A speedrunner’s quest to (re)build the perfect N64 controller

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0:39Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Mushy Bowls. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the first in a new series of episodes sponsored by Visible Wireless all about gaming. For the next four Sundays, we are going to tell you about all kinds of different stories in gaming. We did a series last fall. We had a ton of fun. We're doing it again. But this time we're doing it slightly differently. We're going to tell you stories about the five senses of the gaming world. And if you're saying, David, there are five senses and you just said four Sundays, that's true. You're going to have to stick around to see how we figure it out.

1:11Our friends from Polygon are going to join us to help explain. We have some really fun, wild stories about how the five senses show up all over the video game world. The first one we're doing is all about touch. And our touch story comes from a very specific corner of the gaming world. Speedrunning. These are those incredibly dedicated gamers who just try to beat games in as little time as possible. They play it over and over, faster and faster, always trying to get time down. Either by exploiting glitches and shortcuts in the game, or just spending hours and hours and hours finding the exact optimal path through a game.

1:46If you've never watched a speedrun, pick your favorite game and just poke around on YouTube. You'll probably find someone playing it in ways that you seriously didn't think were possible. And people who are really good at speedrunning can often do it blindfolded, which is just a whole other thing that I don't even understand. Our producer Will Poore poked around the Nintendo 64 speedrunning community, and he discovered that all is not well there, and is very not well for one speedrunner in particular. I'll let Will take it from here.

2:18I am a big fan of Nintendo 64, and so I was delighted to discover just how popular my favorite games are for speedrunners. I've been watching these incredible videos of people flying through Mario 64, Zelda, Mario Kart, finding all these shortcuts and hacks that I had no idea about when I was playing these games back in the day. But the more I learned about the N64 community, the more I heard about this problem that they've been dealing with for years. I found this really dramatic YouTube video that lays it all out. Back in 2003, the Nintendo 64 was discontinued, never to be manufactured again.

3:00But what nobody understood at the time is that Nintendo had just set off a ticking time bomb, something that years later would threaten the entire existence of speedrunning on the N64. The issue is, when you play lots of these games competitively, you end up beating the crap out of your controller. You're playing for hours every day, and you're going really hard, so you're wearing down a bunch of little plastic parts that were just never built for it. In an N64 controller, it's the joysticks that eventually give out. I actually remember this happening. My brothers and I used to fight over which controller we got to use because the joystick on one of them just kind of flopped around.

3:41So it's a super common thing. But if you're a speedrunner, a bad controller can cost you a lot of time and precision. So everyone wants nice, pristine hardware to play with. The problem is Nintendo hasn't made original N64 controllers for 20 years. And all that time, speedrunners have been burning through joysticks at a fast enough clip that the world is running out of them. So under this major threat of having to go outside, speedrunners have been waging a desperate war trying to halt this problem before time runs out. N64 controllers are now real commodities. On eBay, an unopened, genuine Nintendo controller can go for more than$500.

4:28There are third-party controllers out there, but they're just not as good. So lots of speedrunners end up playing what they call the eBay lottery. They buy a used Nintendo-made controller and just hope the joystick is okay. And this looks in pretty good shape. Stick is actually pretty tight. Stick on this one is also, it's a little loose, but it's not too bad. There's even a cottage industry of people building new joystick parts. Some are 3D printed. Really nice ones are made of steel. But those go in and out of stock. There's a secondary market. It's a whole thing. Anyway, the story that I'm here to tell, it's set in the world of that controller shortage, but it's not that story.

5:11It's about this one very accomplished Mario Kart 64 speedrunner who has a very different, much lonelier problem. Just to start off, how'd you get into speedrunning and when? I started playing Mario Kart 64 in, I guess, like late 2013. I had owned the game when it originally came out, but I probably never touched it again after the GameCube came out. But I just randomly had the N64 around one day and was just messing around with Mario Kart on it.

