NEW YORK, April 17 — Achievement unlocked! Speedrunner Darbian from the US recently completed a speedrun of the classic Super Mario Bros in less than five minutes.

A speedrun is a playthrough, or a recording of a playthrough, performed with the intention of completing a goal as fast as possible. In this case, Darbian’s goal was to complete the game as quickly as possible.

He played the game on an actual Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), an 8-bit video console that the company first released in 1983, instead of using emulators.

The gamer sped through eight levels of the game and defeated King Koopa, the boss at the end, in four minutes, 57 seconds and 260 milliseconds, recorded live on his channel on Twitch and later posted on YouTube, beating the previous record of 4 minutes, 57 seconds and 693 milliseconds held by German speedrunner i_o_l on speedrun.com.

Darbian completed the speedrun without getting his character killed in the process.

While detractors have pointed out that Darbian at some points seemed to have ‘passed through’ some of the plants that should’ve killed his Mario, as well as skipping entire levels or ‘worlds’ in the game with the use of warp zones, others have come to his defence, as saying that glitches and hitboxes (an invisible shape commonly used in video games for real-time collision detection, i.e. bumping into enemies, objects in the game) in the original, 31-year-old game are a known factor and have been used by speedrunners before.

According to Wikipedia, the fastest playthrough of the entire game without the use of warp zones clocked in at 19 minutes, 5 seconds and 896 milliseconds.

Super Mario Bros has an active speedrunning scene, with gamers constantly trying to one-up each other in their attempt to set a new record.

No one knows how long Darbian’s speedrun record will last, but judging from the video, it will certainly be difficult to beat his time.

Gamer Darbian (top left corner) in the process of speedrunning through Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros as he is cheered on by fans and onlookers in the live chat (bottom left corner). — Picture via YouTube/Darbian