Crackslide and the Future of Super Mario 64 Speedruns

More than 25 years after its release, Super Mario 64 is still being pulled apart by speedrunners who are determined to find faster, stranger, and more reliable ways to reach the credits. The latest breakthrough, a technique known as crackslide, does more than shave off a fraction of a second: it dramatically simplifies one of the game’s most intimidating barriers and reshapes how both standard and blindfolded runs can be routed.

This article explores what crackslide is, why it matters so much for the community, and how it could change the path toward future world records and previously unthinkable blindfolded milestones.

The Long Battle With the 30-Star Door

To understand why crackslide is so significant, it helps to know why the 30-star door has been such a focal point in Super Mario 64 speedrunning. In the vanilla game, players are meant to collect 30 Power Stars before passing through a door leading deeper into the castle. Speedrunners, of course, are rarely interested in doing things the intended way.

For many years, bypassing that door efficiently meant using a notoriously unforgiving trick known as the Second Backwards Long Jump (often abbreviated SBLJ). The SBLJ allowed runners to build absurd backwards speed on a staircase and clip through the door without having the required stars. While it is technically possible on real hardware in real time, the trick demands:

• Extremely precise analog stick angles
• Tight timing on rapid long jumps
• Consistent control over momentum on a narrow staircase

For top-tier runners with thousands of hours of practice, SBLJ was a brutal but manageable skill check. For newcomers, it was a wall. For blindfolded runners, it was almost prohibitive, because the trick relies on continuous analog control and visual feedback that is hard to replicate through sound or vibration alone.

Crackslide changes that equation almost entirely by offering a method that is mechanically simple, consistent, and far better suited to “scripted” execution from memory or audio cues.

What Is Crackslide?

Crackslide is a newly discovered technique that lets Mario slide along a specific wall and railing combination to gain enough horizontal speed to pass through the 30-star door without needing the classic SBLJ. The name comes from the runners who first developed the method and the sliding motion along a crack-like edge between geometry.

At a conceptual level, the trick exploits three core pieces of the game’s physics and collision system:

1. Wall alignment: Mario is positioned at a specific point where the wall and nearby geometry create a favorable angle.
2. Backflips to reach a precise spot: A couple of simple backflips place Mario onto or near a narrow railing.
3. Butt-slide to build speed: By using the C-up camera and initiating a slide across the railing, Mario accumulates enough speed in a controlled direction to clip through the door.

Compared with the relentless input intensity of SBLJ, this is almost serene. There’s no extended chain of perfectly timed long jumps; instead, runners follow a short, repeatable sequence of movements that are far more forgiving. Initial demonstrations were performed with emulator tools to prove the concept, but the real breakthrough was the fact that human runners reproduced the trick on console within minutes, showing it was fully viable in real-time runs.

Why Crackslide Is So Much Easier Than SBLJ

The difference in difficulty between SBLJ and crackslide is less about raw technicality and more about execution profile: what kinds of inputs you need to make, how long you need to sustain them, and how punishing failure is.

In practice, crackslide takes something that used to be a gatekeeping skill and turns it into a routine checkpoint. That doesn’t mean it is trivial for brand-new players, but the gap between “I understand the theory” and “I can do this in runs” has narrowed dramatically.

How Crackslide Alters Popular Categories

Super Mario 64 speedrunning is divided into multiple categories—such as 16-star, 70-star, and 120-star—based on how many stars you collect before finishing the game. The 30-star door skip is most directly relevant to lower-star categories and challenge runs, but any improvement to routing and consistency reverberates across the community.

Effects on Low-Star Categories

In categories where the goal is to collect as few stars as possible before beating the game, every major skip is critical. Replacing SBLJ with crackslide offers several benefits:

• Lower barrier of entry: More runners can attempt competitive routes without grinding an extremely punishing trick.
• Higher run completion rates: Fewer promising runs die to a staircase choke point.
• More optimized attempts: With the door skip less volatile, runners can afford to push harder in other risky sections.

As more people adopt crackslide, time expectations for low-star runs are likely to shift, and leaderboards may become more densely contested at the top.