5:50This is the humble beginning of Beck Abney, or Abney317 online. Today, he's a 30-year-old software engineer and Mario Kart legend. But back in 2013, he was just a guy dusting off an old game system for fun. Then I think I was looking up how to do mini turbos or something online and accidentally found the time trial rankings and thought, oh, this looks fun. I'll just submit some times. The site he found was MarioKart64.com, home of that game's speedrunning community. Basically, a group of gamers dedicated to completing each of the game's 16 courses in as little time as possible. Mario Kart 64 was released back in 1996.

6:33So by the time Beck wandered in, they'd been at it for more than 15 years. The website has times from people who submitted, you know, right when the game came out. So the community has existed for a really long time. And when I joined and long after I joined, it was just kind of you send an email in with whatever your times are. You know, you may or may not provide proof. Before I joined, people were mailing in VHS tapes and things like that. And Beck thought, I can get into this. I'll drive some times today and see where it ends up. I think I was maybe 350th or 360, somewhere in the mid 300s when I first joined, which today would be maybe equivalent to 500 something because we've had so many more people join in the last 10 years.

7:21Now, 10 years later, I'm still still playing. He didn't stay in the mid 300s for long, though. He started playing for hours a day or grinding, as speedrunners would call it. and it was showing. So what put you on the map in speedrunning? What were your first records? When I first was playing, I went up the ranks really quickly. So I was really high ranked in non-shortcut and shortcut. A lot of people don't really play both a ton. Usually one's more focused on the other, but I was kind of doing everything. So some context here. It's pretty easy to cheat in Mario Kart. On some tracks, you can hop over guardrails and land way further ahead in the course.

8:07In other spots, you can glitch the game out by crashing into just the right out-of-bounds wall, and you get warped to the finish line. Over the years, discovering new shortcuts has become a sport unto itself. So today, the community divides records up into these two buckets. Runs that use shortcuts, and runs that don't. Anyway, Beck was making waves in both categories, but he really made a name for himself in shortcuts. My first record eventually was the new Chaco Mountain shortcut was discovered in 2014.

8:47It's a pretty absurd hack. You launch yourself straight at a wall right at the start of the race and then fall backwards across the finish line. But somehow the game thinks you've driven a full lap. I was the first person to hit it about six months after it was discovered to get like a five second lap. It's just kind of automatic world record just for hitting it. It was like a 10 second world record improvement. And then I would improve the three lap record a few months later as well. And that record kept going down. Again, being competitive in any game means grinding, playing for hours and hours and hours, shaving off a second here, a second there.

9:26I've watched Beck play he live streams on Twitch, and it is oddly mesmerizing.

9:38Lots of speedrunners go pretty big in their streams, especially when they hit records. By comparison, Beck is pretty understated. Here he is hitting that Choco Mountain shortcut on all three laps, which meant finishing the whole race in less than 18 seconds. The non-shortcut record for reference is a minute 55. Oh my god!

10:10He just smiles, shakes his head, and chuckles to himself. And it's a pretty good run. Shortcuts are really weird to watch, because the glitches are often very hard to trigger. So it's a lot of trying, failing, resetting, and trying again and again. But there's something about Beck that is clearly tuned to that kind of zen state, and it's worked for him. So long sessions, lots of attempts. What, as you're rising through the ranks here, what is your end goal? What do you have your sights on? I just kept trying to improve. There's a lot of good goals in this game that they have that kind of keep people playing a lot.

10:51I think I got up to number two in non-shortcut, and eventually I was grinding to become shortcut champ, and I became number one in the shortcut category. His specialty was playing through all 16 courses using all the known shortcuts. He was so dominant that a YouTuber named SummoningSalt made an hour-long video just about the quest to beat him. And then there's Abney, making a joke of the competition. Nobody could catch up to him without new strategies. But the competition was heating up. 20 years after the release of Mario Kart 64, the game was more popular than ever to speedrun. Beck fell back to third place in non-shortcut driving, but he fought to stay competitive, and he kept improving.

11:39I was better at driving in 2019 than I was in 2016, even though I dropped back to third place, because I was playing shortcut and I was doing the full game runs and streaming a lot and playing a lot of different categories. I definitely improved until, you know, 2019, and then I had a lot of controller issues. In 2019, everything changed for Beck, and not for the better. That's the year the N64 controller crisis caught up with him. The joystick failures, the parts shortage, all of it, but in a way that no one could have anticipated. That's after the break.

