How Super Mario 64 was beaten without the A button

The A Button Challenge in Super Mario 64 consists  of trying to complete the game without using the  

A button. For the uninitiated, that’s the jump  button, which is kind of a pillar of Mario games.  

What began as a new fun way to play the game,  the A Button Challenge, or ABC for short, quickly  

turned into more of an infinitely intricate puzzle  rather than a test of skill. Starting around 2007,  

it was almost exclusively played on emulator using  savestates to create tool-assisted speedruns,  

or TASes, and found solutions that were  technically possible within the bounds of  

the game but wouldn’t be feasible in real time  with a controller. Over the past twenty years,  

the game has been tirelessly refined and optimized  this way, all the way down to 13 A presses for  

all 120 stars. For more information, check out  this short summary video I made on the topic.

But in the past few years, there’s been a  resurgence of playing the ABC in real time,  

on console, and what the community accomplished  in that time is nothing short of incredible.  

What just happened last week is the culmination  of this amazing community effort. From May 17th  

to May 21st, 2024, Super Mario 64 was beaten  in 0 presses of the A button by Marbler.

[Marbler: It’s done! Guys it is done!]

In real time, on a real console, with a real  controller, in 86 hours. So how did he do it?

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First of all, although the game can be  beaten in fewer than the required 70 stars,  

doing so inevitably makes use of the A  button, usually to do backwards long jumps,  

so that’s off the table right away. This would  have to be done by collecting 70 stars in no A  

presses, and reaching Bowser in the Sky without  skipping any star doors. So which 70 stars do you  

choose? As it turns out, even  if you only pick the easiest,  

you quickly run into very slippery territory  after just a couple dozen, let alone 70.

The TAS ABC is infamous for displaying the most  extreme strategies to save one A press, things  

that are so far removed from something remotely  achievable by a human that I can’t even begin  

to describe it. The task of taking dozens of  these and turn them into something that could  

actually be performed was the first step  of this process, and it took the community  

years to pull it off. Through the combined  work of Marbler himself, Pannenkoek2012,  

Ivan178, BillyWAR, dabs, ex320kyt, zyon134,  blobfish_times, saplingdatree and ds273,  

simpler methods were discovered, setups were  invented, the limits of what’s achievable were  

shattered, and it ever so slowly became less  and less unthinkable. Marbler, one of the most  

influential figures of the TAS ABC of the past  five years, set out to become a pioneer in the  

real time ABC. He practiced relentlessly for  months, came up with several strategies of his  

own, and set out to be the first person to  complete Super Mario 64 in zero A presses.

These are the 70 stars he chose to collect.  Among those, using modern strategies,  

most of them are relatively trivial with enough  practice. Let’s go through the ones that aren’t.

Four stars in, we have Wall Kicks Won’t Work,  so Marbler used hyperspeed twirling to reach the  

star. Quick heads up, the whole run features an  ungodly amount of pause buffering to hit precise  

tricks, which results in mild flashing  that can be uncomfortable to watch. So,  

to get hyperspeed, Marbler used framewalking, a  trick where you alternate forwards and neutral  

on the control stick every couple of frames to  walk up steep slopes, so he could slide down  

unto the spindrift and hit it with nearly  double the speed he otherwise could have.

Next is Bowser in the Dark World with red  coins, and already, this is one of the  

hardest parts of the run. There are five  main challenges to overcome here. First,  

Marbler uses an open corner in the wall hitboxes  to set up vertical speed conservation, or VSC,  

and store the vertical speed of a dive recover,  which he reactivates to grab this ledge. Then, he  

lures a goomba down to come back from the 6th red  coin and framewalks up the seesaw platform, then  

uses it to slidekick bounce across. He climbs this  slope using slide grinding. The angle Mario is  

facing makes it so as soon as he’s on the slope,  he slides off and enters freefall without having  

any time to start turning, then immediately falls  back on it because Marbler is holding up right.  

But because he’s actually holding ever so slightly  more up than right, Mario ends up moving sideways  

up the slope by a tiny amount every time. Sideways  movement while in the air is called straining.  

