He’d game through the night and then head back to his job, which he didn’t enjoy, on little sleep. That’s when Fowler got serious about Super Mario Bros. By 2009, he was an ironworker on bridge projects, laying rebar by day and gaming by night. He gave post-secondary studies another shot, but jumped at a chance to work in Edmonton. That was 2003.Īfter high school, he struggled to find his footing, uninspired by studies at Sheridan College in nearby Oakville-“I totally bombed it”-and was eventually lured into a construction job. “The idea of breaking the game blew my mind,” says Fowler. But it was Metroid Prime, a 3D first-person shooter on Nintendo’s GameCube console, that was the first game in which gamers discovered “sequence breaking”-a process by which they identify glitches that allow them to skip whole sections, and sometimes advance directly to a game’s final credits. He picked up an old-school Nintendo Entertainment System at a garage sale in high school, although several years passed before he mastered Super Mario Bros. Speedrunning enhances his cognitive abilities, and even blurs the connection between his conscious mind and his tapping fingers.īefore Fowler fell in love with speedrunning, he was a casual gamer, like a lot of suburban teenagers, growing up in Burlington, Ont. And scientists say Fowler’s craft produces more than just the income that pays his bills. He plays to thousands of spellbound fans on the live streaming platform Twitch.īeating a classic video game might sound like a fun hobby, but Fowler’s years of speedrunning have ballooned into a full-time gig. Fowler is a “speedrunner,” the name for gamers who obsessively search for optimal paths and exploit glitches that save precious seconds to post the fastest times. 3, the iconic Nintendo game first released in 1990. The 33-year-old Canadian gamer who lives in Salt Lake City had been racing to beat every level in Super Mario Bros. Nobody had ever made a run faster than 70 minutes, but Fowler’s stunning achievement on Feb. Fowler had beaten his own world’s best time by three seconds. The clock stopped at one hour, nine minutes and 58 seconds. Two minutes after that, big exhales and barely contained glee as all that was left was waiting for his final time. A few minutes later, a setback that slowed his momentum: “Surprise, surprise!” he barked. “We’ll see, we’ll see,” he said to no one in particular. Ten minutes shy of a new record, he fell silent. “This is a good run? Well, you know what happens to good runs,” he replied: Fowler had come this close before. Somebody in his audience had dared to mention his impressive pace. Mitch Fowler was skeptical that he was minutes away from setting a new world record.
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