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13:52Welcome back. To recap, the year is 2019. Beck Abney is a Mario Kart speedrunning phenomenon. But the more he plays, the more he notices that something is off. How did you find yourself in your own very lonely predicament around controller? You know, that day when I just randomly decided to start playing it, we had three controllers and I just picked them all. And my old gray controller happened to be in the best condition. I was like, oh, this one's good. I'll just use this one. And I just kept using that same controller for the next couple of years. And as it slowly wore down, I never really noticed it.

14:34I just kind of got used to it and I kept improving my times. So I didn't think much of it. I kept improving and the controller just kept getting more and more destroyed from me playing Mario Kart. And then eventually that controller got worn down so much that I couldn't turn properly with it anymore.

14:55If speed running in general is stressful for controllers, Mario Kart is torture. You're constantly wrenching the joystick back and forth to get these little speed boosts. And if you're really grinding, a new controller can flake out in a matter of weeks. Yeah, so what are the parts that are degrading and failing? Yeah, there's like a little bowl on the inside that kind of pushes up against the bottom of the analog stick. And it sort of is just like a little curved plastic bowl. And the analog stick just will dig into this plastic. It's just plastic on plastic. And if you open up one of these controllers that's like old and used, it will just be full of plastic dust from the bowl being just shaved down.

15:43There are ways to extend the life of these parts. Some speedrunners open up their controllers and lubricate all the places where plastic grinds on plastic. But eventually, those little sticks and bowls will be toast. This is the crux of the joystick shortage. And it was the backdrop as Beck went looking for a new controller. I was like, okay, I need a different controller now, I guess. And then when I tried to, you know, use a perfect condition one, I bought a bunch on eBay. They were a little bit easier to find back then. I was like, oh, I can't drive very well with this one. The problem, bizarrely, was that the new controller was too nice.

16:21He'd gotten really good at playing with a half-broken controller. what is the best language that you have to describe what it is you're feeling for with the perfect controller in the past i've described it as and if people have used a lot of n64 controllers or bad ones will kind of know what i mean is like it's mushy like the analog stick as you're pushing it like a perfect one will feel like the same when you're pushing it you know halfway versus all the way, like it feels like one fluid motion where like the, I guess, ones that I'm using will be kind of harder to push as you get closer to the edge.

17:01It like stops me before I even get there really, but it's like kind of a weird squishy feeling for it. Beck opened up his old controller and he saw that, yep, the little plastic bowl was worn down. He realized that that was the source of the mushiness. So as a test, he put that old part into a new controller. And it worked. He had a new controller that felt like an old mushy one. So for a while, Abney 317 was back. But then, that controller failed. And that same process happened maybe two or three more times, where I kind of was like, oh, well, I know the solution now. I'll just, I just have to swap out everything except the bowl.

17:41Keep the super worn down bowl and swap out all the other parts. And I was doing that and I was getting world records at that point too. The intensity was ramping up. He was driving faster, grinding harder, and destroying his controllers along the way. I remember specifically getting a Rainbow Road non-shortcut world record. My controller broke and literally the analog stick actually snapped in half off the controller. Beck and his squishy bowl were riding high, but it was never going to last forever. And then eventually it was worn down too much. He put the old bowl in yet another new controller, but it was too far gone.

18:26There's no going back at that point. The perfect controller was well and truly dead, and it was the worst possible time for this kind of setback. Beck felt like he was this close to being at the top of his game, which would be the top of pretty much anyone's game. But now he was being held back. It got to the point where I was reaching closer and closer kind of to my top potential of driving maybe, and I was more and more picky over time. And every time I'd have to swap controllers, I'd be like, oh, well, this one's not quite as good as the one I was just using. So it feels like you are like with your own sort of aptitude for the game hitting a ceiling where whatever tiny difference the controller makes is for you the difference between improving or not improving.

