Alex Penev

Alex Penev

Alex Penev is a Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart: Double Dash!! player, staff member, all-round gamer, and a popular personality of the kart community (he narrowly won the 2004 Karter Contest over Finn Berger, and came 2nd to Sami Cetin in 2006).

Alex is a former Mario Kart 64 world champion for both non-shortcut and shortcut. He pioneered some strategies (notably Kalimari Desert) and many shortcuts, and has had several long-standing WRs. Most were shortcut WRs, and they have all fallen as the years went by. His most famous WR was for CM non-shortcut flap, which despite being done with an inferior strat (lap 1 instead of lap 2), stood for more than 5 years. Some of his other long-standing records, such as LRSC 3lap and CMSC 3lap, were eventually beaten with the use of new shortcut routes.

Alex is currently ranked 17th in Non-SC and 6th in SC in MK64. He has been #1 in both, but has gradually slipped through the years. He was also the top ("universal") MK64 player for many years. He is still currently #2 in Universal ARR and #4 in Universal AF, indicative of concentrating on both fields, rather than specialising. He has never officially retired, and has made a few returns to try out new SC discoveries.

Alex was MKDD champion in the infancy of the competition, rising to the top of the ladder in a couple of weeks' time during January 2004. He dominated for 4 months, but went into inactive status in July 2004 and has since slipped to outside the top-50.

Alex is a veteran of N64HS and a member of several hi-scores sites. He holds or has held site records in Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Pokemon Snap (among others; he no longer keeps track).

In addition to gaming, Alex is a mediocre programmer, and has helped the kart community by creating the current front-end for the SMK, MKSC, MKDD, and MKDS pages. He also designed (and presently maintains) the backend database for those sites, and even drew some of their graphics. It's not always obvious that he is involved with these sites, until something breaks down or needs to be added. In more-visible roles, Alex was a former MKDD updater for several months, but has delegated the role to more-active players. Nevertheless, he still updates the news and players awards on a weekly basis. He is an admin in the forum, but rumour has it that he has other top-secret powers...

Personal quotes include "chown -R me ~you/base*" (all your base are belong to me), and "...no queue jumping" (in response to "I want your babies!").

External Links

• Alex's Cyberscore profile
• Alex's MKDD profile
• Alex's first videogames webpage (outdated; some content is pre-2000)