Perfect Dark's Oldest Record Was Finally Beaten!

helloyou absolute legends I am in shock the oldest world record in perfect dark history has just been beaten a time that stood for almost 16 years and until several days ago was a time that I thought was as fast as a human could ever possibly go perhaps it was because I failed to see the potential optimizations that in hindsight seemed obvious but perhaps it was because I just wanted to believe the record would last forever I've made a lot of videos about crazy records being beaten by extremely talented gamers and for my own part I've been responsible for beating some of goldeneyes oldest records but it seems as though the tables have turned as it's now one of my own records that has fallen in early 2004 I set a time of 25 seconds on the level called war the third of perfect darks for special assignment missions when the record was achieved it seemed like a pretty big deal and truthfully until it was actually accomplished I wasn't even sure if it was possible getting 25 seconds was a shock then and as the years went on it never really seemed to appear any weaker over the past few years it seems as though all of the ancient records from rares groundbreaking duo of classic first-person shooters were being destroyed and given that this record of 25 seconds on war was among the oldest naturally people pondered including myself about the possibility of it being beaten whenever the question was raised I always said war 25 will never be beaten the time was so tight so precise so simple so short how could you possibly be an entire second faster evidently it was possible on the 18th of March rayon is run beat war in 24 seconds lowering a record that had stood for 5846 days if anyone was going to do it it was rayon he's the most talented speed runner I've ever seen though as skillful as he is I still would have said it was out of his reach in order to appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment we have to go back to the beginning in this video we will examine the history of perfect darks war on the agent difficulty we will learn about the objectives the challenges speedrunners faced and the discoveries that led to this saying new record this level has some of the most interesting history in the game and I really hope you enjoy before we go on this video is sponsored by Ray Khan if you aren't using wireless earbuds by now you are missing out big-time but don't be tricked into spending hundreds of dollars on a new pair recon earbuds cost half the price of other premium earbuds and sound just as good now I've been using ray cons latest model e 25 and they are incredibly easy to use they pair in seconds they have six hours of play time they have heaps of base and they fit great I've been using them when I work out when I'm out of the house when I'm practicing my various hobbies and they always feel comfortable they come with a variety of differently sized attachments to fit any ear rake on earbuds don't have any wires or stems which makes them both stylish and discreet most people won't even know you're wearing them recon also has a 45 day satisfaction guarantee so there is no risk in trying them out so click the link in the description to get 15% off your order today at buy rake on comb slash legend that is buy rake on Comm slash legend to get 15% off your new pair of rake on wireless earbuds war is one of perfect darks special assignments missions unlike the standard missions in war we take control of a Mayan a small area 51 type alien with the stereotypical large head the differences between a Mayan and perfect darks protagonist Joanna aren't purely cosmetic they turn a lot more sharply and in general are much more difficult to control in war we lead a team of Mayans attempting to infiltrate the scattered temple ruins and kill the scale our King the Sierra being a different more antagonistic species of alien the skitter sanctum houses three kings but on the easiest difficulty agent we only need to eliminate the first this is our only objective and it's a simple one in terms of speed running the theory is very straightforward we need to get to the king as quickly as we can to deliver the killing blow standing between us and the king are scared our soldiers that are endless in supply a slow and steady pace isn't a good idea when the enemies don't stop coming when they are killed they respawn near the and immediately begin hunting us down we begin the level armed with a Phoenix a useful weapon that fires a basic bolt of energy on its primary setting that can also unleash explosive shells with its secondary function thus get our soldiers carry Mahler's pistols that offer amazing utility against enemies with high health its secondary function allows for a charged shot that does incredibly high damage at full charge it has the potential to kill the scattered King in one hit making it a useful weapon to attain thankfully the scatter soldiers we face on our journey can be killed relatively swiftly with a single explosive shell to the face since the dawn of perfect dark speedrunning the basic strategy of this level has always been the same strafe as tightly as possible through the winding hallways kill a single scatter with an explosive shot to collect the mauler and take out the king with a single charged shot to the head now as a speedrun it just wouldn't feel complete without some luck being thrown into the equation and there is definitely some RNG involved here the main bottleneck is a single door that grants access to the final section where the King awaits obviously it would be faster if the door was already opened when we got there allowing us to run straight