In 2008, a video game company known as HardCircle
was founded by someone named Bret Measor. With Programmer Jeff Feenstra and artist Michael Opada,
they released the flash game Bimmin, an endless runner game that went on to find some moderate
success. Looking for inspiration for HardCircle’s next project, Bret stumbled across a game
called Cactus McCoy and The Curse of the Thorns, a platformer beat-em-up set in the wild west,
featuring a cactus as the protagonist. Around this time, the hugely influential platformer Super
Meat Boy was released, a full-fledged PC sequel to its flash predecessor Meat Boy. After playing
these games, Bret was convinced that Hardcircle’s next release had to be a platformer. A programmer
named Thomas Martin, who now worked at HardCircle, was a huge fan of Indiana Jones, so they decided
to name this project Pixel Quest: The Lost Idols, a game about a treasure hunter who was collecting
golden frog idols for a tribe that had lost them. On November 9th, 2011, the game was released out
into the wild and would go on to become their most popular release by far, having huge success on
websites like Coolmathgames, Kongregate, and Armor Games, reaching over 500k plays on that website
alone. The game was laid out into three sets of 16 stages with each post-tutorial level having three
golden idols to be collected. For the second level set to be unlocked, 24 total idols had to have
been collected, and for the third level set to be unlocked, 72 idols had to have been collected. The
minds at Hardcircle wanted the game to be, well, Hard, which is shown by the level difficulty
ramping up significantly between each level set. Among the idols, there were many gems
in each level that could be collected, though these only served as a way to boost
the player’s score and weren’t required for any form of level progression. Aside
from walking, jumping, and double jumping, the only special move that the protagonist
possesses is the dash, where the player can zip forward with the z key, vital for dodging
obstacles and efficiently collecting idols. Now, I don’t know what the first platformer to feature
a dash mechanic was, but I can confidently say to all the Celeste fans watching that Pixel Quest
did it before… just not nearly as well. The dash mechanic in Pixel Quest is what would go on to
allow for the most important speedrunning glitch present in the game. A couple of months after
the release of The Lost Idols, Hardcircle would release a sequel called Pixel Quest: The Lost
Gifts, which slapped some different level design and a wintry coat of paint on the game, just
in time for the holidays. However, in terms of both speedrunning and casual play, the original
Pixel Quest remained the more popular option. So, when did Pixel Quest’s Speedrunning
scene begin, and how were speedrunners able to discover the infamous wall phasing glitch
that would go on to completely break the game? After spending hours searching YouTube and
other archives to try to locate any runs that may be missing from the leaderboards, I
can confirm that the first known Pixel Quest speedrun was uploaded on August 17th,
2015 by a speedrunner named dveon_102. Speaking of searching, did you know that thousands
of people still find my new videos by typing my channel name “ItsMaximum” into the search bar?
Actually, much more commonly, people type “its space maximum.” Well, if you want to avoid ever
having to do that again in the future, subscribing to the channel is the best way to be made aware of
when I upload any new videos. Also, on the subject of the channel name, a few days after this video
goes public, I will be shortening the channel name from “ItsMaximum” to simply “Maximum.” I’ve had
the youtube.com/Maximum URL for over half a year, and I’ve been going by “Maximum” on most other
social platforms for quite a while now, with the only notable exception being Twitch, where
the Maximum name is unfortunately taken. I think It’s time that I make the switch over on YouTube.
ANYWAY, in his run Dveon spends a bunch of time going for a skip here in level 1 where the
player can barely kick off the raised wall and continue to scale it, which can be
slightly faster than the intended route. Unfortunately, Dveon didn’t really save any time
with this one. In level 3 Dveon dashes and then hits the pause button in the middle of the dash.
Upon unpausing the game, this proceeds to unfold. So, what the heck just happened?
