30 Brutal Video Game Challenges Aced by Total Wizards

There are people who are good at video games, and then there are masters who must have descended from immortal game playing gods. For starters, LordSaradoc holds the world record for beating Super Mario Bros. in 4 minutes, 57.69 seconds, without the assistance of emulation tools or save states.

Runnerguy2489 grabbed attention at the beginning of the year when he completed three dungeons in Ocarina of Time while blindfolded. If you tune into his YouTube channel, you can watch history unfold as he attempts to complete the entire game 100 % with a sack over his head.

Desert Bus is a joke game created by the entertainers Penn & Teller that consists of driving a bus down a straight route for 8 hours in real time. A team of gamers created a charity to benefit children's hospitals called Desert Bus for Hope, where they marathon the mind-numbingly dull game for a week at a time. So far they've raised millions of dollars through their commitment to dull digital life on the road.

If you've ever stood in front of the Hellmouth's gaping chasm and wondered if it was possible to clear it in a giant, virtuosic leap of faith, SmileB4DEATH has a video for you. Using a Bladedancer Hunter, a Sparrow, and some well-timed Arc Blades, he crosses the entire pit flawlessly.

Sure it's a bit showboaty, but French gamer Kayane, one of the top Soulcalibur players in the world, takes on the competition with style. Without looking at the screen once, she demolishes her opponent with a flurry of combos at Paris Manga in 2013, a display of skill still talked about to this day.

By this point, unarmed Skryim builds have taken off as a viable path, but it took a brave, foulmouthed viking by the name of Robbaz to kick off the entire movement. If his salty language doesn't turn you off, prepare to stand in awe of his fists made of steel.

If you've played any of the classic Adventure Island games, you'll recognize the main character, Master Higgins. He's based on a real Hudson executive, Toshiyuki Takahashi, who became famous for his ability to fire off 16 button presses in one second. He went on to invent the turbo button for video game controllers so the rest of us mere mortals could catch up to him.

Zallard1 recently pulled off the near-impossible feat of beating Super Punch-Out!! while blindfolded for Awesome Games Done Quick. AGDQ is a veritable superhero of charity, raising money to fight cancer while engineering some of the most outrageous game stunts out there.

A lot of astounding video game feats take extraordinary concentration and reflexes, but Carrie Swidecki's accomplishment required inhuman stamina. She set the record for playing Just Dance 4 for 76 hours, 4 minutes, 52 seconds consecutively. We're not sure how she even survived.

Undeterred by the wins of other blindfolded speed runners in Super Punch-Out!!, Jack Wedge took the challenge back to its roots this year, completing the original Punch-Out!! in a flawless streak while blindfolded. His bouts against Soda Popinski and the notoriously impossible Mike Tyson are balletic displays of ingenuity and memorization.

By now, the moment has become a legend in video game history: In a tense match between two all-time fighting game champs, Daigo Umehara managed to parry an entire multi-hit Super Combo from Justin Wong's Chun Li. A single parry takes practice and precise timing to pull off, so 17 parries in a row was almost like witnessing someone leap over the Empire State Building.

On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew would face an emergency, and Data would bust out his superhuman, lightning-fast hands to reprogram the ship. That's nothing compared with expert player DOLCE's mastery of Beatmania. With 1,836 perfect button presses in 2 minutes, he's faster than man or machine.

Kaizo Mario World is the most infamous hack of Super Mario World, turning the peaceful game into a nightmarish hellscape of invisible blocks and death traps. Speedrunner dram551 performed a flawless play through in 14 minutes and 29 seconds without getting killed once. In the picture above, he uses his skills to raise money for charity.

The NES has one of the most difficult game catalogs of any system, so when The Mexican Runner committed to beating all of them on his Twitch channel, he got everyone's attention. Watching him dismantle games like the Silver Surfer is a thing of beauty.

Cool guys don't look at explosions, and cool women don't look at the games they play with polished perfection. Haruna Anno has a day job as a Japanese model, but she made waves when a video circulated of her tearing through the original Super Mario Bros. without even glancing at the screen.

