So I was playing SMB on my Game & Watch today, and of course the first thing I decided to do was go to the minus world, because that sounds like a solid plan right? What I didn't realize was that the tiny screen of the console would make it extremely difficult to judge my movement in relation to enemies, so I would go on to lose all my lives. As I went back to the title screen, it dawned on me: I can press B and choose a world, even though I didn't finish the game! It seems there's some sort of flag in the game that enables world select if your world is 9 or higher.

Anyway, this had me thinking: It MUST be faster to lose all your lives at or before the minus world, and then continue at world 8 after Game Over, right? Worlds 4-1 and 4-2 are not that long, but they're definitely longer than it takes to lose all your lives. I could see this category saving a good 15 seconds off your time, easily.

I just tried it, it doesn't work.

Yeah, I just tried it using the PRG0 ROM and it doesn't seem to work that way either. I guess the G&W version has been modified to allow world select. I know you can continue from the minus world by holding A, but that's irrelevant and useless. Ah well.

well do 4:53 for g&w edition

I believe the way the G&W version works is that whenever you enter a new world, world select is enabled for all worlds up to that point; for example, if you got to world 7 for the first time, you can now world select up to world 7. Obviously world select caps at world 8 because that's the last valid world, but the minus world being world 36 internally still triggers the unlock behavior.

Note that this behavior isn't consistent with the NES original of course. If you beat the minus world as is possible on the FDS version of SMB1, you do get the full world select as if you beat the game proper and this does have certain use-cases in certain CEs, but no applications for main board categories. Even if enabling world select this way would save time, it would be against the spirit of the Any% category (for example, you could theoretically use the cartridge swap trick to set the continue code for 8-1 but this is obviously disallowed).

We do not permit runs of the G&W version on the leaderboards due to that version having significant alterations as previously described (and that version apparently runs faster than the NES original according to testing by Periwinkle), but your find is still interesting nevertheless.