through but this relies on one of the scatter soldiers opening it and for whatever reason the position of each scatter is random there are a total of four scatters that can be running around at any one moment and most of the time they'll be passed to the door by the time you get there with the door closed you may be wondering how the door could be closed when the scatter obviously just ran through it but both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark tend to cheat when it comes to enemies moving through doors if the area the door is located in isn't loaded enemies will pass straight through as if the door didn't exist without ever opening it on the rare occasion a scatter will be lagging behind enough to be trapped on the other side of the door by the time you get there this ensures that the scatter actually opens the door allowing you through this single door will ruin almost every run by being closed so speedrunners need to perform many runs to get the luck they need the random positions of each scatter make it more difficult to kill them as well the winding hallways produce many corners that block your vision from what's up ahead while the explosive shot does eventually prove fatal to scatters it's not instant so you need some distance between you and the scatter when you may that's shot if you turn a corner and run head-on into a scatter it's almost always too late to kill it without losing time especially given that producing an explosion right in front of you will cause you to get thrust too backwards by the blast speed runners have an idea about which scatter they want to kill and where but it won't be in the same position every time so again more luck is needed the door ends to get our positioning makes this a lot more frustrating than it needed to be but in this field that's just the nature of the beast when the perfect dark rankings were created all the way back in August of 2000 the record for war agent was 28 seconds this was held to jointly by snapdragon the creator of the original ranking system a programming genius and paragon the first truly dominant champion of perfect dark at this point in perfect arcs history no proof was required to claim records and while the top players did make videos of some of their times in this case we have no footage of these original 28 this lacks stand on proof requirements would ultimately caused one of the first controversies in the community and it just so happened to involve war agent on the 22nd of August 2000 they use er joined to the perfect dog forums under the name mod Naik eighteen two and a half hours after joining he would create a topic claiming that he had tied the world record on war agent and that he was going to beat it 13 minutes later he replied to his own topic proclaiming that he had achieved a new world record beating war agent in 27 seconds the top players immediately doubted modern I exclaim and honestly I can't really blame them in under three hours he had joined the forums tied the existing world record and set a new one in hindsight I'm surprised this time was accepted at all but as history shows it was accepted modern ike is still to this day credited with being the first person to achieve 27 seconds mod knock was hit with a barrage of questions trying to ascertain the strategy he used first and foremost to test the validity of his claim but also to see if there was something the other players had missed he provided a brief outline of what he did which offered no new insights but he did mention that he used the one point to control style this is the control style that uses these C buttons to move and strafe instead of the control stick which is only used to look around unbeknownst to the community at the time the one point to control style is far superior and much faster than the one point one control style one point one uses the control stick to move and to look which means that in order to turn left and right you need to sacrifice some movement speed players were adamant however that there was no difference Paragon confidently stated that the control style does not affect your times if you are an expert at one of the styles even modern Ike was clueless about the differences between the control styles stating that one point two was not faster this major disconnect was happening because no one knew at the time that it takes a few seconds to get to full speed and every time he stopped running forward at maximum intensity you lose full speed and have to rebuild it again this meant that with one point one every time you turned a corner you lost a bunch of time as far as one point one users were concerned 27 was impossible to achieve and very well maybe it's understandable how they felt it was unattainable given that their own runs were so inexplicably slow it wasn't until October that Snapdragon was able to prove that one point two was superior and informed the other players does the fact that modern ike was using one point two a meaning that he did in fact achieve 27 not really and in my opinion he probably didn't get it when pressed on giving specific details he provided a sub optimal strategy and didn't seem to be very knowledgeable about time targets it took him 10 minutes to achieve 27 after getting 28 but couldn't replicate it again after that point 27 didn't prove to be too challenging though and as the next two years rolled along it was tied by over 20 runners surprisingly there was no new strategy developments even though people were so close to breaking through in August of 2000 the day after mod Knight claimed here's 27 the user dark call pondered hell I just thought of something if this is truer than 26 is easily