Just in case anyone's interested:

The emulation site Zophar's Domain still hosts Nesticle movies from ancient times, including some SMB1 speedruns. I have a 7 min 10 sec run on there from 1999, and the "record" progressed all the way to 6 min 30 sec in 2000. Not sure if they belong on official record progression lists, but I thought some here might find them charming if nothing else!

https://www.zophar.net/movies/nes/super-mario-brothers-1.html

This is really cool

I added a section to the WR Progression for it and other very old runs:

Ancient Runs Outside Leaderboards Several emulator movies were uploaded to Zophars Domain: 7:45 by deputy-headless on May 9 1999 7:10 by Quasifrog on June 26 1999 7:00 by DarkMazda on July 15 1999 6:30 by gz on October 1 2000

Jeff Ninneman and Jason Harmer had a recorded Super Mario Bros. race in front of a crowd in 2002. (Article, Video) Both had times of 5:50 (5:53 from pressing Start), though Jason Harmer (on the right) was a bit faster. The article mentions Jeff Ninneman having finished with 5:11 and Jason Harmer having finished with 5:09. These may refer to their personal best times at the time of the race or at the time of article (February 26 2006). Jason Harmer has a 5:09 video uploaded on October 12 2012 that may be the run refered to in the article.

Can someone clear up some of the confusion about the last section or know more runs that would fit there?

I found an article stating that their PB were 5:11 and 5:09, but it also says that both of them finished the race at just over 6 minutes

I also found a Norwegian Facebook account named "Jeg elsker Super Mario" (I love Super Mario). I saw a couple posts about 2010 and older speedruns, but since my Norwegian isn't on point yet, I can't really understand what they're talking about. I'm kinda affraid to use Google Translate since it can mess up certain important points. There were also videos linked, but they got removed

Edit: turns out they only had 1 public post about speedrunning and the video got deleted. They didn't leave infos. Also, it's danish, not norwegian. Both languages read and sound almost the same lol

are the zophar's domain files able to be viewed as videos?

I made a recording of the first run on Nesticle 0.43 via DosBox, but the other 3 all desynched.

Man these runs are cool to watch, and it shows the progression of optimization that the category has today

actualy why the player in that run tries to get 6 in everything at the end? lmao

And here we are almost 25 years later and I finally decided to try my own hand at speedrunning. ;)

Welcome!

Thanks! Good to be here.

Interesting