Implications for Full-Game and Marathon Runs

Even in categories where the 30-star door is less of a central bottleneck, consistency is king—especially for marathon or charity runs where safety, reliability, and entertainment value matter more than raw world-record potential.

A trick like crackslide that is both fast and relatively safe is a perfect candidate for marathon routing. Organizers and runners can:

• Reduce the odds of an early, run-killing mistake
• Showcase a flashy new skip that viewers can understand and appreciate
• Preserve the overall pacing of the route without resorting to slower, “intended” alternatives

This fits a broader pattern in speedrunning: when new tech makes previously high-risk strategies safe enough, marathon routes gradually converge with record-optimized routes.

Why Crackslide Is a Game Changer for Blindfolded Runs

Blindfolded speedrunning is one of the most demanding forms of play in any game, requiring runners to memorize movement patterns, timing, and audio cues so well that they can complete the game without seeing the screen. Super Mario 64 has been a showcase title for blindfolded runs at events like Games Done Quick, where runners perform complex platforming purely by feel and sound.

The main bottleneck for pushing blindfolded times lower has been tricks that are nearly impossible to execute consistently without visual feedback. SBLJ was one such bottleneck. Because it demands continuous analog control and fluid adjustments based on Mario’s position, it is extremely difficult to “script” in the way blindfolded runners prefer.

Crackslide, in contrast, breaks down into a sequence of discrete, countable actions:

• Walk into a wall until Mario audibly or physically stops
• Perform a fixed number of backflips
• Trigger a slide with a clearly detectable audio cue
• Wait for specific sound effects or counts to indicate the right moment to pass through the door

This is exactly the sort of pattern-based execution that blindfolded specialists can refine into near-perfect consistency. As a result, crackslide has triggered fresh discussion about the possibility of achieving a sub-10-minute blindfolded completion of Super Mario 64, which has long been viewed as an aspirational but very distant goal.

Academic research on human memory and motor learning supports the idea that well-structured, repeatable action sequences are far easier to master than continuous analog control, especially under sensory constraints. Studies on procedural memory and motor skill acquisition show that consistent, chunked sequences of movement can become highly automated over time, freeing up cognitive resources for error correction and adaptation. Crackslide aligns perfectly with that style of learning.

How New Tricks Like Crackslide Are Discovered

From the outside, discoveries like crackslide can seem almost magical, as if runners randomly stumble onto them. In reality, they’re usually the product of systematic experimentation, detailed knowledge of game physics, and collaborative tools-based research.

Tool-Assisted Exploration

Many major breakthroughs in retro game speedrunning emerge from tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) communities. Using emulators that allow frame-by-frame control, savestates, and detailed memory inspection, creators can probe the limits of what the game engine allows. Over time, patterns emerge:

• Odd behaviors when Mario interacts with specific geometry edges
• Unexpected ways speed or momentum carries through animations
• Corner cases where collision detection fails

Once a promising interaction is found in a TAS context, runners work to simplify the setup—reducing the number of frame-perfect inputs, replacing analog angles with cardinal directions, and using visual or audio markers that are achievable on original hardware. This process of “TAS-to-RTA translation” (real-time attack) has produced many of the most iconic tricks in speedrunning, across multiple games.

Community Collaboration and Iteration

Modern speedrunning thrives on open collaboration. When a new trick is discovered, runners usually:

1. Share video demonstrations and input diagrams
2. Publish rough input sequences or controller overlays
3. Iterate on set-ups to make them more consistent or controller-agnostic
4. Integrate the technique into test runs to measure real-world time impact

Crackslide followed this pattern. After the initial concept was shown, other runners quickly confirmed that it works on actual hardware with standard controllers, then refined its setup for ease of teaching and replication. Within a short period, it shifted from an intriguing curiosity to a serious candidate for standard routing.

What Crackslide Reveals About Super Mario 64’s Engine

Every time a major new trick is discovered, it reinforces a broader truth: Super Mario 64’s movement system is extraordinarily deep. The game’s engine, one of the first true 3D platformer engines on consoles, was built under tight hardware constraints and evolving design philosophies in the mid-1990s. The result is a mixture of robust core logic and quirky edge cases that are still being explored today.

