Super Mario Bros. Wonder speedrunner sets world record with bizarre out-of-bounds glitch

Speedrunners have descended with full force upon Super Mario Bros. Wonder, following the discovery of an odd glitch which allows players to completely skip through certain mandatory areas of the game.

As GamesRadar+ reports, earlier this week, Twitch streamer and speedrunner Jhay posted a clip to Twitter highlighting a glitch which makes it possible to skip the level at the end of the first world – Pipe-Rock Plateau Palace – entirely, therefore allowing entry into the second world much faster. The glitch requires some messing around in two-player mode – using a second controller, the player must walk their first character off the screen, switch the characters on the options menu, and then the player-two controlled character is able to walk off the side of the map, which isn’t meant to be possible. 

Then, by switching back to one player and choosing to play as the character that was previously set to player two, players can find themselves fully off the beaten track, and progress to the second world. It’s a bit complicated, but Jhay has clearly got it all worked out, as it was using this trick in multiple places around the map that’s now allowed them to complete an Any% run (essentially, a speedrun in which reaching the end of the game by any means necessary counts as finishing it) of Super Mario Bros Wonder in one hour, 30 minutes and 55 seconds.

Over on Speedrun.com, you can see that this latest time beats Jhay’s previous record (which used the same skipping technique) by almost two minutes, and plenty of others on the ranking can be seen pulling off similar maneuvers in an attempt to climb to the top. 

For reference, HowLongToBeat estimates that the main story of Super Mario Bros. Wonder takes around nine hours to complete, so to shave seven and a half hours off from that is pretty significant. However, with this clearly not an intentional feature, it’s likely only a matter of time before the glitch is patched out. 

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is certainly one of the best Nintendo Switch games available to play right now. To keep up with more releases on the console, be sure to check out our roundup of upcoming Switch games.