Nintendo 64 · 16 Star · 1996
The most-contested category in Nintendo 64 speedrunning, in which Mario collects only the sixteen stars needed to unlock the final battle — a route so heavily optimised that the record went unbeaten for over three years.
Super Mario 64 requires seventy stars to reach Bowser in the Sky under normal play, but the game's star doors can be passed with far fewer through a combination of precise movement and well-known sequence breaks. The 16 Star category demands exactly what its name implies: gather sixteen stars, exploit the routes that skip the rest, and beat the game. It sits in the sweet spot of the game's categories — long enough to demand sustained execution across many levels, short enough that a single mistake ruins a run outright. The route is a monument to two decades of collective optimisation. It leans on the Backwards Long Jump, the game's most famous glitch, which exploits the fact that Mario's backward speed is never capped, allowing him to accelerate to absurd velocities against a staircase and clip through the star-count check on locked doors. Alongside it sit dozens of movement techniques — precise dive-rolls, wall kicks, and speed conservation tricks — that shave fractions of a second from transitions between stars. By the 2020s the category had reached a state of near-saturation. The 16 Star world record set on 22 March 2023 stood untouched for more than three years, a remarkable stagnation in a discipline where records typically fall within months. The route was so refined, and the execution requirements so brutal, that further improvement appeared to demand near-flawless play across the entire run. The deadlock broke in 2026, when the runner Suigi completed the category in 14 minutes and 32 seconds, taking roughly three seconds off his own three-year-old record. As of mid-2026 Suigi held all five of the game's major category world records simultaneously — an unusual degree of dominance in a competitive scene this large. The 16 Star record illustrates the shape of a mature speedrun: a route essentially solved, where progress no longer comes from discovery but from the grinding pursuit of perfect execution.