Finally, he dive recovers onto the pipe using a  precise setup that makes him land on a 1x1 unit  

bit of floor that isn’t covered by any wall  hitbox. This quirk of some platform corners  

is called a misalignment and is caused by the game  rounding down Mario’s position do an integer value  

for the purpose of floor detection, but not wall  detection. Bowser himself is trivial afterwards.

Next up is Bob-omb Battlefield. Three  stars require going on the floating island:  

Shoot to the Island in the Sky, red coins  and 100 coins. This level makes extensive  

use of cloning and the HOLP: the held object’s  last position. The HOLP only gets updated when  

the game has to draw the object Mario is  holding. With a glitch called hat in hand,  

Mario’s hat can prevent an object  Mario is holding from ever being drawn,  

meaning that the HOLP becomes disjointed from  the object being held, leading to glitches  

like remote release. Cloning is the bread and  butter of the TAS ABC, but it’s monstrously  

difficult to do in real time because it hinges  on the exact way every object in the level is  

loaded and deloaded. Coming up with viable real  time strategies for cloning is nothing short of  

miraculous. The full ABC video has a complete  breakdown of how the HOLP and cloning work.

Marbler begins with red coins and 100  coins by setting a HOLP just off this  

ledge and sending a goomba clone to  it using the hat in hand glitch. He  

uses that clone to set another HOLP closer to  the island, sends another goomba clone to it,  

does a hands free teleport with a bob-omb to store  it for Mario to retrieve later, and takes a shell  

all the way up the mountain. Once up there, he  does a slide kick off the shell to land on the  

second goomba clone with a ton of speed and makes  his way to the island. He regrabs the bob-omb,  

which was invisible in front of Mario this  whole time, and that allows him to set the  

HOLP near the star box for Shoot to the Island in  the Sky. He finishes the red coins and 100 coins,  

then reenters the level and sends a goomba  clone to the HOLP before redoing a similar  

setup to reach the island. This time, he can  use the goomba clone to bounce to the star.

Another star in Bob-omb Battlefield is  particularly challenging: Behind Chain  

Chomp’s Gate. The star is too high to dive  recover to, and the gate can’t be destroyed  

without ground pounding this post three times,  so he uses a cork box to clip inside the gate  

and set the HOLP under the star. Then, he uses  a very specific cloning setup to send two goomba  

clones to the same HOLP. With a precisely  engineered object slot manipulation setup,  

he’s able to place the goomba that’s earlier  in the processing order lower, and the one  

that’s later higher. When he comes back into  the gate, he bounces on the low goomba first,  

then the high goomba second, high enough  to reach the star with a single HOLP.

Before he leaves Bob-omb Battlefield, Marbler has  one final task: to set an extremely precise HOLP  

to help him get the Shifting Sand Land 100-coin  star. He heads over there, collects some coins,  

and remote drops a cork box using the hat in hand  glitch. Thanks to the perfectly accurate HOLP,  

the box slides down and breaks on  the very last frame of its lifetime,  

allowing it to be duplicated for infinite coins.

Stand Tall on Four Pillars is one of the hardest  stars in the run. The crux of the issue is getting  

this goomba to chase Mario outside of its home  and get in the perfect position. From there,  

a precise setup lets Marbler bounce on the goomba  and end up inside this pillar in such a way that  

he gets pushed out onto this platform. Once  that’s done, a slidekick gets him on this  

narrow ledge from where he can take the warp  up. This warp is meant to be one way only, but  

there’s a very small section where it’s possible  to activate it the other way around. Finally,  

Marbler makes his way across to the Eyerok  fight, making sure to never fall into the sand,  

because there’s no way out of it if he does.  Collecting the star is tricky, but doable.

For Vanish Cap Under the Moat, Marbler can crawl  up the entire first slope, then slidekick bounce  

over the wall to clear the first half of the  stage. The second half is hard but doable in  

no A presses until you reach the switch. Here,  Marbler needs to make it on not one, but two  

misalignments to reach the top. Thankfully,  setups exist to make it less excruciating.

