For the first time, Super Mario 64 was completed without ever pressing the A button. This is a new world record that was previously considered impossible.
To fully understand how monumental this achievement is, it is worth knowing that the A button in Super Mario 64 is used to jump, making it one of the most important elements of the platformer. The record was achieved without any reconfiguration, and relies entirely on creative use of game mechanics, bugs, and exploits discovered over the years since Super Mario 64 was released in 1996.
Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge (ABC for short) has an incredibly complicated history stretching all the way back to the early 2000s, several years after the game’s release. Super Mario 64 geeks competed to beat the classic platformer by using the A button as little as possible — a long-held assumption that it was simply impossible to complete the game without pressing A at all.
Streamer Twitch Marbler managed to complete the game without pressing the A button even once after a grueling 86-hour game. The record was achieved without any reconfiguration of the game’s version for the Wii virtual console, which is apparently the only confirmed version where this is possible. Eight months ago, Marbler managed to beat the game using the A button only twice, and said at the time that one A could be salvaged by playing the Wii Virtual Console version, although the final clear would require «some truly absurd» move.
This was achieved through decades of effort and experience by the speedrunning community. Again, it’s hard to overstate the difficulty of this achievement, not only because it took over 20 years to get there, but also because of the complexity of the game itself.
Source: GamesRadar