Meet TASBot, a Linux-Powered Robot Playing Video Games for Charity

摘要

Let me begin with a brief history of tool-assisted speedruns. It was 2003. Less than halfrnthe developed world had internet access of any kind, and YouTube hadn’t been createdrnyet. Smartphones were rare and nascent. Pentium III processors still were commonplace,rnand memory was measured in megabytes. It was out of this primordial ooze that anrninteresting video file circulated around the web—an 18MB .wmv labeled only as a “superrnmario bross3 time attack video” [sic]. What followed was an absolutely insane 11-minuterncompletion of the game by someone named Morimoto replete with close calls, norndeaths and Mario destroying Bowser after apparently effortlessly obtaining 99 lives. Thernonly other context was a link to a page written in Japanese, and the rough encodingrnthat Windows Media Video format was known for in that era made it difficult for casualrnviewers to observe that it was an emulator recording rather than the output of a realrnNintendo Entertainment System (NES) console.