How Speedrunners BROKE Donkey Kong 64 | World Record History

30 hours according to Wikipedia that's how long it takes to beat Donkey Kong 64. upon release it was praised for its unimaginable length IGN even called it rarewares War and Peace but little did they know dk64 would become one of the most broken games in speedrunning history [Music] is just utterly destroying it I didn't think this game could be this much more broken than it is G [Music] thank you [Music] so what's up with that huge estimate anyway one of the other popular 3D collect-a-thons of the time Banjo-Kazooie was only estimated to take around 11 to 12 hours to beat Super Mario 64 takes around the same amount of time so what gives sure dk64 has huge levels but so did Banjo-Kazooie in fact that game's Overworld is much larger and both have the same number of Worlds well the difference is in the amount of collectibles in Banjo-Kazooie the grand total is around 1100 dk-64 however has not just one thousand not even just 2 000 or 3000 or even four thousand in total the game has 4841 total collectible items the bare minimum required to beat the game 1927. so any speedrunner wanting to tackle this game would surely have a big challenge ahead of them in order to BK rule the final boss of the game you need to access the final stage of the game Hideout help for this you need at least 100 foreign okay so there's a lot but rather than bore you with the details all at once let's go back to the first known 80 world record with lasting footage a segmented one meaning it was done over the course of multiple sessions where the best takes of each section are stitched together completed by Dutch Joe in June of 2006 with a final in-game time of 5 hours and 4 minutes in his notes Joe mentions Gathering all the minimum Collectibles required to beat the game the 100 golden bananas required to get into Hideout Helm the game's final stage four Battlegrounds required for opening a door in Helm Eight Keys seven of which are obtained from beating the game's bosses throughout the seven main levels Jungle Japes angry Aztec Frantic Factory gloomy gallion fungi Forest Crystal Caves and creepy castle and the eighth and Helm itself 15 banana Metals which are obtained after collecting 75 regular bananas in a stage with a unique conch which is required to play the jetpack minigame which unlocks the rare rare coin and the Nintendo coin obtained from playing the Donkey Kong arcade game in Frantic Factory both of which are required to get through doors and Helm he also collects enough regular bananas to open the boss doors in each level which when totaled with the 1125 needed for all the banana Metals comes to a staggering 1680 bananas out of a total of 3 500 like I said it's a lot but after months of planning Joe put it all together earlier I mentioned that a segmented run allowed a runner to try a segment multiple times until they got the take they wanted however in the case of dk-64 Joe wouldn't get this luxury unfortunately for speedrunners the game Auto saves every time you pick up a collectible as well as many other instances and the game has no copy function meaning that redoing any section isn't an option a big reason why no one had attempted this Behemoth of a game before now regardless though he pulled off what was an extremely impressive accomplishment a few months later Tom vadova would improve the record by nearly 30 minutes with a 436 in this run Tom only takes about 13 minutes to get through Hideout Helm which if you notice at the bottom of the screen is a timed stage what determines the amount of time you have to go through the stage is a collectible called blueprints in every stage of the game including the lobby DK aisles there are five blueprints one for each Kong available to collect by killing an enemy known as a kaspat each blueprint collected adds a minute of time that you can spend in Helm after turning them into snide but the game awards the player 10 minutes by default meaning you can have up to 50 minutes in the stage since there's 40 blueprints total the reason that Tom and other Runners at the time elected to get as many blueprints as they did even though they didn't need nearly that much time is because turning in a blueprint would get you a golden banana and since all you had to do was kill an enemy for one they were easy choices towards the 100 total needed over the next few months Tom would drop the Run by 10 minutes and after that nothing for three years as as a result of the game's length and the inability to do a proper segmented run it was an extremely unpopular Speed game while Tom's run was impressive at the time it really comes down to a major lack of interest in the game from a speedrunning angle but this all changed on June 9th 2009 when someone decided it was time to break this game [Music] thank you [Music] a runner by the name of Mano cheese found out how to exploit the invulnerability you get after being damaged to ledge clip out of bounds and around to the portal of Hideout Helm shortly after a runner named xcord had discovered that you could backflip in this corner with Diddy and with tiny to get out of bounds which was much easier this effectively cut out a massive amount of golden bananas required to beat the game with the number dropping from 100 all the way down to 15. this was the minimum required because it was the number of golden bananas needed to make the factory B Locker disappear while it was possible in most instances to skip B lockers with lanky this was an exception because you could not squeeze to the sides as a result of his hitbox and the walls it's also important to note that it was required to enter this level so that you could unlock the last playable Kong in the game chunky on the same day a clip was found that allowed you to skip past boss stories without the need for any regular bananas with these discoveries all that needed to be worried about in a speedrun was beating all the bosses is getting the four Battlegrounds and collecting enough coins to buy the moves and upgrades you need for certain parts of the game and more importantly during the final boss since the fight Cycles through all five Kongs and requires specific moves such as hunky chunky Diddy's rocket