possible getting hit boosts you you have a Phoenix with explosive shells explosions from the Phoenix hug be hurt but they do hit you people who played gold and I might remember this being done with grenades on runway maybe we can get it to work here it's funny that he mentions runway as I just covered it in my previous video but while in Goldeneye explosive buoys save a very significant amount of time in Perth dark damage bursts are far less impactful it would be hard to notice a single boost being effective at all you'd have to get many to see a noticeable difference dark coal was on the right track though figuring out how to use the Phoenix to boost yourself wasn't immediately obvious using the walls wasn't an option as the fact that you're facing forwards would merely produce back boosts it wasn't until late 2002 that this enigma was finally cracked brian boss art had joined the competition earlier in the year and was making a name for himself in goldeneye discovering huge sequence breaks and setting classic world records he had been grinding hard for months and did what many Goldeneye players do when they get bored he moved over to perfect dark while Brian would eventually become champion of Perfect Dark several years later at this stage in his career had barely touched the game on the 3rd of November he would achieve his very first perfect dark world record tying the 27 that had been set just over two years earlier but he knew this level had more to give he devised a strategy that would change the level forever on the 30th of November 2002 Brian boss art would achieve this run you Brian had figured out a way to self boost using the Phoenix you might think that looking at the ground and shooting is pretty obvious but it's not as intuitive as it seems on the surface if you just simply look straight down and try to boost yourself you won't gain any time if anything this will only slow you down the key that unlocked this technique was holding all the way up on the control stick this made the cursor aim ever so slightly down which because of the angle you're running out would shoot the ground behind you it's barely noticeable but this tiny variation makes a world of difference aside from the fact that it's a lot more difficult to navigate when you're looking straight down the boosts make it even harder to control your character this is much trickier than it looks Brian's 26 was pretty good but there were definitely a couple of flaws that immediately stood out while he did use a decent amount of boosts there were obviously areas where he could have fit in more in total he self boosted 10 times but a week later another speedrunner known as snowblind matched the 26 with a total of 16 boosts this is a huge difference snowblind run had some obvious errors as well which seemed to even it out as I mentioned earlier in the video shooting is scattered too closed with an explosive shot will cause you to get pushed backwards and Luis speed both snowblind and Brian were back boosted by their own explosions snowblind also switched stripes going through the door and just before the king this is definitely slower than keeping the same strafe direction the entire way and I mentioned this in my previous video as well if we were to try and formulate to the ideal run there would be a few basic ideas the first would be to add as many self boost as possible then we would hope to kill the scatter to get the mauler without getting hit by the explosion at all in order to do this we can't kill the first scatter like Brian did in his 26 as there isn't enough distance to avoid the back boost therefore the second scatter is a better choice but we'd need to get lucky the scatter has to be as far down the hallway as possible which is admittedly uncommon there would only be a single strafe change that would take place when we killed the scatter keeping the same strafe direction the entire way isn't a goal we could realistically try to achieve as we need to break strafe any way to kill the scatter so switching here shouldn't lose any time now that we know what we want to do the Challenge is figuring out how to implement it when you're analyzing something after the fact it's so easy to wonder why things weren't tried sooner but one of the things people fear is thinking time into a strategy that goes nowhere most people don't want to spend tens or hundreds of hours testing ideas that have no guarantee of working which is why for good or bad it's usually a small percentage of participants that's make most of the breakthroughs by the start of 2004 a total of 8 players had matched 26 including myself it was so long ago I can no longer remember what inspired me to do so but I started trying to optimize the level I fit in as many boosts as I possibly could I grind it until they got the scatter positioning I needed and on the 16th of March 2004 I achieved this run aside from the run itself there are a couple of things to note the first is the lack of in-game sound which I was unable to capture at the time capture cars were much more difficult and expensive to attain back then and my crappy cheap card wouldn't accept RCA audio cables the second thing to point out is the skip right at the very end after the King was killed there is a period of about three seconds missing in the video this is because I stopped recording on the VCR to examine the run at this time I didn't even know if 25 seconds was possible so what I used to do was stop the tape after each run to re-watch it and use the in-game timer is shown on screen to figure out how close I was to 25 it was a complete surprise that 25 appeared on screen and I hurriedly pressed record on the VCR again