For many gamers, seeing the credits roll at the end of a game is enough, knowing you saved the beautiful dragon from the evil princess. For others, however, games just aren’t difficult, stressful, or long enough. These elite gamers go above and beyond, creating their own challenges and proving the impossible is possible.
From no-jump Mario runs to building working computers in Minecraft, these are the gamers that achieved the unthinkable.
One Magical Karp
One of the coolest things in the Pokémon games is the evolution mechanic. With enough experience points, your weak little turnip can transform into a mighty flower, or your tiny buff dude can turn into a bigger buff dude.
In 2019 one gamer by the name of JRose11 decided evolution made the games too easy, and that he was going to beat Pokémon FireRed with a Magikarp. That’s right, the ludicrously weak Pokémon whose only redeeming feature is that it evolves into a powerful Gyrados.
Replacing his starter with a Level 1 Magikarp using a mod, JRose began his punishing journey, and there were hurdles right out of the gate. For starters, Magikarp doesn’t even learn an attack move until level 15. This means that the only way it can deal damage is to exhaust all 40 uses of Splash, a useless move that does nothing. When a Pokémon uses up all its moves, it’s able to use Struggle. Struggle does very little damage and harms the user, but for large chunks of the run, JRose has no choice but to rely on it.
This is particularly arduous towards the start of the run, because if JRose visits a Pokécentre to heal, it also restores all 40 uses of Splash, meaning he must use them all up again before he can Struggle.
JRose previously attempted the challenge on the original Pokémon Red, but sadly realized it was impossible partway through. This is because in the original games, Struggle is a Normal-type move, and Normal-type moves cannot damage ghost Pokémon, and unfortunately for JRose, he found out all too late there are several unavoidable ghost battles in the game. In the remake, however, Struggle has no type and deals flat damage, so it can hurt ghosts. Before you go thinking that makes the run easy, however, consider JRose still has a terrible Pokémon with almost no useful moves and plenty of weaknesses. JRose even learns how Pokémon’s stealth mechanics work so he can avoid difficult fights. I didn’t know this game had stealth mechanics either. In the end, despite being grossly over-leveled, the final battle is ludicrously close. JRose manages to just barely beat the game’s champion at level 99 with only 21 hit points remaining! Now that is a next-level achievement. You can watch his hour-long game
here.
Don’t Jump to Conclusions!
There’s two mechanics that appear without fail in almost every Mario game: you jump, and you collect coins. However, in 2018 legendary gamer Gamechamp3000 decided this was too easy. And thus, she began her ridiculous journey to complete Super Mario Odyssey without jumping once.
Luckily, Odyssey has a precise way of tracking your jumps. Once you beat the game you can chat with the adorable Toadette, who tells you all sorts of interesting things about your playthrough, including how many times you’ve jumped.
Now that Gamechamp had a way of reviewing her performance, she got to work on the run itself. She mostly utilizes extreme parkour, like throwing your hat, called Cappy, and bouncing off of it while it’s still airborne. While this looks similar to a jump, it’s harder to judge, less reliable, and the game doesn’t consider it a jump. When Gamechamp gets Mario airborne, she must then execute some crazy wall kicks and divebombs to get anywhere. After an amazing free running adventure, Gamechamp beat Odyssey only to find she’d apparently jumped 29 times. Though this discovery was painful, Gamechamp was no stranger to pain! She had previously beaten
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild game without climbing once, so she was at home surmounting impossible odds.
She accomplished this by using her environment, carefully stacking objects, and taking extremely long routes towards important goals. When she was faced with a mountain, she’d painstakingly try to sideways-shimmy up the whole thing, stopping if it looked like Link was about to enter his climbing animation. Needless to say, after that experience, Gamechamp was no stranger to coming up with clever solutions.
So, returning to Mario, Gamechamp realized that, for weird programming reasons,
Mario Odyssey counts speaking to NPCs as jumping. She theorized that this is because when you press the "A" button to speak, the game flags it as a jump before the chat box appears, which cancels the jumping animation.