barrel and more with a discovery from 2008 Runners also wouldn't need to worry about the rarewear or Nintendo coin as this clip was discovered allowing you to skip past the door and with this it was no longer required to collect any regular bananas since 15 banana medals were no longer required needless to say the discovery of the B Locker skip on top of a few other tricks had opened the floodgates interest in the game suddenly skyrocketed and people were ready to push it to its absolute limits how far could the game go lots of the rest of the day was focused on figuring out what moves and upgrades were or weren't necessary and the following day on the 10th pmit would set the first record with Helm early in three hours flat nearly an hour and a half off the previous world record in this run he was also able to enter The Hideout Helm Lobby early using tiny Kong and her ability monkey Port which is unlocked in Crystal Caves it was possible to use this pillar and ponytail twirl to get to the top of the ship's snout you could then clip into the corner of the left eye and twirl to the loading zone of the helm Lobby unfortunately no footage exists of most of these runs because runners in this era wouldn't upload their runs unless they plan to submit it to speed demos archive the primary hub for speedrunning at the time and unless a run was of extremely high quality it wouldn't be accepted however the Big Bang was only just the beginning between June 10th and July 22nd not even two months Runners managed to drop the record down by a lot not just half an hour not just an hour but by over and hour and a half and this is how with the discovery of Helm Lobby early Runners started thinking what if we could get into other lobbies early like Angry Aztec or Frantic Factory would we be able to skip getting certain Keys the hunt was on firstly it was discovered you could actually skip the Battleground door in Helm with the same clip used to skip the rare and Nintendo coins removing that requirement the reason the skip wasn't done in the first place was because Runners thought that ki8 wouldn't register if you hadn't opened the crown door this was known at the time as fake key and was a long-standing problem with runs under certain circumstances picking up key 8 wouldn't save it to the file however it was eventually discovered that the key will only register if you load the throne room which is the room that has the coindoor in it because that specific door is what's responsible for writing the key to the file much later on the line when this was found a consistent way to prevent fake key came with it but for the next few years it continued to be an annoyance for runners secondly a user by the name of unreal had claimed that they'd collected only the first five Keys skipping Crystal Caves and creepy castle and using hideout home early to collect the eighth key and the ship that crashes down that lets you enter the final boss fight would still show up previously it was believed that you would need all eight keys in order for this to happen as it was what unlocked calumsy's cage and played the cut scene that makes the ship crash however it was speculated that maybe the game only checks for the eighth key for the event to happen possibly because rare was confident you wouldn't be able to get to Hideout Helm before beating all the previous stages regardless if it was true this would be a massive Discovery lots of testing led to some different findings but one of the primary speculations by a runner named ring Rush was that only Keys 3 and 8 were needed technically Keys one and two would also be required to get to Frantic Factory in the first place but maybe behind the scenes the game was only checking for three and eight additionally key 5 would be needed in order to unlock Crystal Caves which is where you unlocked the previously mentioned monkey Port required to get to Hideout Helm but if Runners could get into angry Aztec in Crystal Caves early then Keys one and five could be skipped if the theory was true while angry Aztec needed some work Crystal Caves Lobby early was actually discovered and it was confirmed that at most Keys one two three and eight were required but probably only three and eight it was believed that the game designers realized key 3 does nothing since key 2 unlocks not only Frantic Factory but also the following stage Gloomy Galleon so rather than make key 3 unlock glue megallion they made it required to unlock the final boss however this is pure speculation and with this a new route was created as a result Mano cheese managed to drop his time to 139 and how long did all of these massive discoveries take to find only three days things would begin to cool down though as Runners would continue to drop their times Lefty's Heroes was the first to be Mano cheese on June 18th with a time of 135 but Mano Cheese came back two days later with a 127 and a week later a 124 and another huge Discovery to come with it a few days prior it was discovered that frantic Factory's door had no Collision when it was closed prior to the level being unlocked if Runners could figure out how to skip past B Locker then instead of needing 15 golden bananas they'd only need six five of which are required to get into angry Aztec and one from an extra blueprint for some more needed time in Helm on the 22nd of June Mano cheese would finally figure it out and dropped his time by nearly 10 minutes to a 115 on July 22nd 2009. the glitch involved using an orange to blast lanky into B Locker's hitbox Mano cheese also goes into the B locker with lanky facing away because the collision at the rear side of any Kong doesn't extend as far out as the front side with this he was able to get closer to the portal than the game intends you to after this round a few months would pass without a new record but the community was still hard at work routing and glitch hunting and as a result xcord would share something with the SDA community that would change the run forever [Music] this story takes us back somewhere around 2007 or 2008 when xcord discovered a website called David Juan's unique video game glitches this website is essentially a massive catalog of glitches that David won an anonymous website goers