Some folks are just really good at mashing buttons. And everyone has their own technique. Maybe you use two fingers. Maybe you hold the controller weird. Odds are though, you aren’t as good at mashing buttons as Ludwig Ahgren, who mashed so fast and so hard in a Mario Party 4 minigame, Domination, that he set a new personal and possibly world record and broke the game.
As first reported by Polygon, Ahgren pulled off this amazing bit of button mashing earlier this week. His technique looks a bit odd, holding the controller with his thumbs and rocking it up and down very quickly, but it worked.
In the minigame, players mash buttons as fast as they can for a set amount of time and each button press creates a Thwomp. At the end of the timer, the game shows a long line of Thwomps, representing all that button mashing. It is during this part of the minigame that Ahgren breaks Mario Party 4. The line of Thwomps is sooooo long that it flys off the game map and into the void.
Three years ago someone uploaded a TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedrun) of the same minigame. Back then the uploader claimed the score of 160 was the max. However, Ahgren proved faster than a computer and proved that to be wrong. This new score of 201 beats his previous high score of 199.
(Update: 1:13PM) - The version of Mario Party 4 that Ahgren is playing is modified to allow players to exceed 160. This is why the original TAS run was limited to 160.
In three years who knows, maybe players with even faster fingers will be breaking 300 in this minigame in Mario Party 4. Though I’m not sure how much punishment Gamecube controllers can handle. They are tough. But everything has limits.