Speed is fun, but precision is what separates good drivers from the greats. Anyone can buy something cheap and powerful and put the hammer down on a straight road, but it takes an expert to put a car exactly where they want it every time without fail — nailing corner entry and exit, sliding perfectly through a course, these are the things that mark a truly excellent driver. But every feat of precision driving I’ve ever seen pales in comparison to what I saw last night: A speedrun of “Mario Kart World” that makes every other driver look sloppy.
This week is Awesome Games Done Quick, a weeklong extravaganza of video game speedrunning that puts the best of the best up on stage and on stream to raise money for charity. Most of the event’s racing games will come on Wednesday, but we got a bit of an early peek at the genre with “Mario Kart World” last night — world record holder Helix took to the stage to run through the game’s free-roam mode and collect all of its question mark panels. The run itself was about 90 seconds off of Helix’s record pace (a pace she claims to have even beaten in practice for the stream) but seeing her skill at the game is truly incredible.
Barely a pixel out of place
Helix’s route through “Mario Kart World”‘s series-first free-roam mode is incredibly optimized, taking advantage of every quirk the game has to offer: RNG manipulation, interactions between assists and world geometry, even time the player’s kart spends moving off-screen during loads. All of that tech, though, relies on Helix’s ability to place her kart precisely where she needs it on a course — she modulates her speed, drifts, and corners like the pro she is.
Video game speedruns are a far cry from racing a car in the real world — the skills don’t exactly transfer one-to-one — but it’s amazing to see how precisely a vehicle can be controlled by someone who’s such a master of the craft. Doing it with a game as accessible as “Mario Kart,” something that so many people have played, just makes the demonstration of speedrunning skill all the clearer. If you’ve ever played a kart racer, check out Helix’s run above and just see how high the skill ceiling for this kind of driving is.