Some broader lessons crackslide highlights about the engine:

• Speed accumulation is context-sensitive: Under certain conditions, sliding or bouncing interactions can stack speed in ways the original designers never tested extensively.
• Collision boundaries are complex: The meeting points of walls, floors, and railings often contain small gaps or overlapping zones that let Mario “clip” when moving at high speed or specific angles.
• Camera modes matter: Variants like C-up can change how inputs translate into movement, opening new ways to exploit terrain.

This kind of emergent depth is part of why retro games like Super Mario 64 remain fertile ground for discovery. Even decades after launch, players are still effectively performing informal reverse engineering of the engine through experimentation, which mirrors the curiosity-driven exploration in game design research and software engineering studies.

Potential Long-Term Impact on the Speedrunning Meta

Not every new trick reshapes an entire speedrunning scene, but crackslide has several characteristics that suggest it will be more than a short-lived novelty.

Route Evolution and Record Potential

As runners adopt crackslide, we can expect:

• Revised best practices: Guides and tutorials will start teaching crackslide as the default method for 30-star door skips.
• Route experimentation: With one major choke point removed or softened, runners may look for new ways to redistribute risk and time saves elsewhere in the run.
• Incremental record improvements: Even if crackslide isn’t dramatically faster in raw time than the best SBLJ attempts, its consistency will allow more record-caliber runs to survive into late-game stages.

Community Growth and Accessibility

Major discoveries often reignite interest in a game’s speedrunning scene, attracting both returning veterans and curious newcomers. Crackslide in particular sends a powerful message: there is still more to uncover in a game that many players thought was “solved.”

Lowering the mechanical barrier to one of the game’s hardest tricks also makes competitive play more approachable. In the long run, that tends to diversify the field of competitors, which is healthy for any long-lived speedrunning community.

Practical Tips for Learning Crackslide

If you’re interested in trying crackslide yourself, it helps to approach it methodically rather than jumping straight into full runs. While the exact inputs and visual references differ slightly depending on controller and display lag, the learning process typically involves:

1. Studying a clear tutorial: Watch one or two high-quality guides from established runners to understand the movement flow and timing cues.
2. Breaking it into segments: Practice the wall alignment, backflip positioning, and slide initiation separately before stringing them together.
3. Using savestates (where appropriate): If you practice on emulator, savestates can accelerate muscle memory formation by letting you repeat the key portion dozens of times quickly.
4. Transitioning to real hardware: Once you are consistent in a safe environment, test the trick on original hardware or your usual setup to account for input and display differences.
5. Logging attempts: Keep notes on what tends to go wrong—angle drift, early slide, late slide—and adjust your setup accordingly.

Over time, the trick should start to feel like a scripted mini-routine rather than a dice roll.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does crackslide completely replace SBLJ?

For many runners, especially in low-star and blindfolded contexts, crackslide will become the preferred method of bypassing the 30-star door. That said, SBLJ still has historical significance and may remain relevant for specific routes, styles, or category rulesets. Some purist or legacy categories might explicitly require the classic method.

Is crackslide harder on certain controllers?

The trick is generally more forgiving than SBLJ across most controller types, but exact feel can vary depending on stick sensitivity, dead zones, and hardware wear. Community guides will often document minor adjustments for popular controller options such as original N64 pads, modern replicas, or adapter-based setups.

Can beginners learn crackslide early?

Yes, with patience. While absolute beginners should still learn core movement fundamentals first, crackslide is reasonable to attempt far earlier in your journey than SBLJ ever was. Many new runners will likely learn it alongside other mid-game skips.

Will crackslide make world records fall quickly?

Crackslide primarily boosts consistency rather than offering a massive raw time save over a perfectly executed SBLJ. Expect to see more record-caliber runs reach late-game sections, leading to gradual record improvements rather than overnight revolutions.

Is this the last major discovery for Super Mario 64?

Probably not. The game’s depth, combined with modern tools and a large, active community, makes further discoveries very likely. If the past few years of speedrunning innovation have shown anything, it’s that classics like Super Mario 64 still hold surprises.