would submit and post for various games ranging from the NES to the GameCube obviously this included the N64 and dk64 on this website was a glitch sent in by Anonymous where you could mess up the music in the main menu of the game essentially when going into mystery mode and selecting any of the three scenes you could press a to end the scene at a certain time and the music in the main menu would be messed up sometimes it wouldn't even be there it could also mess up music in other parts of the game [Music] however with the intro story specifically there were some interesting side effects if you use the intro story cut scene for the glitch and then go into Adventure Mode some actions would cause the intro Story scene to start playing out of nowhere so what exactly is going on this General concept is what is known as the intro story glitch basically when you load a new file of Donkey Kong 64 with cutscene skipping off the intro story cutscene will play the scene has multiple different sections and the game runs a timer in the background that keeps track of when a scene should Fade Out and the next should load in in mystery mode however you can back out at any time normally the game would just stop the timer after backing out but what Anonymous was doing was backing out during a period of the cut scene where the timer starts but the cut scene isn't yet considered active there's only a six Frame Window at the start of the scene where this happens so that's why it was described as being more difficult than the others so if you load into the adventure mode with the intro story timer in the background when the timer hits a Fade Out point if the player is in a cut scene the game will simply start playing the next cutscene in the sequence this entire concept was very interesting to X chord so he decided to use the glitch on every game mode and see what could be found but before we go on it's important to explain what exactly game mode means in the context of dk64 the game engine has 13 different modes all with different properties that load based on what's Happening the important ones to focus on here for this glitch are game mode 5 main menu mode 6 adventure and Kong battle mode 11 DK theater mode and 12 DK bonus and bosses mode when you try DK bonus and bosses mode he found out that instead of showing the intro Story the game would return to the main menu normally when you win lose or exit a boss fight or bonus game you get sent back to the main menu and the game mode is changed to main menu mode however if you exit via an intro story Fade Out you'll stay in DK bonus and bosses mode even while on the main menu as a result of staying in this mode when the player enters a Kong battle match the game instantly returns to the main menu showing the results screen so why does this happen and why is it useful well Kong battle happens to use the same mode as Adventure which also happens to be the only mode with the auto save feature enabled an adventure in COG battle mode the game Auto saves every time you load a map except when there is more than one player in the game normally entering a Kong battle match ensures that there is more than one player in the game and no auto save will occur but here instead of going into the arena the game instantly shows the results screen this is because in DK bonus and bosses mode the mode that the game is still currently in from earlier any screen transition will lead back to the main menu as a result of all of this the game switches to Adventure mode and since the menu can only have one player the game finds this and saves the current file progress why is this significant what's the point well when entering Kong battle more specifically monkey smash all Kongs are given Simeon slam the game's first move their weapon and all weapon upgrades for the purpose of the game mode and as I said before since we're on the main menu and in adventure mode the game saves the current file progress this means that after performing this glitch the file is saved with all of the previously mentioned upgrades from Monkey smash unlocked after this all that needs to be done is going back into the intro story cut scene to properly end the sequence this time so that no fade outs happen while playing the game and with that you're playing dk64 with the first move of the game Simeon slam and all the gun upgrades the first run to implement this new glitch was done with cheats to give the runner unlimited coins oranges and other items at the time this was the standard in the Japanese Community while this doesn't validate the run today it was still a glimpse into what the Run could look like with funky weapons glitch the name that would eventually stick it was done in 1 hour 12 minutes and 52 seconds by a Japanese Runner named KAS but on top of fwg the Western Community was in for a big surprise your goal in Donkey Kong 64 and especially in Hideout Helm is to shut down the blast-o-matic a device aimed at DK aisles that is set to destroy it you do this by completing too many games with each Kong throughout Hideout Helm eventually shutting down the machine this is what takes a majority of the time in the stage and was part of the reason Runners had to pick up blueprints anyways besides the fact that they were easy golden bananas anyways by clipping into this wall with chunky it was possible to carefully navigate out of bounds and skip the door that opens after shutting the blast-o-matic down then using the previously known clip to skip the rest of the doors it was possible to beat Hideout Helm in under three minutes word began spreading that a sub one hour run was possible a four hour long Speed Run taken down to one hour in less than a year through a few people's mission to break the game Beyond repair would be one amazing feat and with one more amazing Discovery by Mano cheese it would surely be possible all right [Music] on June 17 2010 it was finally possible to get into angry Aztec's Lobby early by Moon tailing a trick that allows Diddy to gain extra height it was possible to get on top of the door of Aztec's entrance next with a very precise ledge clip into the door you can move slightly out of bounds after that if you chimpy charge at the right Point you'll descend