV, and video games, often "meld[ing] his thoughts on games and movies with larger arguments for leftist political and economic positions", as well as creating "measured response" videos aimed at debunking conspiracies, alt-right and anti-feminist arguments.