Devastated, she started a second, lonelier run, talking to no one. After beating the game again, Gamechamp returned to Toadette for a gut-wrenching revelation; she had apparently jumped one single time. Worst of all, this jump was unavoidable. This was because one cutscene in the game ends with Mario on the floor, with the only method of waking him up being jumping. After composing herself, however, she thought of an ingenious solution: multiplayer. In two-player mode, another player can control Cappy. One thing Cappy can do is poke Mario, causing him to bounce into the air.
And guess what? This bounce is not considered a jump. Tearfully, Gamechamp completed her third and final run, proving you could beat the game without jumping. And Mario never has to worry about skipping leg day again.
A Farfetched Goal
Minecraft is a sandbox game that tasks players with creating anything from whatever they find laying around. You can build anything from a treehouse to a giant toilet. It's even possible to build an entire city.
In Survival Mode, players are dumped into a great big world and tasked with, well, surviving! The world is vast and algorithmically generated, creating more space and room to play than most will ever need. All algorithms have their limits, however, and in Minecraft that seems to be about 12.5 million blocks away from where the player first spawns. At this point, the terrain generated starts to become erratic and strange, defying the rigid rules that typically control what the world looks like. Players in the Minecraft community have dubbed these strange fringes “The Far Lands”. Notch, the game’s creator, commented that he thought it would be impossible to reach the Far Lands without cheats or exploits, which gamer Killocrazyman took as a personal challenge.
In 2019, Killo set out on his long journey into the deepest recesses of the Minecraft world. For nine months Killo documented his adventure as he went, sometimes uploading multiple videos a day that were several hours long.
The closer he got to his goal, the laggier the game became. This is likely because the game was being forced to spawn in and keep track of more terrain than it was ever expected to. On June 19th, 2020, Killo became the first gamer to legitimately step into the mysterious wonderland the game intended to keep hidden forever.
KilloCrazyMan reaching the far lands reaction by RandomUsername
If each block roughly equates to a single step, and we assume the Minecraft avatar has an average height of 5”10, that means Killo’s journey to the Far Lands would equate to over 5705 miles. That’s twice the distance from LA to New York! Pretty unfair his real-life step counter still reads “0”, if you ask me!
Emotional Damage Run
The Dark Souls trilogy is widely considered to be one of the toughest modern franchises in gaming. Known for the tight combat, tough bosses, and nefarious traps it’s likely most gamers will see the iconic "You Died" screen dozens of times on any given playthrough.
That is, unless you’re the Happy Hob, who in 2017 became the first person to complete each game in the franchise without taking a single hit. Yes, you read that right, not without dying, but without taking a single hit. If you’ve played these games, you know how nuts that is. Some of the bosses in the third game have many quick and unforgiving combos, and
Dark Souls 2 in particular is a very long game with some less than desirable hitboxes. After accomplishing this staggering feat, Hob decided it wasn’t enough and attempted something masochistic; to beat the three games, hitless in succession.
This meant that if Hob got hit once, he had to go all the way back to the first game. And that has happened several times. In one instance that is absolutely gut-wrenching to watch, during the final boss of the run, this happens at minute 11:22 of the video below:
The Greatest Feat In Video Game History by Karl Jobst
After stepping away from the challenge, Hob returned a month later reinvigorated. He used numerous items that boosted his damage output based on having a light equipment load and low health, which makes sense. If you don’t plan on getting hit, after all, what use is armor for? After 12 total grueling months of pain, Hob finally did it, becoming the first gamer to best the notorious trilogy without so much as a stubbed toe.
Of course, his cruel and sadistic audience couldn’t let him have this victory for five minutes before asking him when he would do the same with
Bloodborne,
Sekiro, and
Demon’s Souls, other games by
Dark Souls’ developer colloquially referred to as the
Soulsbourne series.
Eager to please, and probably numb to the emotional pain at this point, Hob completed a five-game run in 2019 and a full six-game run in 2021.
We know
Elden Ring came out recently, but please, people, he’s had enough.