Next up, in Big Boo’s Haunt, the Merry-go-round  star. This would be a trivial star, if not for  

the fact that the star is barely too high to  collect with a dive recover. Instead, Marbler has  

to resort to scuttlebug raising from inside this  room. He sets up the scuttlebug near the door,  

then carefully runs over the area where the  scuttlebug and the room get loaded for just a few  

frames, in such a way that makes the scuttlebug  repeatedly lunge upwards and gain height. Then,  

he sets up the hat in hand glitch so he can  perform remote dropping, and picks up a cork  

box. He bounces with the cork box and bumps into  the scuttlebug, dropping the box at the HOLP,  

which he previously set to a specific location in  Cool, Cool, Mountain. With that setup complete,  

he drops to the Merry-go-round, has to be  extremely careful not to load the cork box  

early while he fights all the Boos, and  regrabs the box to bounce into the star.

The red coin star is one of the  hardest in the run. This red coin  

requires a chain of bounces on these two  Boos that is extremely difficult mostly  

because it’s just really precise and it  involves manipulating two Boos at once.

The Haunted Books star is also relatively  simple but difficult to execute. As with  

every star that involves going upstairs,  it starts with selecting Go on a Ghost  

Hunt so that the staircase starts lowered.  After getting rid of all the Boos, Marbler  

dive recovers on the stairs as they’re raising,  storing vertical speed. He then reactivates it  

to enter freefall with positive speed, letting  him grab the ledge on the upper floor. Then,  

he does the book puzzle and reaches the star with  a very precise dive recover onto the railing,  

followed by a ground pound. This strategy only  works because of wall collision shenanigans  

and runs the risk of falling off, in which  case you need to pause exit and start over.

In Hazy Maze Cave, Marbler needs to go to the  Cavern of the Metal Cap, not just for its star,  

but also because the metal cap itself unlocks  3 more stars afterwards. There are two methods  

to get across, both of which absolutely suck  to do in real time. You can dive recover from  

Dorrie’s head, but that’s insanely precise and  there’s no way to do a normalized position setup  

because you’re doing it from a moving object.  Marbler tries his hand at that for a while,  

but doesn’t get it. Instead, he uses this  slope to do hyperspeed walking and store  

a large amount of sliding speed. He reactivates  that speed with a frame perfect crouch and C-up  

as he gets out of the water to shoot to the ledge  and grab it. Once inside, the main challenge is  

to get this precise dive rollout onto the  crystal, then another one onto the switch.

Next up is Jolly Roger Bay. Here, the sunken  ship star can be collected by crawling and  

framewalking up the slippery slope, all the way  up to above the star. And now’s the hard part.  

Marbler stops walking and Mario gets what’s  called a steep floor push, which pushes him  

off the slope into a backwards freefall. From  there, he’s too far from the box to reach it,  

so he has to use perfectly angled straining  to keep Mario’s speed as close as possible  

to -16 without reaching -16. Mario’s speed has a  soft cap at -16 and at 32, above which a sharper  

deceleration is applied to him. By staying  under that cap using a lot of straining,  

Marbler is able to keep his speed while adding  on a lot of sideways movement, maximizing how  

much he’s able to move Mario in a single frame.  This is often used in TASes to optimize Mario’s  

speed to 31.99, so it’s usually called the .99  trick. Performing it in real time in any capacity  

is ridiculously hard, because there’s  basically no way to tell what the decimal  

portion of Mario’s speed is and how to  get it as close to -15.99 as possible.

Through the Jet Stream is equally difficult. This  time, it’s mostly because Marbler needs to get  

Mario into a unit precise spot under the star that  will get the stream to push him upwards into it,  

while under the time limit of the metal cap.  Thankfully, a setup exists to make his life a  

bit easier here. Actually getting the metal cap is  no easy task either, with this crazy dive recover.