very slowly as soon as Diddy starts moving forward you jump out of the move Jump Around the doorway which extends out of bounds a little bit and clip into the loading zone it should also be mentioned at this point that Moon tailing can be used to get to factory early without tiny by jumping up and grabbing this ledge before the platform is raised by key2 it was also possible with a moon kick from DK while this seemed like a massive fine unfortunately the trick was not able to be used while you could get into Aztec and play the level fine and it was confirmed that key one wasn't needed for cairo's ship to spawn attempting to leave the lobby would cause the game to soft lock since resetting the game which would avoid the problem counts as splitting the run into multiple segments the trick was not able to be used in any percent can't run unless Runners wanted to go back to multiple segments despite this trick not being useful in any percent after a few runs Mano cheese finally achieved a 57 minute in-game time on June 8 2010. again no footage of these runs are on the internet today but over time he was able to drop the time to 54 minutes on August 3rd 2010 a run he finally felt was good enough to submit to SDA and as a result we have video footage of it by now the route had changed pretty substantially thanks to some major finds in the community one being the discovery of how to bypass certain bee lockers without lanky as explained before akong's hitbox extends farther in front of it than behind so with precise and careful placement it was possible to push DK's backside into B locker and just barely slap into a portal on top of this allowing you to enter angry Aztec early even though you still had to fight Army Dillo and Japes to get key one this also allowed you to enter caves early with DK what you're seeing here is a moon kick a glitch that works by canceling an aerial attack a move that gives DK lower gravity with a kick by interrupting things at the proper time you apply the lower gravity to the kick with this it was known that you could get into the Cave's Lobby early because the backside of the rock blocking the entrance isn't solid since rare didn't think it was possible to get there however you were never able to get into the level without lanky with this newly discovered B Locker skip though you could enter caves right after completing Jungle Japes since the game registers you as having gone to Crystal Caves you are able to buy the late game moves required to get to and complete Hideout Helm mainly monkey Port before even going to angry Aztec so now only two golden bananas were used to beat the game one to get into Jungle Japes and the one collected to unlock Diddy another trick I've neglected to mention until now is called Swim through Shores by mashing B and swimming forward into a Shore it is possible to clip under an island this is done on the fairy Island at the beginning of the run in order to talk to the ferry and unlock the Shockwave move which allows you to break dirt Mounds that are scattered around the game upon using the move a coin is dropped which gives 5 coins to each Kong regardless of if they are unlocked or not these coins are used to purchase the Kong's upgrades so being able to get a lot very easily is a essential for the Run later on this would be retired to a new timing method that began at pressing a to start the intro story in the main menu and ended at the last input when chunky hits the final punch on K rule this is known as RTA or real-time attack in the speedrunning community rather than use the in-game timer this is how runs would be timed from here on out with the new timing method came a rule change and a new dominant world record holder now that in-game timing wasn't used anymore resets would be allowed which means angry Aztec early was finally able to be used in an any percent run as I mentioned before this trick was extremely difficult and as a result would prove to be a massive run killer down the line Additionally the ability to reset also sped up Hideout Helm as you used to have to do a super long out of bounds route with Diddy in order to turn off the blast-o-matic since he is the last Kong you use in Helm and even though this skipped most of the mini games you still had to do the two with Diddy to turn it off now you could just reset the game after collecting the key with this all that was needed to complete dk64 was the one Golden Banana needed to unlock Diddy and nine total moves it should be noted that Runner still chose to collect two bananas because you could pick up the banana outside of Jungle Japes and skip the dancing cut scene if you roll into the loading zone at the right angle and rather than having to do a b Locker skip you could just enter the level properly and so after after all this two years after Mano cheese is 5217 on May 4th 2012 a runner named ring Rush would get his first record with a final time of 50 34. it's important to mention that while this did shave nearly two minutes off the previous record it was thought that the RTA strats could save five to seven minutes compared to the single segment era so while this was an impressive run nonetheless Runners had a long way to go to catch up to mano Cheese's level of optimization over time though ring Rush would get closer and closer as he brought his time down to a 47-18 on July 6 2012 thanks to a combination of a few new strats and optimizations but a few months later around October of 2012 everything would change um I found it out like 15 minutes ago before my stream today I tested something with a lag and I got a consistent Factor early with lanky so like lag is just utterly destroying I didn't think this game could be this much more broken than it is but every clip we couldn't do before GG this game is destroyed completely there's no hard tricks left in I don't I don't remember the full time frame of this but I want to say summer 2012. I I feel like saying is a near to kiss noticed that hey in Gloomy Galleon the jump to the ship for Chunky's uh chip banana seems like really far and it's really surprising that you can make this jump testing led to more testing led to more testing and eventually the crazy conclusion we came up you jump further