A pair of highly skilled Mario Bros. players recently acquired a combined score of over a million points while teaming up online, setting a new record that very few are likely to break. With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic keeping everyone at home for the past few months, video game fans have been making the most of things by challenging each other over the internet or even working together to pull off what many consider to be impossible.
While not as famous as its later sequels in the Super Mario Bros series, the original 1983 Mario Bros. title remains a popular favorite among old-school arcade aficionados. Unlike its more colorful platform brethren, Mario Bros. features a single screen of play and requires up to two players to guide famed plumber siblings Mario and Luigi as they dodge fireballs and knock down enemies from below. While the game is currently available on the Nintendo Switch, the console’s recent shortage due to COVID-19 has forced some players to rely on emulators to experience the old classic… or maybe even set a new record.
As reported by Kotaku earlier this week, Florida resident Steven Kleisath and South Carolina native Stephen Boyer collaborated online via a MAMEhub Mario Bros. emulator on PC to score up to 1,280,550 points while playing the game’s highest difficulty setting, making it all the way to the second-to-last level (out of 99) in the process. Throughout their nearly 70-minute run, they kept in communication over speakerphone and had to deal with some slight lag in addition to a self-imposed rule against using the game’s enemy-destroying POW block to gain an advantage. “We wanted to give an example on this during this time of pandemic and being home more than usual the limits that can be pushed on this game,” Kleisath explained following the playthrough. “Like a display of game play if you will.” Check out this YouTube video of Kleisath and Boyer’s feat of Mario Bros. prowess below:
Both Kleisath and Boyer carried impressive Mario Bros. scores under their belts before their joined attempt, with the former landing up to 5,424,920 million points on the original arcade version and the latter holding a record of 4,260,210 in the WolfMame emulator. Such displays of gaming skill are well-documented among Nintendo’s classic titles, such as one speedrunner breaking the record for the fastest playthrough on Super Mario Bros by the length of a single animation frame back in 2016. Not all of these tales are success stories, however, as former Donkey Kong record holder and documentary antagonist Billy Mitchell was famously stripped of his status in 2018 after it was confirmed that he cheated.
Luckily, it seems that Steven Kleisath and Stephen Boyer’s impressive performance in Mario Bros. last week is legitimate. It’s made all the more spectacular given how they were playing on an emulator over a great distance, battling lag and self-imposed handicaps to come together to achieve a score that doesn’t seem likely to be matched anytime soon. Once it is safe to travel again, the pair wishes to tackle the original Japanese version in person at a gaming expo or arcade, but for now, they have the footage of their blockbuster playthrough in the MAMEhub Mario Bros. emulator for others to make note of, as a display of skill that will go down in history among the greats of gaming.
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