When the dash button is pressed, the game gives the player additional speed in the direction
that they are facing for a short period of time, and a small amount of time has to elapse before
the player is able to dash again. Upon pausing, the game tries to cancel any dash that is taking
place, but clearly… something isn’t working right. The player continues to propel forward
at dash speed without actually dashing. Looking at the game’s code, it’s very obvious why
this happens. Normally, when a dash ends, the game sets the horizontal change from the dash back
to zero, while also resetting the Dash timer and starting a dash delay timer. However, in the pause
function… the programmer just forgot the line of code. Using my elite hacking abilities to add
the line back in, you can see that dash canceling is completely patched. Note that I had to use
the Lost Gifts version of the game because the original doesn’t like being touched; Lost Gifts
is basically just a reskin, and the underlying mechanics behind the games are identical. Any
left or right movements made after performing a dash cancel will cause the speed of the player
to reduce significantly, with very weird behavior being exhibited regarding which direction the game
decides to constantly push the player in. Dashing again at any point (without pausing in the middle
of it) will fix this buggy state since the game is able to set the dash speed back to zero. Usually,
the player is stopped by some kind of wall after performing a dash cancel, which will cause them
to get stuck in place as the game’s collision detection refuses to allow them through. However,
another fatal flaw with the game allows this to be bypassed. If the player is facing the opposite
direction to the wall, collision is not checked properly.. Holding left after getting stuck on
a wall does cause the player to briefly clip in, but they will clip right back out since they are
holding left. But by simply tapping the button, the player’s direction will change without
applying a lot of speed in the opposite direction… and that is when the magic happens.
Once Dveon gets out of bounds in level 3, he makes slight taps with the arrow keys to try
to get the player facing left while the remaining dash cancel speed is pulling him right. He then
clips back in bounds, where the exit door can be collected. One thing to note about being out
of bounds is that there are invisible barriers at both the top and bottom of the screen, and
hitting the barrier at the bottom will cause the player to completely freeze, requiring the level
to be reset. The rest of the run is filled with all sorts of crafty strategies that take advantage
of the dash cancel glitch, though Dveon struggles greatly with a lot of the movement, both in
and out of bounds, and he gets a skype call in the middle of the run from someone with a lenny
face as their name and a Batman profile picture. Thankfully, he was able to get
rid of the popup in record time, successfully executing a frame perfect,
pixel perfect cursor maneuver. Though, all of this could have been avoided if he knew that
Discord had been released three months earlier. Collecting the exit door in level 16, Dveon
ended his run with a time of 9:16.233, however, in the description of the run, he claimed that he
had a personal best of under three minutes with no video. Analyzing the movement displayed in this
run… I find that very hard to believe. Regardless, he did end up achieving the first sub 3 in
the category with a 2:40.100 on December 20th, 2015, exhibiting much cleaner movement throughout.
In this run, Dveon made use of a new glitch that had been discovered known as fast doors. Normally,
the player has to wait around two seconds at the start of each level for a door animation to play,
whereafter control is granted. However, by pausing the game at any point after the level is loaded
in, the player will be able to start moving immediately after unpausing. The level actually
loads in before the fade in animation even begins, allowing for even more timesave than
it may initially seem. In level 7, Dveon used a very daring strategy at the
start to skip an entire elevator cycle, performing a dash cancel as soon as possible and
then getting a jump off this small segment of wall to just barely land on this platform. In level 10,
he ended up contacting the spikes, but by mashing the shit out of the pause button, he managed to
somehow stay alive and complete the level. Every single time that the game is unpaused, the death
animation is reset, a process that can be repeated indefinitely. The player would normally just die
again after unpausing, but since these spikes are actually falling, they eventually lose contact
with the player, causing them to stop refreshing the death animation. As a side note, while writing
this script, I found out that It's possible to clip out of bounds without a dash cancel by using
this glitch, so that’s cool, I guess. With these glitches at his disposal, Dveon was able to put
together quite a good run for the time, and it wouldn’t be until a year later that he would be
dethroned by Cappan, who put up a time of 2:34.233 on November 7th, 2016. These three glitches
alone made Pixel Quest a very broken game, with the 16 levels glitched record being over
a minute ahead of glitchless, which was a 3:42 by Lunaxity. But what other glitches could the
game possibly have in store? Well, lets just say that it was quite a few, and almost none of them
had any positive applications for speedrunning: On January 26th, 2017, I uploaded a video showing
Pixel Quest in a very bizarre state. The music was overlapping, menu actions were super buggy,
the in-game timer was freaking out, and pausing wasn’t dimming the whole screen, and much more.