during lag okay that's weird why would you jump further during lag people really didn't pay much mind to that flash to October 2014. I'm really struggling with Factory early eventually I had the crazy idea why not throw oranges if oranges are making you jump further maybe they're making you jump further because you're going faster and it has nothing to do with the jumping property it's just you're making further jumps because you're moving faster just a weird idea tested it suddenly bam I was taking this trick almost every time this trick that was just like honestly a major run killer I kept hitting and I would do these lanky long jumps with oranges I would never clip anything I would just long jump towards B locker and it would all be good oh my God what about Aztec early the trick that was defining dk64 because of its difficulty it was stopping people from learning the game as I said earlier I'm pretty sure cfox quit over it I try it and first try I'm in all of these discoveries are thanks to how the game developers chose to deal with lag what rare decided to do was to speed up the game to make up for lost time while lagging it may sound smart but clearly the unintended consequences are game breaking while lag clipping may have completely changed the game it is important to note that these tricks weren't as easy as ring Rush explained or made them look self-admittedly he was getting pretty lucky and overall only a few minutes was saved but the game was still broken wide open so many insanely tough tricks were way less of a barrier now especially Aztec early as he explains new records were set the first of which by Cosmic D12 famous for a Super Mario Bros world records [Applause] all right Super Mario Bros record in the same night a runner named cfox would claim a record of his own a week later and Cosmic came back on December 5th with the 4621 [Music] [Applause] but one orange clip wasn't enough over the next year more and more orange Clips were found to save time and added to the route first there was window clip which skipped a very slow lanky section in Frantic Factory then there was cranky clip in Aztec which streamlined the route from buying moves to freeing lanky and Factory four-year clip allowing an even faster route to free chunky and while Aztec early was made easier by oranges most tricks that depended on this lag could get incredibly fickle and since you have a limited amount of oranges messing up these clips wasn't just a Time loss it was a reset the dream of clipping every wall drove ring rush to Madness more inconsistent Clips were added to the record that saved less and less time but as these strats were implemented over time ringrush took his record back with a 45-37 two days after his last and a month after that dropped it a second lower to a 45-36 then on April 18th of 2013 cfox would come back with a 45-11 around this time ring Rush noticed he was starting to struggle with really basic tricks that shouldn't be difficult but wasn't exactly sure why so oh he bought a new controller and then something amazing happened foreign everyone started playing better and ring Rush kept pushing his time lower and lower with the help of Tricks such as Bush push and Japes early both of which save a significant amount of time normally to progress through Jungle Japes you have to swing over these Vines at the beginning of the stage to slam on a switch which opens the gate to get through the level however you can position DK in a way where he can clip through this wall with the help of a bush secondly Japes early skips the entire sequence of talking to K lumsy and swimming back over to Jungle Japes with this after talking to the banana fairy you can just swim through Shores over at DK Isles and jump into the loading zone even still orange Clips manage to be incredibly inconsistent moments of the Run most games become optimized as people get faster and faster and while this is true to a degree with dk64 it came down to tricks and whoever hit the most of them that was until one day in 2014 when once again everything would change at this point dk64 had two major discoveries left in order to bring the route down to the once thought impossible one con first of all you needed to be able to get to Hideout Helm early with DK and actually it was known that it was technically possible but it was so ridiculously difficult that it was only possible to do in a task or a tool-assisted speedrun which is when a person can manually manipulate every input on every frame and use special tools such as slowing a game down in order to create a perfect speed run this video by ring Rush from 2013 shows it off by using lag DK is able to clip out of the blastermatic above the Frantic Factory door and jump onto a slope inside of it where he is able to perform a moon kick and precisely fly up to grab the ledge to the doorway however even if it was possible to get into Helm early with DK all it would do is skip having to enter Crystal Caves and Skips a move by because you would still have to unlock all five Kongs and buy the moves necessary for the fight with k-roll however there was a known way to get all the moves without unlocking the Kongs and buying them but how well for that we must go back to our old friend X chord who discovered not only funky weapons glitch but also something called main menu moves this glitch may look very similar to fwg and it is both abuse the intro story glitch and certain minigames having to load certain moves and upgrades in order to be possible the basis of the trick is entering the main game through an unintended method which we will get to which skips the game transition from our previously mentioned main menu mode to the adventure mode it also skips the game checking for things such as if you have watched the boss cut scenes before the way this is done is by using the intro story glitch to fade into the intro story I briefly mentioned it before but in order to fade into the intro story you need to watch a cut scene so how can you watch a cutscene in the main menu well while sitting in the main menu there are 10 possible so-called Easter eggs that can happen DK can shake its leg rampy can get chased by beavers and so on seven out of these 10 things