19:14It's like I might be able to improve in the game more, but I'm not able to even get to where I was.

19:23But Beck wasn't finished. If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was grind. After the break, the quest to rebuild the perfect controller.

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20:58Welcome back. So, Beck Abney was in a bind. His ideal controller no longer existed, and competitors were eating away at his hard-won records. At this point, his options were, one, throw in the towel, two, spend years retraining himself on a good controller, or three, somehow reverse engineer his old messed up joystick. For Beck, there was only one way forward. So talk to me about what hoops you have jumped through to try to recreate this mythical controller. I mean, originally it was like, let me just buy a hundred controllers on eBay and just go crazy and see if I get lucky. So I literally just have like an absurd amount of controllers and it's possible.

21:42I could mix and match something and it actually would work. I never really had any luck with that. So next, Beck tried designing custom parts that mimicked his old controller. He used a 3D printing service to build them. Shoutouts to Yasmin in my Discord who had modeled some of these for me. Took some existing 3D models that other people had made and basically artificially like shaved down the bowl to make it kind of worn down as if someone had actually used it a bunch. But I'm just 3D printing it, you know, out of the box, just in bad condition on purpose. For the record, modifying controllers is allowed in Mario Kart speedrunning.

22:24You just can't add new functionality to it. We did like a ton of different ones. So like 0.1 millimeters cut out, 0.2, and then like all the way to like 1.5 millimeters carved out. And I 3D printed them all and I tested them all. And one or two of them, I was like, oh, this is kind of close. It felt familiar. Yeah. With that encouragement, he started iterating on other parts like the joystick and the springs. Now let's print it in a bunch of different materials. Maybe the different materials will feel different. And they do. Very different, actually. Beck showed me this spreadsheet he's been using to keep track of all the permutations.

23:02To date, he's tested 33 distinct combinations of bowl and stick and springs. He's got comments on all of them. Most or some variation on meh, but a couple feel promising. He even set a world record with one of them. It's basically just guess and check, just kind of spend a bunch of my 3D printing random iterations and hope something magically works for me. Is this as frustrating as it sounds as you're telling me this? It sounds incredibly frustrating. Yeah, it's pretty annoying. I mean, I'm lucky that I have like a fairly popular stream and other stuff I can play and it's still still fun. But unfortunate, I guess, because it's like I probably could have competed more.

23:45I think there were records that I was close to getting that I didn't have. I was at one point really close on like the Luigi Raceway three lap non-shortcut record. And then I had controller problems and they kind of ran away far ahead of me after that. And it's like, I have no idea if I would be able to drive the time. Like their times are way beyond what I was doing five years ago. So I have no idea if I could get there now. Do you feel the irony of everyone else hunting for pristine joysticks while you are hunting for these half broken ones? Kind of, yeah. Yeah, it's funny because I, yeah, and I have some of those like steel stick controllers and stuff that people want.

24:24I use them for some shortcut stuff, but yeah, it's like hard for me to create my perfect garbage controller that I want. I don't have that controller. I can't like 3D scan the parts and just replicate them or something. The really galling part is that some other players prefer crappy controllers too. One of his biggest rivals does. But Beck says that somehow it's easier for them to get used to new parts. He'll be like, oh, I can't use this one anymore. And he'll do like a whole controller testing stream, just testing other stuff. And then be like, oh, this one's fine now. Whereas try as he might, Beck just can't seem to warm up to anything else.

25:06it's such a bummer that as we talked i started trying to work the problem myself like what if you okay have you tried getting controllers from other mario kart 64 players that was the the genius idea was to take the person who likes the perfect controller now they they're done with it pass it on to the person who likes the the slightly worse controller and have like the big chain of people passing down control oh my god that was a thought i have had people send me controllers before and someone sent me one uh who was like pretty pretty high ranked and plays a lot uh they sent me one it was like it was kind of mushy like i had described but it like wasn't quite right and it's also i admittedly probably play the game like way more so i would be waiting on controllers if they you know i'm like hurry up and wear down your controller so i can i could play again kind of thing.