I realized that I had somehow managed to overlap multiple instances of a level being played on
top of eachother. As it turned out, I was not the first person to stumble across this bug. Cappan
had posted a guide back in 2016 about how to perform the glitch with a well-timed reset right
before fading into level 17 from the cutscene. With one instance in the level and one instance
back on the cutscene menu, he completed level 17 on the non-visible instance, taking him to level
18. He eventually somehow ended up playing level 17 while having a level failed menu from level 18
in front of his movement. This glitch was found to have several methods of activation, one being
opening the pause menu, clicking the quit button, unpausing, resetting, and then pressing yes to
exit to the main menu during the level reset. This glitch seemed like it could open
the window to a lot of possibilities, but it ultimately didn’t really lead to anything
useful, and thanks to the large amount of lag that it caused, the music overlapping, and the
extremely unusual and inconsistent side effects that it had, it was ultimately banned from
being used in any submissions in early 2018. So, thankfully, there is no potential of having
to play a 48-level-long game at 6 fps with no visibility of your movement and 20 overlapping
audio tracks to somehow save like 14 seconds. If you thought the jankiness
of Pixel Quest ended there, you would be dead wrong. There is an extremely
unusual bug where the game will outright refuse to allow the player to double jump after landing on
the ground. This issue is most apparent in levels 14 and 15, where not receiving a second jump can
end up leading to a decent amount of timeloss. The only way to get around this bug is to
simply stand still for a bit before jumping, which is obviously not an optimal action
to take in the context of a speedrun. Thankfully, the game doesn’t like to throw any
other kind of bs at speedrunners during their ru.. You just witnessed the unfortunate end to a
world record paced 16 Levels glitchless run by JasperTheFish. Is it known what exactly caused the
game to launch Jasper backwards during a dash and into the spikes on the wall? Nope.
On January 29th, 2018, speedrunner die-no-mite posted a glitch showing the game
in a completely softlocked state. If you reset, paused the game, and then didn’t unpause until
the next door animation cutscene finished playing then congratulations, you’re paralyzed. Resetting
doesn’t work, but you can thankfully still go back to the main menu. However, that’s the only weird
thing that can happen by pausing the game during a reset. You may have noticed that after Dveon
performed the death buffer glitch in level 10 in his 2:40, the in-game timer just stopped
progressing. Well, by resetting during the door opening cutscene and pausing and unpausing,
It’s possible to complete any level in the game with 998 points left on the timer, note that
one timer unit represents a tenth of a second. Oh, did I say 998 points? I actually meant 999.
The game sure does have a tough time making up its mind sometimes. However, it’s not like the
in-game timer was ever accurate anyways since it starts at whatever point the player gains control
of the character, making fast door meaningless, it doesn’t account for time spent on the pause
menu, another clear issue for glitched runs, and it is extremely inconsistent, especially
when the game has a large amount of lag. On the same day, die-no-mite uploaded another
video showing this unusual occurrence. Yep, Pixel Quest is quite the broken game. In a single
49 second clip, we had a bizarre softlock tied to the music mute button, lag causing the player’s
dashes and the in-game timer to freak out, and text characters disappearing and having broken
transparency. Well, surely there couldn’t me mor… Again, on the same day, die-no-mite uploaded this
video… Neat, you can make the cannons in the game not fire a bullet by using a well timed pause.
That… could actually be useful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really seem to
have been taken advantage of. Moving back to the optimization of Pixel
Quest as a speedgame, I managed to cut down the 16 levels glitched record from
a 2:34.233 to a 2:15.567 on January 28th, 2018. To help best Cappan’s time, I completed
level 12 with the most optimal glitchless route for the level, since I found that it was actually
slightly faster and slightly easier than doing the extremely inconsistent glitched method. I
applied the same philosophy to levels 13, 14, and 16, while also not accidentally performing
the level dupe glitch in the middle of my run… note that Cappan’s run was performed before
the glitch was banned. A few days later, I uncovered a hilarious glitched strategy
in level 12 that had the potential to save around 10 seconds. You see, if you slide
on this wall for a bit, you'll notice that… the lava is just missing its death collision on
the left side. Once under the lava, by performing a very well timed dash cancel, it was possible
to reach the left wall of the ending cavern. A couple of jumps and a left tap later, and
the level could be completed. I implemented the strategy the next day in a 16 Levels Glitched
record of 2:04.600, a run that featured an abysmal level 16 and ended up quite a bit off the sub 2
milestone. Around the time that this run was set, three different strategies were discovered
that would allow for the time to be pushed down a decent bit further. The first was found
by Cappan in level 8, where one could potentially save a second by clipping in and out of the
left wall of the level to reach the ending door with a much shorter path. The second was a
new approach to level 16 also found by Cappan, where the player could clip through the left
wall of the level instead of the right one, whereafter they could clip through the floor of
the ending cavern, allowing a few seconds to be saved over the glitchless method. Finally there
was a very difficult strategy in level 13 that involved clipping through the right wall and into
the very top right block of the ending cavern, where the player would be able to safely clip back
in and finish the level. Clipping back in on this specific block was necessary since the wall is not
large enough for the player to clip back through normally, they will just get pushed to the bottom.
