The Super Mario 64 Anti-World Record Marathon

The Super Mario 64 Anti-World Record Marathon was a 24-hour livestream event that aired across the weekend of July 5th & 6th, 2025. It was anchored by Draco who, for 24 straight hours, attempted a 120 Star speedrun of Super Mario 64, one of the most popular categories in what is considered to be the most popular speedrunning game of all time.

The gimmick however was that while all 120 Stars would eventually be collected, Draco did them in chunks of 20 and in between each of these six parts he paused the game in order to complete one or more entirely different other Mario games to completion. In order to do this while meeting all technical requirements for a valid run a complicated stream layout was designed that featured two capture zones. The area on the left was reserved for the live line-in feed from the Nintendo 64 console and, in order to comply with the aforementioned technical requirements, was always visible no matter what else was happening on screen. The area on the right was used as a revolving door where every other game was completed, and upon finishing one of these extra games Draco would return to playing Super Mario 64 on the other half of the layout. The goal was to obtain the absolute worst possible time to hit the bottom of the leaderboard.

The final time upon completion of the run (touching the large Power Star after defeating Bowser for the third time) clocked in at 24 hours, 48 minutes, and 11 seconds. An entire 25% chunk of the Gatorbox VOD storage on Twitch was used to archive the complete run in full with no seams or cuts (again, to meet the technical criteria of the run), however when the run was submitted to Speedrun.com it was still rejected by the Super Mario 64 leaderboard moderators. The reason provided on the rejection page was a reference to the "I'm happy for you or sad that happened, I ain't reading all of that" meme, however the run did violate one rule which specifically forbade runs that were done "intentionally slow". The idea for the anti-world record marathon was conceived in 2018 when this rule did not exist, but Draco was committed to performing the run nonetheless and did the entire 24-hour show knowing that when all was said and done the run would be considered invalid.

Despite the over-arching run of Super Mario 64 being deemed invalid for the leaderboards, some of the individual side games did qualify as acceptable runs for their corresponding leaderboards. The "runs" of Super Mario World, Super Mario World 64, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3 were all accepted to their leaderboards. A supercut of Draco's mistakes throughout the main Super Mario 64 run was also uploaded as This is How You Don't Play Super Mario 64, a joke at the expense of the DarksydePhil act that Draco sometimes does on stream.

Order of Segments

• Super Mario 64 (Stars 1-20)
• Super Mario World (Famicom, Any%)
• Super Mario Land DX (Any%)
• Super Mario 64 (Stars 21-40)
• Super Mario Land 2 (Any%)
• Super Mario 64 (Stars 41-60)
• Super Mario Bros. Special (Warpless)
• Super Mario World 64 (SNES, Warpless)
• Super Mario World 64 (Genesis, Warpless)
• Super Mario 64 (Stars 61-80)
• Super Mario World (11 Exit)
• Super Mario Bros. 2 (Warpless)
• Super Mario 64 (Stars 81-100)
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (Warpless)
• Super Mario Kart (All Cups)
• Yoshi's Cookie (SNES, Vs. Mode)
• Super Mario Bros. (Warpless, w/ 3DSEN)
• Super Mario 64 (Stars 101-120)

Legacy

The concept of an "anti" world record marathon was initially conceived by Draco in 2018. Super Mario 64 was chosen as the game to give this a trial run with due to the fact that it was a popular speedrunning game, Draco knew the game well enough to complete a 120 Star run without needing any practice, the game could very easily be split into even segments (20 Stars apiece), and there were enough similar games in the series with which to fill 24 hours of time. To the knowledge of Gatorbox a "performance" of this kind had never been done before so there was also the angle of potentially generating some buzz that would benefit the channel and community, though ultimately this proved not to be the case.

Upon being asked if another game would get the "anti" treatment, Draco stated that he was not sure if there were any other suitable candidates and referred to Super Mario 64 as a "perfect storm" of qualities that made the marathon possible. Sonic Adventure was brought up as a potential second candidate after the marathon, specifically an "All Emblems" run, however Draco declined at the time remarking that at no point in his life had he ever collected all of the Emblems period due to the extreme difficulty of some of them (specifically mentioning getting "S" ranks on every stage). He did agree that Sonic Adventure followed all the other same beats as Super Mario 64 regarding being a popular game, the ability to be easily broken up into segments, and a surplus of shorter games that could quickly pad out a 24 hour schedule.

The future of the anti-world record marathon idea is indeterminate at this time, but Draco has said that if he plans on running another one he'd like to do a better job at making it a noteworthy event.