Next is Whomp’s Fortress. First, the HOLP is  set in a far corner at the very bottom of the  

map in Cool, Cool Mountain using the baby penguin.  Then, Marbler fights King Whomp using the elevator  

platforms. After spawning the star, he uses  a cork box to clone a piece of the collapsing  

bridge and the hat in hand glitch to throw it  to the HOLP while he’s standing on it. As the  

piece is rotating, it applies a displacement  to Mario because he’s standing on it, and  

this displacement is still applied on the frame  where the platform warps to the HOLP. Except now,  

the rotational displacement is applied over a  much larger distance, so it moves Mario a lot  

more. Object slots were carefully manipulated  and the HOLP was carefully placed to send Mario  

directly to the star. To the Top of the Fortress  is done the same way to get onto the fortress.

Before leaving Whomp’s Fortress, Marbler sets up  a HOLP to help him get another Shifting Sand Land  

star, the red coins. Again, this star involves a  ton of object slot manipulation. Three airborne  

red coins are collected using fly guys and a  tornado, but the fourth one is more complicated.  

The extra tornado here can’t be used because it  only spawns after getting the first three stars,  

and Into the Ancient Pyramid can’t be collected in  0 A presses. Marbler has to clone a body part of  

this pokey and send it to the HOLP, then take  a cork box to the pillar to place the HOLP in  

a new location, and clone another pokey body  part and send it there. He now has two pokey  

balls to bounce on, and he does so with a  dive recover. They’re not perfectly aligned,  

so he has to strain left, then right to barely  reach the red coin, all while dealing with this  

awful camera angle. Finally, the star  is cloned so that Mario can reach it.

Marbler moves on to Dire Dire Docks.  To get on Bowser’s sub, he has to grab  

onto these cork boxes, but they’re normally  too high to do it. Using a position setup,  

he falls off the side and does a glitchy ledge  grab. For Mario to ledge grab, the game has to  

detect a wall near Mario’s feet, no wall hear  his head, and a floor in front of him. When  

Mario is in a very precise location, the game  detects the lower box’s wall near Mario’s feet,  

but just barely misses the wall of the upper  box by less than one unit. The floor at the  

top sticks out by one unit, so it is detected and  Mario grabs the ledge of the upper cork box. This  

has to be done under the tight timer of the purple  switch not once, not twice, but three times.

The Manta Ray star is mostly difficult because  Mario’s swimming using only the B button is  

really slow. While the first 4 rings stay out  for quite some time, once you go through 4 rings,  

the last one is a special one that spawns the  star, and for some reason it lasts for a much  

shorter time than the others. His swimming has  to be perfect in order to go through it in time.

And now, Marbler enters Bowser in the Fire Sea,  4 and a half hours in, with 49 stars. To get past  

the pole, he has a special trick up his sleeve.  When I said that Marbler was playing on console,  

I didn’t specify which console. He is on the  Wii VC version of the game. The Wii emulates  

Nintendo 64 games to play them on the Virtual  Console, and there’s a bug with the emulator and  

a number format conversion. Whenever the game  converts a number from a 64-bit floating point  

number to a 32-bit float, the resulting number  usually doesn’t lie exactly on a 32-bit floating  

point value. If it doesn’t, the Nintendo 64  simply rounds it to the nearest available float,  

but the Wii VC version rounds it towards zero  instead. This conversion is made every time  

these sinking platforms move, so every single  time they move, they inch a tiny little bit  

towards Y position 0. At the bottom of the stage,  vertical position is negative, so going towards 0  

means going upwards. This means that over time,  the sinking platforms rise up into the air, very  

very slowly. How slowly? Well, every time there’s  a rounding error, they move up by approximately  

one 8000th of a unit [Note: should be 16000th].  The time it takes for that error to compound  

so much that the platforms rise up closer  to where the elevator is over three days.

After 6 hours have passed, Marbler drops  to the lava and bounces onto the platform,  

which stores the huge vertical speed of a  lava boost. From here, he punches forward to  

preserve that speed, and waits near the edge  of the platforms for 72 more hours. Finally,  

the platforms are now high enough that he can  reactivate that speed and dive to the elevator.  