Aura Puffs has a cuddly YouTube user name, but his Mega Man skills are completely intimidating. He's managed to complete both Mega Man X and Mega Man X2 at the exact same time using a single controller. His synchronized play-through takes multitasking to a new level.

Bloodborne's gothic and fog-drenched atmosphere seems like a natural fit for some heavy-metal wailing. Twitch streamer gbbearzly decided to hook up a Rock Band instrument and thrash his way through the formidable game with some incredible guitar licks.

Ikaruga is considered one of the best-shoot-'em up games ever created, and juggling its complex black-and-white polarity system often feels like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. Enter: two joysticks, one expert arcade gamer. A now-famous YouTube video features an unknown Ikaruga pro who controls two ships at the same time, executing intricate combo chains with panache.

The joke about grandparents loving Wii Bowling is true. John Bates, an 85-year-old resident of Onalaska, Wisconsin, set the world record at 14,000 perfect games of Wii Sports Bowling. That takes extraordinary skill, and an extremely long attention span.

Srwfe is a Taiwanese Dark Souls master whose soul level is so high he can navigate its blighted caverns with the most dexterous pair of feet you'll see all year. His Twitch stream has viewable archives of his adventures, which are sure to inspire jealousy.

Dark Souls isn't the only game experts have trounced with their feet. Nick Hagman rigged up a Dance Dance Revolution pad and began an 8-month quest to beat Ninja Gaiden, one of the hardest NES games, using a frenzy of dance moves. You can follow his epic quest on YouTube.

Everyone thinks they're pretty decent at Tetris. That is until they see the world-record-breaking video of keroco racing through a 40-line game in 18.96 seconds. The pieces move so fast it's often hard to comprehend what's happening.

Its winding pathways have made Super Metroid a favorite game for speed runners to attempt sequence-breaking records on. Awesome Games Done Quick hosted this breakneck charity run between a group of the best Metroid players in the world. It's a nail-biting 45 minutes you won't regret watching.

Twitch streamer The Prixie boldly steers a new course for innovative Souls games-control schemes. Unintimidated by guitar players or feet fiddlers, this pro deftly wields a racing game steering wheel to destroy every difficult Souls boss that stands in her way.

Unsatisfied with his status as one of the greatest Half-Life speed runners, quadrazid flipped the view and reversed the gravity on Valve's classic game. Although he's occasionally disoriented in his videos (can you blame him?) he still plays better than most people right side up.

Imagine all three tough-as-nails NES Ninja Gaiden games played back to back, by two competing teams filled with some of the fastest fingers on the planet. Awesome Games Done Quick produced this must-watch, high-wire act and raised a ton of money for The Precent Cancer Foundation.

Grandmaster Galaxy's "The Perfect Run" is considered the pinnacle of difficult Mario levels. It wasn't challenging enough for MrBean35000vr, though, who decided to remix a Master Quest version of the level. His creation is a gauntlet of punishing and painful traps so hard that he may be the only one alive who can survive them.

Staying alive for more than 5 minutes in the challenging platform game Spelunky counts as an accomplishment. Expert player Bananasaurus Rex went the extra mile though. He managed to singlehandedly carry an eggplant (an essentially worthless item) all the way to the game's secret final boss, a feat that had always required careful coordination between two skilled players.

The Dark Souls community seems to be in a continuous state of one-upping each other with the most ridiculous controller methods they can think of. PIctured here, gbbearzly (who beat Bloodborne with a guitar) hooks up some Donkey Kong bongos and whales on some difficult Dark Souls bosses.

Hot off the presses! Allan "Cheese05" Alvarez has just set a new world record for collecting all 120 stars in Super Mario 64: 1 hour, 41 minutes, 16.87 seconds. That's a solid 3 minutes faster than the previous record. The video of his attempt is a balletic performance of nimble jumps and camera manipulation. It's hard to imagine anyone doing it better.