Draft:The Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge

The Super Mario 64 A button challenge

The Super Mario 64 A button challenge (ABC) is an ongoing challenge to complete Super Mario 64 with all 120 stars using as little uses of the A button as possible. The current count is 13 A presses for all 120 stars in the original N64 version in Japan.

History

On October 16, 2000 Alex Penev sent a letter to Walton Dell's Web Site that was about trying to get all the stars in Bob-omb Battlefield. With as little or no A presses as possible. In IRC at that time, Alex Penev, Myles Bukrim, Jason Whalls, and David Wonn were posting about Mario 64 challenges. One of them was the ABC. At the beginning, people tackled stars individually, not as an entire run. That changed 2001, where some people tried one play, which resulted in 10 stars in zero presses. There was an around four year period when nothing really happened until July 13th, 2007, when the idea of having both real people and tool assisted speedrun (TAS) runs, and on sm64.com, you could submit your own. By that time in 2008, the total count was around 240 a presses for 120 stars. A few days later, it was reduced to 234, but went by unnoticed. The ABC went dormant until 2011, when a TAS made by a group of TASers: Mickey, ToTxTASx, Toyuru2, and Gorogoro12351. They created a TAS that did 20 stars in no A presses. They couldn't get pasted Bower in the Dark World, but that didn't stop the video from getting 78000 views in 6 days. It inspired more improvements in the next few days, which brought it to 22 stars in a fresh file. Then the challenge went dormant once again until August 25th, 2013, when Pannenkoek2012 started on a long journey to do every star in Super Mario 64 with as few A presses as possible. He spent years mastering the cloning glitch which would put the challenge on a whole other level.