An Extreme Mario-Thon
Speedrunning may be all about beating a game as quickly as possible, but as god-tier gamers Chrism and Vallu111 might tell you; that doesn’t mean it’s always quick. That’s because at Summer Games Done Quick 2016, the two competed against each other in one of the most brutal competitions in all gaming; the 602 Run.
This gauntlet involves collecting every single Star in Mario 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, and Galaxy 2, one after the other, for a grand total of 602 stars and shines. This run is, as you can probably imagine, vicious, and takes tens of hours.
Playing any four games back-to-back is hard, but these are Mario games. These platformers have been optimized to death, there are dozens of precise, tricky maneuvers in each game that are essential for playing quickly, where one wrong input can cost minutes. And on top of all that, you have to do it knowing that another runner, just as good as you, is racing against you. The duel was nail-biting: Chrism was ahead for much of the run, but by hour 18 started to lag behind due to fatigue. Vallu experienced a second wind and doubled down, managing to bridge the gap between them. In the end, both players entered the final stage of Mario Galaxy 2 at almost the exact same time.
The level is fittingly called The Perfect Run and I can tell you from experience; it’s hard. The level contains some of the most treacherous platforming Nintendo has ever devised, and to top it off, your health is reduced to 1, so one strike and you’re out.
Chrism and Vallu, after over 21 hours in the gaming chair, began the level around the same time. They both dodged boomerangs, jumped clouds, and narrowly avoided lasers perfectly. In the end, Vallu managed to win, by just 5 seconds.
After 21 hours and 40 minutes of racing, five seconds decided the winner. Since then, the run has been further optimized, with gamer
Odme achieving a record of 19 hours and 57 minutes in 2020. Still, I think everyone should tip their M-emblazened caps to Chrism and Vallu111 for their historic 2016 bout.
Hello Zelda, my Old Friend
If you’ve ever been a kid talking smack about your buddies’ gaming skills in the schoolyard, you’ve probably said something along the lines of “I could beat that game with my eyes closed”. Perhaps you should put your money where your mouth is or where your eyes are?
Either way somebody did it! At Games Done Quick 2015, a speedrunner by the name of Runnerguy2489 decided he was going to play the N64 classic
Zelda: Ocarina of Time blindfolded. For the entire run, Runnerguy wore a thick black blindfold and didn’t peek out from under it once. Runnerguy relied heavily on two things; first off, his intimate knowledge and memory of it. He had run the game normally many times before, so knew it’s rhythm and pace well.
Secondly, he listened carefully to audio cues. Certain sound effects trigger when monsters spawn in the overworld, when items become available for pick-up, and when bosses are about to launch different attacks. Backflipping and side-stepping are also highly useful, as Link always moves a set distance when he performs them.
It should be noted that at the event Runnerguy didn’t beat the whole game, instead completing only the dungeons you could beat as child Link. This was because he didn’t have enough time to practice an entire run, and the GDQ hosts were skeptical it could be done without running over the allotted timeslot. Since then, however, Runnerguy has
completed the entire game blindfolded on his YouTube channel and has inspired other runners to do the same. In 2022 a runner by the name of Bubzia was even able to beat the game blindfolded in a blistering time of 35 minutes!
Conquering EVErest
EVE Online is a massive, strange beast. Famous for its comprehensive, in-game economy based on real-world money, the game has virtual nightclubs that rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and virtual spaceships worth as much as houses have gone up in smoke during massive space battles.
This entry isn’t about EVE’s economy, however, it’s about its size. As you can imagine, a game needs to be pretty massive to entice gamers to spend that much hard-earned cash in it and EVE is massive.
EVE enjoys a mind-boggling 66,856 planets, of which over 44,000 aren’t gas giants, meaning you can feasibly land on them. These planets are contained within 8031 systems which players actively visit, and in 2009, one player decided to visit them all. That player is Katia Sae, a modern-day virtual space pilgrim. Journeying from system to system, Katia had to navigate the typical worries that face all EVE players; fuel consumption, equipment maintenance, and of course, other players.
Remember that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been blown away in space battles before? Well,
Katia completed her entire journey without losing a single ship. Considering that more than 750 ships are destroyed hourly here, that’s quite the feat.
