Hoarding was not explicitly against the rules, but Rustemeyer, to put it lightly, was not pleased with Burbank’s deceptiveness. But the community, Rustemeyer included, had a very mixed response to this event–which is now sometimes referred to as “the unhoarding.” For the first time in years, someone had beaten Rustemeyer in total records. However, on June 11th, 2020, Burbank unloaded a shocking surprise attack–seventeen WRs that he had been secretly hoarding for over fifteen months. A picture of Daniel Burbank featured on the official leaderboards. This strong sense of sportsmanship was one of the most fundamental contributors in Rustemeyer’s ultimate failure in ever achieving world record perfection because it led to an inevitable back-and-forth competition between Rustemeyer and the rest of the community. Whenever Rustemeyer beat Burbank (or any other competitor for that matter), he would immediately submit his new WR to the leaderboards, giving his rival(s) the maximum amount of time to fire back. However, one factor would remain constant. During Rustemeyer’s journey, the two rapidly traded records on various courses. Rustemeyer’s closest competitor was none other than Daniel Burbank himself. But little did he know, another player was secretly surpassing his best times under the radar.

Rustemeyer continued to speedrun the game, and he remained at the top of the leaderboard for the most part (just not anywhere close to having all 32 records). The epic battle between Rustemeyer and the rest of the community would result in one of the most compelling tales to ever emerge from the entire speedrunning community (even being documented by YouTuber, Summoning Salt, with his video, Mario Kart 64: The Quest for World Record Perfection ).Īfter the end of Rustemeyer’s quest, things in the MK64 community seemed to calm down a bit. Finally, on November 26th, 2018, after the final failed attempt at perfection, Rustemeyer’s grind would come to an end.

There were many close calls–with him reaching 31/32 records a total of eight times–but the alliance between the rest of the community was just strong enough to stop him at the last moment. Just like Burbank later on, Rustameyer’s ultimate goal was to attain all thirty-two world records. He was once the champion of non-shortcut world records, holding more world records than any other player for seven years. The story behind the controversy of Burbank’s claim to fame was rooted from a fierce competition that started way back in 2013–an extraordinary rivalry between the top players of the MK64 community, and one of the all-time greats: Matthias Rustemeyer. (Note that this is only accounting for the non-shortcut side of the game, as Mario Kart 64 has a plethora of shortcuts–or large skips probably not intended by the developers–that can be used to complete each course much faster.) A picture of Matthias Rustemeyer featured on the official leaderboards. However, speedrunners also compete to see how fast they can complete just a single lap of the course, so in total, there are 32 different possible world records that can be claimed. The game contains a total of sixte en tracks, each of which have the player drive around the entire course three separate times.

It contains an in-game timer that tracks down a player’s time for each course, and players have been competing against each other ever since the late 90s. Mario Kart 64 is widely considered as one of the “founding fathers” of speedrunning games. The term “speedrunning” is a bit of a loose umbrella term, but generally, it is seen as the act of completing a video game–or a specific task within a game–as quickly as possible. Speedrunning has been around probably as long as video games themselves have. However, the way in which he claimed such perfection involved a controversial strategy, and left mixed emotions that still linger within the MK64 community. On August 8th, 2021, Mario Kart 64 (MK64) speedrunner, Daniel Burbank achieved absolute perfection, attaining all 32 non-shortcut world records (WRs).

Speedrunners game scout