The walls are only solid in one direction,  so he gets pushed in and he makes it past  

the pole. Note that to avoid having to wait  several more hours, he had to time this right  

at the peak of the platform’s movement, and  in the moment, he completely forgot to do it.

[Marbler: Oh no… I wasn’t watching…  the height of the platform…]

By a stroke of luck, he just happened to do it at  the perfect time and he had the height to make it.

Bowser in the Fire Sea is the reason why  this is the first ever completion of Super  

Mario 64 in 0 A presses on console, even  including TASes. The platforms do not rise  

on the Nintendo 64 or any other rerelease,  and a Wii VC TAS being played back on console  

would desynchronize because the Wii has  occasional issues with input polling.

Now 82 hours in, Marbler makes it to Wet-Dry  World. The first star he goes for is Top  

o’ the Town. He needs to carry Chuckya  close to where the star is. To do that,  

he interrupts a punch grab by falling and diving,  which triggers a glitch where Chuckya is treated  

as a light object instead of a heavy object.  This lets him fall off the ledge holding it,  

and ledge grab, dropping Chuckya on the plank  and getting grabbed at the same time. Here,  

it’s a 50/50 chance that Chuckya will throw  him off the plank. That did not go so well  

in this run. After opening the box, he catches  Chuckya as a light object again, throws it and  

instantly regrabs it, and finally, gets thrown  into the star. This also is a 50/50 chance,  

and if that fails, that attempt is ruined. He  reset the star three times to get it to work.

Express Elevator - Hurry Up! is one of the  hardest stars in the run. To get on the elevator,  

you can’t swim, because B swimming is too  slow, so Marbler has to use Chuckya instead.  

Grabbing Chuckya as a light object has the  side effect of locking Chuckya’s anchor,  

essentially its own HOLP: the position where Mario  would be at if it was holding him. Marbler carries  

Chuckya down here, where he sets up another glitch  to preserve the anchor: Behind Camera Anywhere,  

or BCA. The camera’s focus point is usually  a little bit in front of Mario, and using  

the fixed camera, it’s possible for Mario to be  behind the camera but the focus to be in front,  

leading to Mario not even being on screen, and  therefore not rendered. Remember how the HOLP only  

gets updated when the object needs to be drawn?  Well, Chuckya’s anchor doesn’t get updated when  

it doesn’t need to be drawn. Marbler gets caught  by Chuckya and thrown where the anchor still is,  

up on the plank. Now, he just needs to hope he  gets thrown in the right direction again. This  

lets him reach the elevator, but he still  needs Chuckya. He grabs it light again,  

this time using water, and quickly takes it to  push him through the wall and get on the elevator.

Marbler makes it to Tall, Tall, Mountain,  where the hardest star is Scale the Mountain.  

Actually scaling the mountain isn’t hard, it  simply involves a lot of framewalking. The  

problem is the star is barely too high  for a dive recover from the flat top,  

and you can’t roll out from a steep slippery  surface. Instead, Marbler uses what’s called  

a ghost rollout. He gathers a ton of backwards  speed and gets into a position where a combination  

of floor and wall hitbox mechanics ends up pushing  Mario off the slope right at the start of a frame,  

before the game has time to snap Mario down to the  floor. For a fraction of a frame, he’s slightly  

above the flat surface, which means he can rollout  from ever so slightly higher and reach the star.

Marbler makes his way to Snowman’s Land. Into  the igloo is the final hard star to get. He  

enters the igloo using the shell and a dive  recover. Then, he runs into this corner at  

the right angle to do a dive recover into  an unreferenced wall. Mario can only keep  

track of one wall that he’s pushing against at  one time, so in any corner between two walls,  

the one that’s earlier in the processing  order will be unreferenced, or in other words,  

Mario won’t push against it or bonk on it. His  angle with the referenced wall is too shallow,  

so he doesn’t bonk and can dive recover on  the spindrift and reach the vanish cap. Then,  

he lures another spindrift under the limited  cap timer and rolls out on it to reach the star.

