In the waning hours of the Awesome Games Done Quick charity marathon, player grandpoobear raced through Super Dram World, a game designed to torture speedrunners.
If you weren’t aware, Super Dram World is a hacked version of Super Mario World for the SNES. It was inspired by a previous hack of the game called Kaizo Mario World. Both are way harder than the original, and creations that arose from the speedrunning community’s obsession with playing hard games as fast as humanly possible.
Crowd might have gotten into it too. They were HYYYYPEED! pic.twitter.com/0K88lef3rw
— Games Done Quick (@GamesDoneQuick) January 14, 2017
Kaizo Mario World was created by T. Takemoto, best known for making nightmare hacks like his Arsehole Mario series. They make Dark Souls look like a stroll through the park by comparison. The game in turn inspired one of its top speedrunners, PangaeaPanga, to create his own colourful gauntlet.
That game became Super Dram World, the one grandpoobear was speedrunning at AGDQ because, well, he’s the best at it, holding the world record for competing the game which he established just a couple weeks ago with a time of 24:24.
His run wasn’t nearly so perfect, but it wasn’t half bad either, still beating out the creator of Super Dram World‘s first record from over a year ago. Most speedrunners prefer to stick to the official versions of their favourite games. There’s something special about holding the top record for completing the original The Legend of Zelda, for instance. It’s a game that millions are familiar with, and an institution in itself. But others, like PangaeaPanga, prefer to conjure their own hellish challenges.
And thanks to things like Mario Maker, it’s easier than ever. PangaeaPanga, for instance, is know for creating some of the hardest Mario levels imaginable using the Wii U game.. You can watch grandpoobear’s entire run below.
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One response to “Speedrunners Race Their Own Hellish Creations With Super Dram World”
I say this as someone who got bored with Super Mario Maker almost straight-away, but that game really did die before it could live. It’s all but forgotten now and everybody in the scene has just resorted to hacking the old games anyway. I really need to get back to playing some levels, but there is something tangible lost when it’s not ‘Nintendo-made’ either.
I had several ideas for actually creating levels but I was intimidated by the (what I thought might be) large scale, and tried a few times but never got the core idea off the ground.
The few basic bush-league levels I have put up are still around too, which shouldn’t be surprising but only is because Kotaku/etc’s shrieking over the way Nintendo had been over-bearing in its moderation is still fresh in people’s minds. The community simply moved on itself, or in this case back to what it knows/has more power over.