SDA speedrun History:

• February 26 2004, 5:11, Scott Kessler
• April 23 2004, 5:10, Scott Kessler
• October 9 2004, 5:07, Trevor Seguin
• November 7 2004, 5:06, Trevor Seguin
• September 14 2006, 5:05, Scott Kessler
• April 10 2007, 5:00, Andrew Gardikis

I believe that this may be a perfect time by Speeddemosarchive's timing of Super Mario Bros. 1.

First off, I'd like to thank my brother for helping me figure out a faster way of beating the game. If it weren't for him, a run like this probably wouldn't have been seen for a long while. I also want to thank those who encouraged me to keep trying to improve my run even after playing near perfect, including Scott, Trevor, Stanski, and many others.

Scott's run made me decide to push this game to its limits. After seeing his near perfect run, I wanted to completely perfect the game. I give a lot of credit to Scott for achieving a run played perfectly (within the second) without the use of alternate pipe glitches and the walljump. Same goes for Trevor.

I hope you all enjoy this run. I've worked hard to make this possible. Thanks to everyone at SDA who supported me. I'm sure you'll enjoy this one.

SDA speedrun History:

• September 5 2005, 22:52 (PAL), Freddy Andersson
• (completed before ^) August 27 2005, 21:18, Andrew Gardikis
• February 16 2007, 19:57, Andrew Gardikis
• March 12 2008, 19:40, Andrew Gardikis

This run finishes with a time of 19:40, about a 17 second improvement over my last submission. In this run, I chose not to get any power-ups (stars or mushrooms) and I finish all 32 levels without dying once. I had been experimenting with getting fire-power to obtain a faster time by killing Bowser and eliminating the "bridge dropping" cutscenes. I'm pretty sure that the luck required and time it wastes to get the power-ups ends up wasting time overall, but I'm going to test it out a bit more in the next few months.

World by world analysis:

• World 1: Pretty much perfect.
• 1-1 I took the pipe this time. (TG makes me do the strangest things)
• 1-3 I had a weird hesitation here. I attempted to jump at one point, but for some reason it didn't work.

• World 2: Overall very well played.
• 2-3 I was pretty fancy ;)

• World 3: Went as I had planned it, very small mistakes.

• World 4: Went as well as world 1, perfect straight through.
• 4-2 I realized I was an idiot for not taking the ceiling route in any of my previous runs.

• World 5: Went decently
• 5-3 This level has always been a pain, there was always one moving platform that did not appear and so every time I attempted this level I ended up dying. I realized that killing an enemy right before the area with the two platforms always resulted in two platforms. This saved me a good 2-4 seconds.
• 5-4 Awful luck at the firebars, I kind of had to stop as there was a very slim chance I'd live, nothing really seemed to go my way in this level, oh well!

• World 6: A tricky world
• 6-2 This level was difficult to find a consistent strategy for. I still had a few mistakes, but it went better than I thought it would.
• 6-4 I generally take precautions in this level. I feel like I always need quite a bit of luck, so I constantly stopped and tried to figure out the best way to not die.

• World 7: This world loves ruining my speedruns
• 7-1 The hammer bros. were in the worst spots they could be in, I improvised for both sets of them and managed to get by them somehow.
• 7-2 Interestingly, when I walked on the ground to avoid death, it really didn't waste much time at all, less than a second I think.
• 7-3 This level is very unpredictable.
• 7-4 played it very well, got to Bowser and made multiple mistakes, I thought I hit the axe and wasn't paying attention, so I lost a few seconds here.

• World 8: I should know this one by now ;)
• 8-1 This level should have been a little faster
• 8-2 I messed up at the end. It looks like I'm attempting the flagpole glitch, but at the time I did this run it had not been discovered yet. Very awkward finish, it was slow and silly. That would have been amazing had I actually pulled it off by accident.
• 8-3 I mess up on this level as much as I mess up on level 4-1, it's like a 1/100 chance.
• 8-4 Went very well. At the end of the water section I just barely missed getting into that pipe and randomly started entering the wall, this wasted about 2 seconds. At the very end I almost attempted to jump through the axes, but I really didn't want to take the risk, maybe in my next run.

I did not reach my goal of sub 19:30, but hopefully I will in my next attempt.