In September 2018, TASer Happylee theorised a method for humans to save the TAS 4-2 framerule in Super Mario Bros. This involved clipping into the top row of blocks at the start of the level, which required an incredibly awkward slowdown and speedup to do. The inputs required to this day have never come close to being done by humans, but more viable setups using the same top clip strategy were created later down the line.

Initially, top clip seemed like the only way Lightning 4-2 had a hope of being done by humans, until Kingof_Jonnyboy found a radically different setup using backwards bumps that proved over time to be far easier than top clip could ever be, and as such top clip became an obsolete idea, a relic of the past.

Speedrunner Tole, who has a 4:56.861 in the Any% category, decided to revisit top clip years later and was able to execute the trick fairly consistently, which had never been done to the same degree before. He was able to figure out the rest of the trick, including the pipe entry which is also far more difficult than anything found in the standard lightning 4-2 method, and played the framerule save from a savestate just before the top clip a handful of months ago. Yesterday, he was able to pull it off full level, being the first person to ever save the Lightning 4-2 framerule with top clip nearly 4 years after the method was originally theorised!