Now only missing a Toad  star, Marbler heads to Cool,  

Cool Mountain to set a HOLP in a precise spot  that’s totally not gonna be relevant later,  

and goes to Lethal Lava Land to farm lives up  to a hundred in order to go attempt Bowser in  

the Sky. Reaching Bowser in the Sky is a huge  pain with glitchy ledge grabs, misalignmnents  

and sliding on the railing, so once he gets up  there, he never wants to have to do it again.

And now, Bowser in the Sky. The first couple  platforms are reached using misalignments,  

with a setup to get into them. Then, Marbler pulls  off something that is actually batshit insane:  

the Chuckya Drop. I’m gonna be real here: I can’t  begin to describe this in a way that would do it  

justice. To better show it, here’s a TAS that  does the exact same strategy Marbler did in his  

run. While on this moving platform, he dances  around the edge of Chuckya’s activation range  

in an extremely precise and deliberate way to  manipulate it to run off its platform and fall  

all the way down here. While Marbler is busy  pause buffering his way through a ton of frame  

perfect movement, several glitchy ledge grabs,  and doing this manipulation completely blind,  

he gets Chuckya to chase Mario, get into the right  spot, turn it repeatedly just the right amount,  

slowly inch to the perfect spot, and fall off the  platform. Finally, he gets grabbed and randomly  

thrown, hoping to land on the seesaw platform.  Let me repeat this. After this completely insane  

10-minute setup, he gets thrown in a random  direction and hopes that he survives. Thankfully,  

he actually has a 56% chance of making it,  and he does on his first successful attempt  

at the Chuckya Drop. This took him 42 attempts.  Every time anything went wrong, he had to reset  

the level by dying. However, he’s not out of the  woods yet. He still has the entire stage to climb.

Fortunately, the HOLP he set earlier comes  to the rescue. Marbler grabs the Chuckya  

using Behind Camera Anywhere and throws  it to the HOLP. This sounds very simple,  

but it’s actually unbelievably nervewracking.  BCA is a very precise trick made harder by the  

fact that you can’t see much of anything, and in  this case, Chuckya makes sure that Marbler can’t  

see anything at all. On top of that, he needs to  grab it as a light object, which means he needs  

to do the frame perfect punch cancel pause  buffered dive method with the perfect angle,  

without having any idea of what he’s doing. If  he messes up, he needs to die to reset the stage,  

or worse, be expelled to Cool, Cool Mountain to  reset the HOLP. He gets it after a few attempts.

Next, he runs up the disjointed, misplaced  hitbox of the axle. Again, needless to say,  

this is extremely precise. Mario gets squished and  pushed out at the end and grabs the ledge. After  

angling the camera to briefly render Chuckya and  set its anchor by the HOLP further up the level,  

Marbler positions Mario in a precise spot with  the right camera angle to set up BCA again while  

Chuckya is falling off screen until it grabs  Mario. Because Chuckya is never rendered and  

its anchor never updated, Mario is warped  up to the HOLP, near the top of the stage.

The very last hurdle is this ledge, and he  needs to lure a goomba to bounce on it with  

a dive recover. The goombas aren’t infinite here.  If he messes up, he has to redo the entire stage.  

He lures the goomba down. He bounces on it, and  misses. But there is another goomba. The third one  

is too far though, so if he messes up this one,  it’s really over. He lures it down, and this time,  

it’s good. A bit of trivial movement and a  misalignment with a position setup get him  

in the pipe, and he fights Bowser. Again, Bowser  doesn’t require A, so he cruises to the finish.

There are simply no words that can do justice  to Marbler’s achievement. This was unthinkable  

just two years ago. Super Mario 64 has  been beaten without using the A button  

for the first time in history. This is  one of the most impressive video game  

achievements ever. It simply doesn’t  get any better than this. I hope this  

video shed a bit of light on how incredible  this really is, and thank you for watching!