History of the A Button Challenge

In the early 2000s, players began trying to beat Super Mario 64 with as few A presses as possible. Thus, the A Button Challenge (ABC) was born. At first, the challenge required clever movement around the levels, but it eventually required advanced techniques and glitches to whittle down A presses. As of 2018, the challenge is still active, with only 20 A presses remaining.

Part I: Early History

(todo: this is almost certainly missing things from forum pages and non-English web pages. More research and elaboration on this section is required.)

In 2001, Walton Dell's website detailing Super Mario 64 tricks included details on the ABC for BoB, as well as the red coins star in SL. Curtis Bright, who runs sm64.com, was keeping track of ABC at least as early as December of 2006. In early 2007, Thiago Trujillo had what is the earliest, nearly complete count for the game (that we have access to) with a total count of about 263 presses. (This list is missing all navigation presses, two of the DDD stars, three of the TTC stars, one star in RR, and BitS.) On 13 July 2007, a GameFAQs forum thread about the ABC was made.

Part II: Pannenkoek2012's Initial Run-Through

When pannenkoek2012 arrived to the ABC scene in August 2013, the A press count was at 211. His first ABC video was for 5 Itty Bitty Secrets, in which he completed it in 0 A presses. Pannenkoek brought much more optimization to the ABC, using cloning, Goomba architecture, frame walking, hat in hand displacement, WDW water level manipulation, shell hyperspeed, infinite coin glitches, and Big Boo manipulation. Within the first 4 months, nearly 100 A presses had been saved, bringing the count down to 117.