However, I just realized while writing this script that it's possible to just perform another dash
cancel and get stuck on the wall with a lot more speed, having a similar ending to the level 12
strat. This variant is significantly easier, and I think that it will definitely be incorporated
into runs at some point. The 16 Levels Glitched Category had quite a lot of promise, and the
breaking of the sub 2 barrier seemed almost imminent. Unfortunately, over four years later,
that last minute barrier has yet to be shattered. Around the same time, me and JasperTheFish
were making a huge push to try and bring the 16 Levels Glitchless world record lower and lower
into the low 3:0x range. Throughout its history, the Glitchless category never really
had any earth-shattering discoveries. It all came down to making micro-optimizations to
the movement in each level, adding dashes at every moment possible. While IlluminaTea had waited for
the third rock to fall in level 12 before safely passing by in his record of 3:21.267, Jasper, in
his 3:09.933, performed a dash under every single rock, a strategy that is quite a bit harder than
it looks. When I set my first Glitchless record of a 3:09.067 on December 28th, 2017, I added
a dash through this elevator in 13 to save a fraction of a second, and I tried to perform a
double jump dash from this pillar in level 15… though the game had other plans. After a world
record battle with Jasper that lasted two months, I came out on top with a 3:05.300. Nothing had
really changed much aside from simply having cleaner movement and a slightly different approach
to the end of level 14. However, I didn’t want to stop there. On February 4th, 2018, I cleaned up
my movement enough to score myself a 3:03.933, reaching my goal in the category.
I moved on to routing and playing the Any% category of the game, because in the three years
that people had been speedrunning Pixel Quest, not a single person had made the effort to
properly speedrun the whole game in one sitting. There had been two runs of people
completing all 48 levels in the game, one by Dveon back in 2015, and another by
BugAwrgtdta at the start of February. Dveon’s run was over 30 minutes long, and had some awesome
death buffering moments sprinkled throughout, my favorite being this one right
at the very end of the run. The later levels in Pixel Quest are both extremely
challenging and extremely long compared to the mere sprinkle of challenge present with the first
16 levels. Since Dveon and BugAwrgtdta were using the dash cancel glitch, they were able to skip
a lot of the treacherous obstacles and puzzles placed before them; the most notable example of
which has to be BugAwrgtdta’s completion of level 47, where they completely bypass the arduous three
key puzzle present. Awrgtdta finished their run in 9 minutes and 21 seconds, over 20 minutes faster
than Dveon. However, the thing about both of these runs is that neither of them paid any attention
to the number of golden idols that need to be collected before starting the second and third
level sets, which is 24 and 72 idols respectively. They were still able to go through all the levels
since they already had all of them unlocked, but this made their runs Glitched New Game+ runs,
rather than truly being Any% completions. For me, I wanted to complete the game as if it were on
a fresh file without the use of dash canceling. I spent the next several days timing and routing
what the fastest 72 idols were to collect in the first two level sets. I still have the original
text document that I used to create this route, with 29 idols coming from the first set and 43
coming from the second. The first 5 levels don’t have any idols, since they are tutorial levels,
and they can actually be completely skipped in the context of an any% speedrun since levels 1-6 are
actually all unlocked from the start of the game. I went to work playing the category and scored
myself a 17:20 on the 9th of February, 2018. The run was decent, but I unfortunately had quite
a few costly mistakes like this death near the end of level 47 that cost around 30 seconds. To
this day, I am still the only person to have ever completed a true Any% speedrun of Pixel Quest.
