Random: YouTuber Speedruns Touching Grass (In Every Mario Game)

“Touch grass” has become the rallying cry for angry people on the internet, and it’s most often levelled at gamers. It’s shorthand for “go outside”, or simply “oh my god the thing you’re complaining about is SO TERMINALLY ONLINE that you really should go and do something that isn’t sitting at your computer yelling at strangers on the internet”. It’s sort of like saying “calm down”, but much more evocative: We really all should go outside more, shouldn’t we?

YouTuber and Twitch streamer j0rts, who appears to be some kind of duck, spends most of his videos doing strange and “mostly pointless things”, as he himself puts it. This includes playing Mario Kart with only his eyes, beating Super Mario 64 at 400% speed, and trying to complete the Great Deku Tree dungeon without ever turning left.

J0rts’ latest project is the gamer’s dream: Touching grass as fast as possible in every single Mario game. Most games take mere seconds, although it takes almost two minutes to find the first grass in Super Mario Bros., and over three and a half minutes in Yoshi’s Island. The longest by far is Super Mario Sunshine, which takes a ludicrous 7 minutes, mostly because it’s all cutscenes.

J0rts set up some ground rules (hahaha, ground rules) for the grass-touching — it has to be active, i.e. it can’t be during a cutscene, and it has to be green, and on the ground, so bushes don’t count, and neither does the black grass at the start of Super Mario Odyssey.

You’re probably wondering which game is the fastest to get that grass touched, aren’t you? Surprisingly, it’s Super Mario Land 2, with just 6.34 seconds of non-grass-related activities before Mario gets his mitts on that green stuff.

So, now you know. If you get told to touch grass, just boot up Super Mario Land 2, and you’ll have fistfuls of turf in no time.