Mario Kart Speedrunners Are Racing To Blow Themselves Up With Blue Shells

Gif: Nintendo / Skilloz / Kotaku

Do you know you can hit yourself with a Blue Shell in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? Speedrunners do, and they’re going all out to blow themselves up with the first place-targeting item as quickly as possible.

Skilloz, the current world record-holder for the hilariously named “Blue Yourself” category, uploaded a video yesterday (h/t Polygon) showing that it’s possible to go from the beginning of the race to spinning out in a Blue Shell blast in just under 38 seconds. If you’re a fan of Baby Daisy—there’s got to be at least one of you out there—you might want to look away.

Here’s how Skilloz did it, according to the man himself:

The items you get depend how far away you are from first place. Knowing this, I sandbag at the start to get a good chance of getting a Star. Then I rush to the next set of items and I’m at the point where getting Triple Mushrooms is also a pretty decent chance. These aren’t too terribly difficult to get if you’re able to correctly position yourself.

The toughest part is getting the Blue Shell. There’s no real way to manipulate it. You can only get a Blue Shell if you’re at least 2000 units behind first place. Since that’s the closest you can be, it’s about a 5% chance of receiving a Blue Shell. You can also only get a Blue Shell once 30 seconds have passed in game.

So when I hesitate in front of those item boxes, I’m waiting on those two things: the first-place CPU to get at least 2000 units ahead of me and 30 seconds of in-game time [to pass]. A member in our community, GsFlint, found that these two conditions can basically line up with each other at the same [time] in Mario Circuit.

My favorite speedruns are those that see players take a small, preferably ridiculous part of a game and get very serious about learning how to do it fast. It’s hard to say how low folks will be able to get “Blue Yourself” times in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but you can bet I’ll be watching with bated breath.

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