After playing Any%, I moved back to doing 16 Level Glitchless runs to see if I could squeeze any
more time out of the category. And I don’t know what was so special about February 11th, 2018,
but I managed to do this in under three hours. 3:01.200. Just a handful of frames away from
reaching my new goal of a 3:00 and putting the category away for good. There were no
potential new strategies to implement like there was in glitched. I had to just keep
playing the category to see what I could do. And, ten minutes later, this is what I did. Early 2018 was such an exciting time for Pixel
Quest speedrunning: from all the new discoveries, to the massive new world records, to the
huge competition spree between me and Jasper, and, of course, the breaking of a minute barrier
that I had never even intended to go for. However, as you may have gathered, for the past four years,
the game has been completely dead. Not a single person has even come close to setting a new World
Record in any of the game’s 16 main categories. Many categories remain completely empty, with zero
100% runs of the whole game ever being performed. No matter how much love and passion people have
put into playing and optimizing a game, sometimes, the community behind it just fizzles out. Sadly,
it seems like the company behind the creation of Pixel Quest has faced a very similar reality.
In 2015, Hardcircle announced that they were actively working on the next game in the
Pixel Quest series, Pixel Jones and the Gateway of Souls. Unlike The Lost Gifts,
which was basically just a reskin of the original Pixel Quest with some different levels,
this game was poised to be a completely new, full-fledged game that would run on PC and
consoles like the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One. This felt like an obvious next step, as popular
flash franchises like Meat Boy had seen massive success when transitioning to the PC and Console
market. Hardcircle showed off the prototypes that they had at different game conferences, it
began to appear on upcoming game lists, and promotional art from the game had been licensed
and completed. The game seemed like it would absolutely be launching at some point in 2016.
However, as of February, 2022, Pixel Jones has yet to be released. HardCircle is unfortunately no
longer a company, with their domain now being on sale. Unable to find any answers as to the fate
of HardCircle and Pixel Jones, I wrote a couple of questions down and sent a hail mary email to
what I believed to be the address of the former company’s founder, Bret Measor. Shockingly,
around three months later, I got a response. On top of the information about the creation
of Pixel Quest which I sprinkled in the introduction of this video, Bret let me know
why Pixel Jones was never able to be completed: a lack of funding. The Pixel Jones team applied
for different grants that would have provided the vital funding necessary to complete the game,
but the requests they made were all rejected, despite the large amount of popularity that
Pixel Quest had managed to garner online. However, around 2-3 years ago, Bret dusted off the
game and started working on it again with a group of people. I actually knew that this was the case
a few years ago because, in 2018, I sent a tweet to the programmer of Pixel Quest, Thomas Martin,
and six months later, in 2019, I got a response that they were “hoping to have something to show
soon.” Unfortunately the continued lack of funding and a certain event that happened near the
start of 2020 ended up killing off this spark of passion. As for the end of HardCircle, Bret said
that he simply got tired of running a company and wanted to move on to other positions in the game
industry. He did well enough to reach an early retirement, and now he appears to be running
a blog about going on different hiking trails. Unfortunately, Thomas Martin doesn’t appear to
have been as fortunate. Bret said that Pixel Jones may still yet come back from the dead, but we will
just have to wait and see what ends up happening. From the early 2000s to the mid 2010s, Flash Games
absolutely dominated the online space. These games reached millions upon millions of players, and
despite so much interesting stuff happening during this developing period of time, it seems like
almost none of it has been properly documented for people to reflect upon and learn about. I
hope that, with this video, I was able to document both the speedrunning community and the company
behind Pixel Quest, one of the most broken flash games ever created. However, I don’t want this
video to be the last thing that people ever hear about Pixel Quest speedrunning. So I am putting
up a $100 bounty on beating my own record in Pixel Quest’s 16 Levels Glitchless category. I am
also putting a $25 bounty on my 16 Levels Glitched record, and a $25 bounty on my Any% Glitchless
record. All that you have to do to claim a bounty is to submit your new record to speedrun.com and
have it be verified on the leaderboard. If any of these bounties are claimed, I will update the
video description and link to the run that beat my corresponding record. Sometimes, a small spark
is all that is needed to initiate a huge chain reaction. Thank you all very much for watching.
A huge thanks goes out to Jezs for helping me edit the script for this video, to Cappan and
Jasper for helping me out with the research, and, of course, to Bret Measor for providing
his unique insight that helped make this video a more complete package. I wish everyone who
decides to start speedrunning Pixel Quest the best of luck, and I hope that some of the game’s
ancient records are finally able to be beaten.
wow what a great video about a great game, everyone should watch this video and speedrun the game smile