The Journey of Katia Sae by KatiaSae In total, Katia’s journey took an entire decade to complete, beginning in 2009 and ending in 2019. That means her journey saw two Presidents, the birth, sale, and fall of Vine and all seven seasons of
Game of Thrones! Yes, seven. All seven. We don’t talk about eight.For their efforts, Katia was invited to the Dev-only planet of Polaris, had an in-game space-monument created in her honor, and made it into the Guinness book of world records. And to think, my parents said I’d never amount to anything if I spent all my time playing video games!
Go Broke or Die Tryin’
The two most obvious things in Mario games are jumping and collecting coins. Well, it’s time to eliminate that second one, too! Mario player Ceave Gaming decided to deny Mario his capitalistic impulses in 2018 and see if he could complete New Super Mario Bros. U without collecting a single coin.
While that doesn’t sound too hard, this challenge is actually practically impossible. That’s because Nintendo wants you to collect coins: the game’s designed around buying power-ups and earning extra lives. They never dreamt anyone would try to avoid them all!
As such, many areas of the game are so flush with coins they simply can’t be avoided. This meant it was very, very difficult for Ceave to plan a route through the game. He’d often have to go back to an earlier level to pick up a power-up you aren’t supposed to have later on, just to make coin-avoidance easier. Like in the image below, where regular Mario can’t get through this area coinless, but mini-Mario can!
Eventually, Ceave reaches a fork in the road; this series of platforms covered in coins, or a pipe which forces you to collect a single coin upon leaving. Unfortunately, Ceave found that what this meant is that the smallest number of coins he could beat the game with was one. One! That’s frustrating! Ceave was so frustrated, he went back to these platforms to see if he could figure something out. It was here he discovered an old speedrunning trick; by approaching a pipe in the exact right way from the side, it’s possible to skip the animation where you get sucked into it.
This meant he was able to leap up the side of the wall with the Acorn suit, kick off at the right moment, glide, then boost into the side of the pipe and he did it! Mario was able to beat Bowser without submitting to his capitalist traps. Great success, Comrade Mario!
Just Dance?!
Being a hardcore gamer can come with a lot of health risks! For starters there’s repetitive strain injury, stiffness in the shoulders, eye strain, lower back pain, and lard butt just to name a few!
But what if I told you that some game marathons pose serious long-term threats to your health? Well, that’s the price you pay if you’re a dance maniac. Carrie Swidecki, and she holds the most physically painful gaming records ever achieved, because she’s a
Just Dance champion! If you’re not familiar, the
Just Dance games use motion-sensing devices to track and monitor your real-world dancing prowess. That means that, unlike many longform gaming sessions, if you wanna be a
Just Dance pro, you’ve got to be on your feet and working your body for hours at a time. Swidecki first made headlines back in 2010 when she broke multiple records by playing
Just Dance Revolution for a glute-busting fifteen hours straight. The very next year she broke her record by an hour, and two years after that upped her insanity to the unthinkable: playing
Just Dance Central for an entire 24 hours.
2012 Guinness Attempt Dance Central 2 by carrie swidecki
At this point it's important to mention that no medical professional would ever recommend you exercise for an entire day. This much exercise can lead to what’s called over-training, which can cause extreme pain, fatigue, and the breakdown of skeletal muscle, which can have long-term damaging effects on the body. Still, Swidecki was not satisfied with the amount of pain she had inflicted on herself. In 2015, she began an unthinkable endeavor; to not just beat her previous record, not even to double it, but beat it nearly six times over. That’s right, from July 11th to the 17th, Swidecki did nothing but dance, with a few sparse breaks, eventually racking up the insane time of 138 hours.
That’s the world record for the
longest gaming marathon ever! For perspective, that’s one hundred hours longer than the longest Minecraft gaming marathon, which game do you think would be harder on your body? Since that monumental achievement, Swidecki has remained undefeated and what’s more, she livestreamed the entire thing for charity. Forget
Just Dance: if I’d tried to do this, I’d have Just Dropped Dead.
