A super-dedicated Super Smash Bros. Melee player broke a 14-year record yesterday for the game’s “Break the Targets” mode.
Break the Targets is a classic Super Smash Bros. minigame in which a character must break ten targets as quickly as possible. Each character has their own moveset and target test layout. Right now, the record for completing the mode in Super Smash Bros. Melee is a Mr. Game and Watch player’s 2.82-second run. Then, comes a Luigi player’s 3.23-second run. The player who just set a new record for Link’s run, Joseph “Savestate” El-Khouri, completed the mode in 3.52 seconds, .03 seconds faster than the previous record set in 2004 by a Japanese player named Taka (there are two other faster times, but they were accomplished on either a modded copy of Melee or with an assisting tool).
It’s rare for a record to go uncontested for so long, and to celebrate, El-Khouri lost his mind live on Twitch:
The video goes by so quickly, it’s hard to see what’s happening. El-Khouri shared his strategy in this diagram (the red line is the first boomerang, the blue line is a bomb, the purple line is an arrow, the cyan line is a hookshot and the green line is the second boomerang):
El-Khouri’s innovation, he told me over Discord, was a “shallow angle on the 2nd boomerang for a more direct path to the back target.” It took him five days to accomplish, and when he did, he said, “I think my reaction is pretty telling. That’s what it feels like to leave a 14-year-old record in the dust by two frames.”