Progress and understanding by groups of people happens exactly like this in manufacturing, art, science, engineering, design, social science, literature, and every other collective human 's what humans do. In the video analysis of this speedrun, if you forget the video game part of it and all the negative connotations you might have about that, you get to see the collective effort of thousands of people over more than three decades who have studied a thing right down to the bare metal so that one person, standing on the shoulders of giants in a near-perfect performance, can do something no one has ever done before. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.

Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere - fast est, strong est - and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. This is similar to a point David Foster Wallace made in his piece about tennis player Tracy Austin (collected in Consider the Lobster): One of the reasons for the popularity of sports and sports media (analysis, etc.) is that, unlike many other human endeavors, it's relatively easy for spectators to judge and compare and analyze athletes' performances, to see how & why they fail, where they might improve, and how they stack up against past performances and records. Heck, even if you aren't into video games it's pretty interesting. As Craig Mod said, 'it's like watching a swiss clock maker explain his machine'. 27 minutes may sound daunting, but if you've ever played SMB more than casually, it's fascinating. In this 27-minute video, Bismuth explains how fellow speedrunner Kosmic achieved the world record for the fastest Super Mario Bros game ever.

World record super mario bros