Mario Superstar Baseball and the Pursuit of Perfection

The surprising common connecting my familial obsession with a GameCube game from 2005, the Olympics, and speedrunning

Whenever I’m back in Central New York visiting family, my siblings and I make time to play each other in Mario Superstar Baseball. Released in 2005 for the GameCube, the game is old enough to vote, and yet it remains our preferred format for hashing out sibling rivalries.

A lot of retro games, especially those from Nintendo, maintain an active player base. But because Superstar Baseball received a sequel on the Wii, which was a far more popular console than the GameCube, few Nintendo nostalgics return to the GameCube version for their baseball fix. 

The family copy of Mario Superstar Baseball, as seen during my latest visit

A small community for the game exists on Reddit, and a Discord dedicated to the game’s modding and online scene reports 800 total members. Based on this slim online community, if my siblings and I were worse than all other active players, we would still be among the top 1,000 Mario Superstar Baseball players …