count his cutscenes however which one plays is based on RNG once you do get a cut scene in the main menu the game will transition into the intro story and eventually Fade Into the actual game and since the game doesn't transition from main menu mode to Adventure Mode anything the game loads while spent in the main menu will transfer to the game so getting to this final intro Story scene that shows DK's house always takes 4 minutes and 26 seconds since there is no way to manipulate this Runners will try to do as much as possible within this time frame this includes talking to cranky and going back to the main menu to begin loading into boss fights or mini games that will give them any moves they will need for the run after this entire sequence is done all they have to do is wait for a cut scene to trigger in the main menu and they will be brought back into the game with these two Miracle tricks you could theoretically beat the game with only DK since you don't actually need to unlock the characters to use them in the final boss fight however as I explained the blast-o-matic kick used to get to helm early with DK was unbelievably difficult but as the story usually goes little simplifications were discovered over time while grinding the trick but after an unbelievably long 40 hours ring Rush was able to pull it off in practice once it's impossible to understate how massive of an accomplishment this was if this was to be completed in a run it was thought that it would likely only be one person and the category would be entirely dead regardless a route was created and then one month later ring Rush would be the one to kill the category come on that was a pretty good attempt uh that's honestly where the better attempts I've had for a good amount of Reason give me that lag jump this oh my God all right enough hand again we need another shock wave right here Shockwave otherwise I'm not gonna have enough damage vulnerability to make across the scap would you Shockwave already okay now we have five tries to this orange clip we're in we're into helm [Music] I think I would get home early in a run on March 17 2014 ring Rush did The Impossible and pushed dk64 into a new era the blastomatic kick was the new Aztec early on steroids it took cfox 30 hours of attempts just to get it once oh yes oh my God oh my God even today in 2023 the trick has only been performed by 17 people there's even a document with their names a trick with documentation of every single person that has completed it is a truly special trick there was one thing I forgot to mention being in hub's lobby with DK is great and all but how do you get into the actual stage well originally ring Rush used lag to jump farther distances over The Lava and used orange lag to clip behind B locker and open the door however a Japanese Runner named Cigna found a way to skip this method later on it is possible to Moon kick near Chunky's pad near the entrance and clip through the support beams of the ceiling and go out of bounds right around where you would with Diddy and Tiny what this also meant was that Runners could save time by doing the orange training Barrel during isg rather than having to do it at the very start of the run before Hideout Helm since they did isg after grabbing ki8 and because completing the orange training Barrel is what allows you to use oranges and again like I said before Runners want wanted to do as much as possible during isg rather than sitting around waiting for it to be done over time Runners were starting to get somewhat consistent at blast nomadic kick and their time started to fall slowly but surely ring rush and Cigna would take turns Bringing Down the record further and further and between March 29th and August 5th the Run would be taken from 3311 to 3016 through sheer will and optimization a sub 30-minute run was on the cusp but who would be the first to do it would it be ring rush or Cigna or cfox well it would actually be a new world record holder zenernicus yeah and that is dk64 in under 30 minutes ring Rush wouldn't let this stand for long though in fact on the same day he would get a 29-29 and for a while this is where the record would stand until 2015 in fact or another big change to the isg sequence happened as I mentioned before Runners began doing the orange training Barrel during the isg sequence to save time in other parts of the Run however Runners would start doing it at the beginning of the run again as a result of two major discoveries because Runners want to do as much as possible during isg one thing that was considered but never possible was collecting key 8 during it and it was impossible for two main reasons first the key dance is considered a cut scene which if you remember means that the game would drag you back to the intro story secondly while traveling Out of Bounds at home's Lobby b-locker's text would activate which would also drag you into the intro story prematurely since the game considers it a cutscene at the time there was no feasible way around either of these things however it was discovered that using orange damage allowed you to skip the key dance cutscene and you could save and exit midair which is the reason why Runners had to do the orange training Barrel at to start again secondly with proper camera manipulation it was possible to skip the B Locker's text activation ring Rush was trying to do an extremely difficult version of this for a while and while it worked in theory it was brutal in practice to the point he would eventually quit the game no longer having the patience or desire to bring things down even further however a runner named isotage would over time optimize it in a way that was doable in a run although still extremely difficult and this enabled him to have a serious shot at completing this route it's important to clarify just how difficult this route was an entire document exists to explain why and that if you aren't in the absolute upper echelon of skill then trying it is pointless among other things the start of the run through key 8 has to be near perfect where you will prematurely Fade Into the intro story another important thing to mention is how the game saves movesets from performing isg to a file previously Runners would just