The world has been playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System since 1985, and we're still not done playing with it.
Even though all gamers who call themselves a "gamer" has beaten the classic NES platformer on multiple occasions, some with thumbs of steel have tried to reach a new plateau of success by setting new "speedrun" records for finishing the game in the fastest time possible.
A gamer who calls himself Darbian on his YouTube channel has raised the bar yet again with his completion time of 4 minutes, 57 seconds and 260 milliseconds on an original NES console copy of Super Mario Bros., according to a YouTube video posted Wednesday.
His time topped the previous Super Mario Bros. speedrun record by 0.0007 seconds, according to Speedrun.com.
Darbian's insane accomplishment also helped push humanity one step closer to competing with the skills and intelligence of computers (though it's hard to understand how beating computers at video games could help humanity overcome the inevitable robot apocalypse) and may have brought the quest for a nonassisted Super Mario Bros. speedrun to an end.
The best speedrun time that can be achieved with a "tool-assisted speedrun," a speedrun that uses a programmed input sequence in the place of a human player, in Super Mario Bros. is 4 minutes, 57 seconds and 31 milliseconds, according to a video on the TASVideoChannel on YouTube. Darbian's latest record was just 1/20th of a second away from achieving the ultimate speedrun time on Super Mario Bros.
So if an alien race is trying to recruit a human on Earth to save its species, by testing dexterity, reflexes and hand-eye coordination using Super Mario Bros., then Darbian is the aliens' "Last Starfighter."