There’s no two ways about it: the video game speedrunning community is a collection of certifiable weird units. But there’s something oddly inspiring about a group of people dedicating their entire lives to shaving microseconds off a Super Mario 64 run. The lower the stakes, the fiercer the competition.
This weekend, a bloke from Brisbane smashed a speedrun record for GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 which has stood unchallenged for fifteen years, an achievement which obviously transcends any example of Aussie sporting excellence you’d care to name.
You might recall ‘Dam’, the first level of GoldenEye. It’s an incredibly short level with only a handful of bad guys for James Bond to shoot. Even the biggest moron would finish the level in a few minutes tops – but the speedrunners have been chipping away at faster and faster speeds since time immemorial (by which I mean 1997). Until this weekend, the record belonged to Bryan Bosshardt, who breezed through Damn in a tidy 53 seconds.
No longer. Homegrown hero Karl Jobst blew the record out of the water during a run on video game streaming site Twitch which clocked in at a blazing fast 52 seconds. He promptly lost his shit:
Now, there’s a good reason why he was so shocked: GoldenEye speedrunners rely on the game’s inbuilt stopwatch to determine final results, and that bad boy only shows times in full seconds. None of this millisecond nonsense. So it’s basically unknown how many people have gotten close to that magical 52-second figure, but no one’s quite pushed past it until now.
If you watch the full video of Jobst’s run, you’ll note some of the insane techniques speedrunners use to squeeze as many microseconds out of Dam as possible. He forces Bond to look at a very specific angle – basically right down at his feet – because that provides a nearly imperceptible speed advantage in the game’s engine for some reason. He hopes that he gets hit by enemy bullets, which provides a minor boost too. And there are a few gates he needs to pass through, and again it’s totally luck as to whether they’ll open at the right time to let Bond through.
And yet he did it. Here’s the full video:
We live in baffling times.