view a file a Surefire way to ensure information was sent to it but with a new method to give just Diddy his weapon for the K rule fight since none of the other Kongs needed theirs this would no longer be possible it was discovered that watching the Diddy DK TV press start menu would give you Diddy's weapon viewing a file would erase this though and since you couldn't guarantee if the moves would go to the proper file or an unusable hidden file known as file 4 which the game only uses behind the scenes to handle certain data this created massive problems as a result a runner named TJ with help from isotars would begin looking into how to get around this he began testing certain actions such as entering crankies or entering a training Barrel then he would quit the game and wait to be pulled into the intro story this worked for a few actions but not all so he thought why not try it with a file other than file 1 with File 2 it was a massive failure but with file 3 nearly all his actions were it turns out this was because every time the game saves it switches the current data between the loaded file in this case File 3 and the hidden file 4. while this wasn't discovered until later TJ actually theorized this but wasn't able to confirm it because of his and isotarges lack of knowledge on the concept later on as a result of these discoveries a consistent way to send the info to the correct file was found anyways all of these improvements could theoretically save 90 to 100 seconds but added a ton of difficulty especially to the beginning of the run with the isg time crunch however on March 19 2015 isotage himself was able to complete a run in 2832 beating ring Rush's record by nearly a minute after this isotage would go to mostly work on tassing and emulation but there was still more time safe to be had shortly after this run was completed on April 2nd 2015 something big happened while it was known for a while that N64 games were going to be coming to the Wii U Virtual Console it took Nintendo a while to finally release it with this bundle of games came Donkey Kong 64 and naturally speedrunners were curious about the potential for faster runs since there would certainly be no lag but wait no lag is a bad thing it's actually a very bad thing considering how many major tricks in the game involved the abuse of the game's lag mechanics mainly this affected getting into Factory early every method known for getting into the stage early involved lag or was simply not possible in a real-time run DK home early was also not possible because there wasn't enough lag on k-rule's ship so the idea of running the game on VC was effectively dead regardless there was something going on in the community that would make the any percent run much easier in late 2014 xcord was messing around with a known glitch called tag Barrel storage which exploits the way that tag barrels work when entering a tag Barrel the game will lock the camera in place and load the visuals that we see for the menu however the Kong isn't actually transported to a new room or anything like that they're Simply frozen in place and invisible After exiting the Kong is made visible there is a way to abuse this though if a Kong's current state is changed after entering the tag Barrel by doing something such as crouching it makes it possible for the Kong to move around while in the menu this creates some interesting side effects for example using one Kong's move with a different Kong next in April of 2015 Adam Whitmore Outlaw mental man ring rush and x-cord found a glitch called telegraphic what this glitcher does is allow you to warp from your current elevation and your stored elevation if a floor is above you what exactly is stored elevation well basically it's the game's method of calculating certain movements for example climbing up a ledge it also changes to zero if a Kong is unloaded like for instance in a bag Barrel so if you can perform tag Barrel storage or TBS for short and move far enough away that the tag barrel unloads and then exit the tag Barrel DK's current position and sword Position will be vastly different next we must understand how the game actually calculates previously mentioned movements like climbing up a ledge essentially the game takes current and sword position and adds them up to the final position so when DK stored position is 0 and his current position is 500 if DK climbs up from a ledge his final Position will be one thousand so by grabbing onto this ledge while in TBS you can teleport up to a path that leads to Frantic Factory and with another Telegraph you can get up to Hideout Helm too Not only was this way easier but it was also faster than blast nomadic kick this would also be the cause of many players switching to the key 8 during isg route now that it was much easier and more consistent to do it fast enough with this Cigna was able to come back with another record beating iso's run by 10 seconds on July 1st 2015. the next day it would lower by another second and by July 11th he would have to run down to a 27-44 for a couple of months the record would stand until TJ would take the record and drop it down to a 27-17 on September 30th 2015 and then nothing until May 15 2016 when TJ would drop it three more times over the course of a week until finally getting a 2656 on May 23rd and for a few months nothing until this oh my God [Music] in truth this trick was originally found back in March of 2015 by TJ however it was incredibly difficult you had to fit into a gap that is one-third the size of the minimum amount you move in a single frame when holding up basically a really really tiny Gap because the invisible wall above B Locker extends very high up but luckily right to the top of DK's backflip on this platform you can get to the top of it and ledge clip through it it looks weird but it's a ledge clip just like the one used to skip the banana boss doors or any other ledge clip except really high up and really really thin additionally the ceiling being a slippery slope added another level of difficulty since you can't stand on top of it however if you can successfully clip through the wall you can simply fall down and enter the portal so while there was a lagless way to enter Factory early