There are plenty of tricky Stars to collect in Super Mario 64, from the likes of Shoot into the Wild Blue in Whomp’s Fortress to Plunder in the Sunken Ship in Jolly Roger Bay. Elevator Tour in the Volcano, a Star mission in Lethal Lava Land, requires Mario to enter the titular volcano and make his way through an obstacle course — and now some clever players have found a way to do it without ever pressing the A button.
Some background information is required here. The “0xA challenge” in Super Mario 64 is considered one of the toughest by the game’s community. As the name implies, it requires you to complete portions of the game without ever pressing the A button, which causes Mario to jump. Only certain Stars can be collected without jumping, and finding new ones is a highly respectable discovery. In most cases, players simply seek to set a new record for the fewest A-button presses possible.
UncommentatedPannen, the secondary channel of YouTuber pannenkeok2012, has proven that a 0xA run of Elevator Tour in the Volcano is possible. Using a tool-assisted speedrun, they dive their way into the volcano, where purposefully touching the lava and getting rocketed into the air lets them tangle with a Bully, the horned Super Mario 64 enemy that must be pushed into the lava in order to be defeated. Due to their AI behavior in this particular version of the game, they can also be pushed around in the lava. This leads to the wildest part of the run: at about one minute into the video, Pannen begins a 21-hour-long process (sped up of course) of bumping the Bully around, eventually getting it onto the same elevator that needs to be taken toward the Star.
Clearly, the process for a 0xA Star of any kind is quite elaborate. You can’t do something like this in the Nintendo Switch version of the game through Super Mario 3D All-Stars, but you can at least play it with a Switch-compatible Nintendo 64 controller. Super Mario 64 is also available via the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack, which also includes related games like Mario Golf and Paper Mario.
