Name: How To Become The World's Fastest Gamer... Blindfolded
Uploaded: 2025-02-13T12:44:33.000Z
Duration: 12 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

When I'm on world record pace, it's because of nerves and the stress that I go through, I have a heart rate of easily like 160 or even more, which is very comparable to when I go running outside, so it's pretty intense.

Meet Bobsia, a champion gamer with a very particular set of skills.

The comparative

I'm a speedrunner and I complete games as fast as I can, but blindfolded.

His biggest achievement to date was a blindfolded speedrun of Super Mario 64, collecting 120 stars in one sitting, which took him a colossal 11 hours and 22 minutes. 120 star was something that was like completely thought of as impossible by like literally everybody, like including myself, people started like mocking me, yeah, but could you do it in one sitting?

Now a world record holder, Bobsia is quitting his job and going full time.

For me at this moment, it goes just like any other career.

And for the aspiring speedrunners out there, he breaks down his technique, teaching us the steps to level up our playing.

Speedrunning relies on muscle memory, the brain's ability to perform a task with minimal conscious effort after repeated practice.

When you play a game, your motor cortex sends signals to start a movement, and your cerebellum helps fine tune these movements for better coordination and accuracy.

With practice, your neural pathways become stronger, making your actions faster and more precise.

So what happens when you remove a major sense like your sight?

One of the techniques that we use to actually navigate games blindfolded is something that I personally call beat counting.

So what we use is the background music of the game.

We literally listen to the song, count the rhythm of it, like one, two, three, four.

Based on these beats, we bind inputs to the beats.

And like this, you can make extremely precise and also consistent movement.

And basically like this, I have mapped out the entire game.

One and two, three, four, five and six, seven, eight.

I usually practice and stream for like around three hours per day right now.

Within these three hours, I would say I'm not longer than like two hours blindfolded a day, which, I mean, it's already quite a bit, I guess.

After I'm tired from gaming, what I usually do to unwind is chill out with like my cat and my wife, go on a little walk.

It's very interesting how he is after gaming.

When it's a great run that went really well, you can see the excited energy on him.

Sometimes he's quite gloomy if things are not working out how he wishes it to go.

I'm just trying to navigate how the run was that day.

Gameplay might not always go to plan, but dedication is key.

I got into gaming all the way back in the days when I was a tiny kid.

We had a Nintendo 64 at home, so I grew up with lots of Nintendo titles, especially Mario and Zelda franchises.

I got into speedrunning by watching another blindfolded speedrunner actually called Runnerguy.

I saw Runnerguy doing a blindfolded Ocarina of Time speedrun, and it was so fascinating how he did crazy setups, like jumping twice to the right side, backflipping five times, changing the angle.

It was a game that I played so often, and this was a completely new approach of how to play it.

I decided to try it out myself with a game that I know, which was Super Mario 64.

In Super Mario 64, the main objective is to collect 120 stars.

Some need, like, puzzle solving, some need, like, movement.

My process in learning Super Mario 64 was taking each star and then trying it visually out until we reach the point that we can reliably get it blindfolded.

When I catched on that same day my first star, it was such a great feeling.

The excitement that I got on that day, I think that just went on forever and that just lasted.

I should be around the 5,000 hour mark with Super Mario 64 alone.

Training for his world record took one year and three months.

It was a whole challenge itself, preparing everything.

I had a famous rice bowl, which is always mentioned online.

It's always a bit of a meme online because I used to always, mid-run, quickly grab my rice bowl, eat a bit.

I was blindfolded, of course, so I had trouble, like, finding the spoon and all.

Trying to eat mid-run and then, like, gain quickly.

It's just part of the speedrun because you want to do it as a single session, especially in blindfolded, where there's so much doubt about my legitimacy.

I did the run and, like, it was on YouTube and I just went on with life.

And a couple of months later, like, some random person in my chat was like, yo, look what I found.

They linked me to the Guinness World Record website and there was, like, an article about me with, like, my record.

My biggest rival right now is kind of myself.

Bobsia is one of a global community of speedrunning enthusiasts with millions of members sharing strategies online and competing against each other.

I was fortunate enough that I've been to many speedrun events in my life.

It's very fascinating for me that, like, this little hobby of mine can bring me around the world.

His channel has built such a fan base that he's quitting his job as a software engineer to be a full-time gamer.

So, today will be my last work day in my company job, actually.

It was always like, yeah, one more week, one more month, one more day.

And, like, now it's here, so I'm extremely...

The biggest reason why I now decided to quit my job and, like, pursue my speedrunning as, like, my full-time gig is mostly I have so many things I want to work on, so many videos that I want to produce about it to, like, spread the word about this hobby around the world.

So, yeah, why not just go for it, you know?

Bobsia is now taking on other games, including the very difficult Dark Souls.

When I met Bobsia, I had no clue of speedrunning, of really gaming whatsoever.

So it was a really eye-opening experience when he showed me one of his videos.

It's not such a shocking thing anymore that he's now doing full-time because I've seen it every day, how it's growing, how his community is growing.

For me, at this moment, it feels just like any other career.

Of course it comes also with, like, factors of, like, yeah, financial stability.

Like, what if my, like, viewers drop or, like, my numbers drop, you know?

But I try to just not think too much about it for now because it's going stable, it's going well, and I'm just doing what I love to do, and I think that's the most important right now.

This Masterclass isn't for the faint-hearted.

We're going deep into Super Mario 64 for Bobzia's guide to catching a star blindfolded.