on top of it being extremely difficult there just weren't many VC Runners period additionally this was found around the time where blastomat kick was ruining any percent for many people and they began moving into other categories interest in a VC run just wasn't there especially for any percent however someone would change this [Music] all right let's put on the mic I guess I'm very very nervous G G on October 29th 2016 kiwi killer 67 was able to pull off in any percent run with the ledge clip and beat the previous record by 40 seconds with a final time of 26.16 and no one wanted to beat it a time that fast on N64 might as well be impossible and the VC friendly ledge clip was so difficult that no one wanted to grind the attempts needed to get it in a run on top of all the other difficult tricks in the run it might as well have been unbeatable but that's not where our story ends in tandem with the fact that a lot of the more frustrating parts of the Run were made easier such as the B locker techskip and Hideout Helm in January of 2017 TJ discovered something that would be called phase Falling by ring Rush with an already discovered Moon kick that lets you reach this vent it was possible to clip out of bounds and enter the stage and after this the floodgates bursted open [Music] thank you GG [Music] oh my [Music] no no please please hold your God I'm scared uh I don't know if this is good or not if this is a 24 I'm stopping I don't see myself beating this and after the run was re-timed it had been confirmed that Falcon had beaten Donkey Kong 64. in 24 minutes and 59 seconds [Music] months would pass until the next World Record but Cigna would come back and set another one this time with a new trick to help him out discovered by TJ phase walking one trick I've neglected to mention this far but is used as the beginning of every Speed Run is called face swimming now this is going to be a major simplification and if you want a deeper look into this and many other glitches mentioned in this video go check out bismuth's in-depth technical explanation of the dk-64 task run while the run is different in some ways lots of Concepts such as this one remain the same to put it simply by exiting first person at a certain angle it is possible to swim straight through walls this trick is pretty trivial and it's rare you'll see a top runner ever mess it up secondly there's phase falling which was mentioned earlier this is much more difficult but with practice top Runners can get it pretty consistent there's a third even harder much more broken trick phase walking these all use the same mechanic after leaving first person provided your facing angle as well within a certain range it's possible to maintain what is known as the phase angle for one frame a facing angle range that allows you to pass through walls however one frame clearly isn't enough to be able to walk through a wall it works with swimming and falling because holding the stick neutral won't change the phase angle both of which are actions that don't require the stick to be moved walking however requires the stick to be pushed forward on the single frame of having the phase angle however you can do various different actions to extend the time that you have it but the important one here is walking to be able to walk through a wall you would have to alternate between holding the stick forward and having it neutral every frame this makes it so the phase angle is never corrected so DK can go through walls this was discovered long before it was ever done RTA but obviously it wasn't thought to be possible because of the ridiculously precise inputs but over time ring Rush would find ways to decrease the amount of inputs required there's a lot that goes into how these imposes were decreased but basically it was discovered that the stick didn't actually need to move to neutral every frame in fact it didn't really need to go to neutral at all the state just had to move within a certain range every frame despite this though the trick is still extremely difficult to pull off over time and with lots of practice it was finally pulled off in a run and as I said Cigna was able to set a new record with a time of 2458 on February 23 2018 face walking applications included walking through this wall to make Factory early faster and a new strategy for clipping through walls in Factory itself that was also faster and with this Cigna went on a tear [Music] [Music] you landed off over the course of two years Cigna was ultimately able to drop his time down to a 24-30 on November 2nd 2020 and that is where the Run stands today today in what was a relatively recent decision the leaderboards are split between Wii U virtual console and n64. truthfully there is a lot more action on the N64 side of things despite the runs effectively being the same at this point and the time difference being entirely from lag and loading differences in fact a new record was set 12 days ago at the time of writing this script A 2549 by zenernicus overall the difficulty of the speed run cannot be understated there are so many insanely difficult tricks spread throughout the run that can cause a reset at any time while there is room to grow in optimization a lot of it comes down to Runners becoming more consistent at these tricks for example if we look at cigna's newest record his best possible time is a 2406 what this means is that the sum of all of his best times ever for every split is only 23 seconds faster than his run which for any speed run is extremely impressive especially 3D ones with a gauntlet of insanely hard tricks like dk64 so yes while there is room for the record to fall it certainly won't be easy on Virtual Console or Nintendo 64. so while on the VC side of things the any percent category might look dormant there's lots of Hope for the game as a whole records may be scarce nowadays but who's to say another Impossible Game breaking glitch isn't found and we repeat the same pattern we've seen over and over again all we can do is wait and find out [Music] I don't know

Channel: Connor01

Views: 935,040

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Id: o3885gOxEmc

Length: 49min 38sec (2978 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023