Super Mario 64 · Nintendo 64 · 1996 · Speedrun Staple · Discovered by Community
Repeatedly long-jumping backwards on stairs lets Mario's backwards speed grow without limit, until he moves so fast that he passes straight through the star doors — enabling completion of the game with zero stars.
The Backwards Long Jump exploits a speed accumulation bug in Super Mario 64's movement physics. The game caps the speed of a long jump only in the forward direction, so when Mario long-jumps backwards on stairs — and long-jumps again on nearly every frame — his backwards speed multiplies with each jump and quickly reaches enormous values. At this velocity, Mario passes through solid geometry that would normally block movement, including the star-count doors that gate progression through the game. Its most famous applications are bypassing the star doors that guard the first Bowser stage and the Fire Sea, and climbing the Endless Stairs, which normally demand 70 stars. Speed-runners use these bypasses to complete Super Mario 64 in the "0-star" category — finishing the game without collecting any power stars — a run that typically completes in under seven minutes. The BLJ became the signature technique of Mario 64 speed-running and is sufficiently well-known that it appears in cultural references to the speed-running community at large.
When Mario long-jumps, Super Mario 64 sets the jump's speed from his current speed and then caps the result — but the cap only checks speed in one direction. Moving backwards, Mario's speed is negative, so the cap never applies. On stairs and other suitable slopes, the player can make Mario long-jump again almost every frame, and each jump multiplies the backwards speed further.
Mario's movement is checked in a handful of sub-steps per frame. Once his speed is large enough, a single sub-step carries him past a wall or door entirely, so collision that should stop him is never registered. The game was not designed for speeds of that magnitude, and nothing in the original release prevents them.
The 0-star category created by the BLJ is a philosophical statement as much as a technical accomplishment. Super Mario 64 was designed around collecting power stars as the central activity; the game's entire progression system is built on the assumption that stars must be earned. A run that completes the game without any stars inverts this assumption entirely, using the game's own physics against its intended structure. The 0-star category has attracted some of the most technically skilled players in the Mario 64 speed-running community, and its current world record is measured in minutes and seconds rather than hours.
The BLJ's cultural penetration extends beyond the speed-running community. The distinctive visual of Mario accelerating backwards on a staircase before vanishing through a door has been referenced in speedrun documentaries, mainstream gaming journalism, and social media content. Nintendo fixed the BLJ in the 1997 Japanese "Shindou" re-release of Super Mario 64, and versions built on that release, including Super Mario 3D All-Stars (2020), do not allow it — a rare instance of Nintendo addressing a speed-run exploit.
The backwards long jump's ability to build essentially unlimited speed opened the door to one of Super Mario 64's strangest phenomena: parallel universes. By accumulating enough backward speed, Mario can travel so far in a single frame that he lands on a copy of the map's collision that exists far outside the intended play area, at regular intervals across the game's coordinate space. Chaining movement between these "PUs" lets players reach places the level geometry should make unreachable.
This pushed an entire subculture of analysis built around minimising inputs — most famously the "A Button Challenge," which seeks to complete stars with as few presses of the A button as possible. Because an A press can sometimes be shared across separate actions, the community developed the now-legendary concept of the "half A press" as a unit of accounting. The painstaking work of routing parallel-universe travel without pressing A turned a speed glitch into a deep, almost mathematical exploration of the game's movement system that reached audiences far beyond speedrunning.