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CHICAGO — Simon Weaver, an expert in the enduringly popular Mario 64 speedrunning scene, has turned a corner that many are saying will resonate through competitive gaming forever, getting a little younger during a recent playthrough. 

“Whoa, this changes everything we thought we knew about how fast you can possibly do something,” said Kira Schmidt, a fellow Mario 64 enthusiast that was present for the historical time traveling run. “Naturally we all used to just think that the fastest possible time would be a small number, minutes or seconds or something. But what no one considered is that you might actually reverse time and beat the game in negative two days, like this fuckin’ gnar dog right here just did!” 

The run, which utilized a few standard tricks as well as a few secret interdimensional secrets he’d developed on his own, shattered all previous successful speed runs of the iconic Mario 64. 

“There’s still a lot of confusion surrounding this, so let me clear it up,” said Weaver shortly after the record breaking performance. “The simple, two dimensional videos of my run will show a time of 1 hour and 32 minutes, but anyone that was in the room and saw my stubble disappear will tell you that I actually went back in time two days, making my official score one of negative 37 hours, 18 minutes. All 120 stars.”

Executives at Nintendo congratulated him on his success, in addition to publicly reckoning with the weight of the accomplishment.

“We want Nintendo products to be something everyone continues to love as they get older. And frankly, now that you have us thinking about it, we want it to go the other way too,” said Nintendo president Doug Bowser. “We’ve always said Nintendo has what it takes to bring out your inner child. We just didn’t, you know, think our games were the secret to aging in reverse. Holy shit. This kid really warped, huh? That’s fucked up.”

As of press time, Weaver was overheard asking everyone what day it was.