Control Freaks
All games have one thing in common; from the most casual of puzzlers to the most frantic beat-em-up, every game uses some kind of controller. For many gamers, a challenge run comes not from beating a game while collecting every item or never taking a hit, but simply by playing around with the input.
Case in point, do you remember
Donkey Konga? I bet you don’t! It was a
Donkey Kong rhythm game that involved bonking along to 2000’s hit covers on a set of electronic bongos. On that note, check how gamer Benjamin Gwin has used these ridiculous controllers to beat Ornstein and Smough, one of the trickiest fights in the original
Dark Souls.
Bongo Souls - Ornstein and Smough by gbbearzly As you can see in the clip, he even sets his back button to trigger when his mic picks up a clap. A lot of people can’t beat this game normally. As you can see, he’s mapped different areas of the bongos to different common PlayStation inputs. That’s not the only wacky Nintendo peripheral that has bested this series, though! ZeroLenny shocked the world by beating D ark Souls 2 with a Wii Zapper. On-theme, he used a crossbow the entire run.
Absolute legend LilAggy, who holds the record for fastest time to beat the difficult samurai slasher Sekiro, decided to challenge himself not by using a funky peripheral but his own funky feet. Despite the violence and monsters, this is still probably the most wholesome use of a foot-cam I’ve seen this year.
While all these peripherals are certainly impressive, nothing compares to the next lunatic. That’s because the fittingly named Robotater managed to find a way to play Skyrim on a potato. Or rather, a collection of potatoes.
Robotater first attached alligator clips fed with wires to each potato. These wires were then fed into a MakeyMakey circuitboard, with each potato input corresponding to a specific key on a keyboard. He then attached wires connecting his fingers and another part of the circuit. Because electrical currents can pass through potatoes, this meant that whenever Robotater touched one, he was essentially completing a circuit, generating a potato keyboard signal!
Robotater couldn’t do much like this, but he was able to have a Skyrim experience at least as competent as my grandma. Saving the top banana for last, I’d like to mention Superlouis64 who beat
Dark Souls 3 with some bananas, in a similar setup to Robotater. Bet you never dreamt there’d be a more Donkey Kong-appropriate
Dark Souls run than the bongo one, right?
Minecraft in Minecraft
We’ve already covered some of the amazing things that’ve been built in in Minecraft, but nothing compares to this next creation, which is reliant on something called Redstone.
Redstone is a rare material in
Minecraft that can, in essence, carry an electrical current and transmit power from one place to another. Redstone is commonly used for cute little novelties like moving drawbridges, automatic farming machines, or monsters.
However, as
Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, Redstone was bound to make its way into the hands of more determined individuals. What some gamers realized is that if you’re clever about how you utilize Redstone, you can essentially create working electronics in the game, and if you can find a way to create a screen, anything’s possible. Take Redditor ‘I Really Like Stairs’, for instance, who was able to use Redstone to create a slow, albeit functional,
game of pong in
Minecraft. And while this achievement is impressive, it can’t compare to the herculean effort that was recreating
Minecraft in
Minecraft. Taking Redstone to the extreme, ingenious gamers Summyuri, Uwerta, and StackDoubleFlow got to work. Their gargantuan creation is made using absolutely no mods or hacks, just Redstone. The contraptions they created mirror real-world computer components, including a graphics processor, RAM, and memory unit. Inputs are delivered via an enormous controller and projected onto an even bigger screen.
I made Minecraft in Minecraft with redstone! by sammyuri While the game is monochromatic and rudimentary, that’s still
Minecraft in
Minecraft! The
Minecraft facsimile includes a fully realized 3D world, 16 types of blocks, 32 items, along with plenty of mechanics found in the full game. Despite the wizardry and ingenuity of those involved, the Minecraft-Inception machine is only able to render a single frame of the game every few days. Thus, the intrepid team created a specialized server that runs the game at ten thousand times its normal speed, making their creation playable. Hopefully, we’ll live long enough to one day witness
Minecraft running in
Minecraft in
Minecraft!