to try and capture as much of the end screen as I could this definitely wouldn't pass proof standards today but it was ultimately accepted back then without too much controversy one of the things about Perfect Dark that makes a verification a bit easier is the timer on screen showing exactly how fast the run is in this case the quality is really bad as where most video is from back then but anyone with a keen eye can see that the final time shown on screen was in the 23 second range it takes two seconds to finish from when the objective completed message comes up which gives the final mission time of 25 seconds war agent in 25 seconds was a really strong record for the time and it would be over one and a half years before anyone tied it just as Brian had popped his world record cherry with war agent three years earlier another player was about to get his first and that was brian is ron otherwise known as perfect ace Rhian joined the community in September of 2005 he joined with some really impressive times but what was really crazy was his age in his first post he introduced himself hi guys I'm also known as perfect ace and I am new to this elite I believe I am the only 10 years old in this elite started playing at the age of 7 check out some of my sick times when I started speed running back in 1999 I was 13 years old which seems pretty young now many of the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark players back then were in their early teens the age demographic was much younger than it is today but I can't remember a single other person who was as young as Ryan was when they joined not in perfect dark or Goldeneye speedrunning or any other game for that matter even if someone was that young they were certainly not as good as Ryan was at that age the fact that he was so young cause some people to even doubt he was a real person assuming that he was the alt of another player having some fun this prompted Ryan to record a live video of himself playing perfect dark to prove both his age and his skill the level of choice was war agent he would achieve a twenty six this is one of the most classic videos in perfect dark history and was the first introduction of arguably the greatest player of all time yeah take that Matt at the end of the video Ryan exclaimed take that Matt this is in reference to Matt cook an ancient Perfect Dark speedrunner who was particularly vocal about his distrust of rayon from this point on though everyone knew rayon was for real on the 24th of October 2005 Brian would be the first to tie 25 just like Brian Bart three years earlier wore agent was also Ray Allen's first ever world record in perfect dark this was considered insane at the time the 10 year old had only been in the community for a month and had already tired what was considered to be one of the best world records at the time what's even crazier was rayons thoughts about the state of the run the day after achieving 25 he would post anyway I don't think that run was good at all I guess 24 might be possible this comment began a community discussion on whether or not 24 could be done ideas for new strategies were tossed around and some hilarious comparisons were made lek master stated I'd say 24 war agent is as likely as five defection agent stop dreaming defection agent in five seconds was performed by illu in 2010 Brian White stated I'd say a 24 war is comparable to a 21 runway the boosts are there and are mathematically possible but whether or not it is indeed actually possible is another question if you've seen my previous video you already know that 21 runway was achieved to last a month the idea of skipping the mauler completely and focusing on boost throughout the entire run was proposed it is possible to kill the king with two quick explosive shots from the Phoenix ultimately this was a dead end even with more boosts the time lost from needing two shots on the king eliminated all of the time gained with no concrete conclusions the discussions on war 24 faded away over the next 15 years more and more people tied 25 and every single person used the exact same strategy when the level begins to boost yourself eight times before entering the sanctum reload perform eight more boosts as you approach the scout our soldiers reload fire one shot at the second scatter and elect the Mahler as you run past run through the door that is hopefully open before doing two or three more self boosts he immediately switched back to the Mahler and fire one charged shot of the Kings skull it's important to know that you can't self boost after you shoot this get our soldier as you don't pick up weapons when you were looking down so it's imperative you remain looking up until you collect the Mahler but in saying that there was always a gap between picking up the Mahler and the next couple of boosts that were performed once through the door it was obvious that there was room here for some more boosts but it was seen as too difficult and probably wasn't worth it every single 25 that had been achieved was high people weren't even close to 24 throwing in two or three more boosts wasn't seen as something that would tip the scale and people were more concerned with getting through the door cleanly by March of 2020 31 people held the record of 25 with the fall of runway 22 in February war 25 had become the longest lasting world record in history for both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark over the previous couple of months Brown had been absolutely demolishing perfect dark setting mind-blowing records one after the other in mid-march he would set his sights back to war agent to finish what he had started over 14 years ago in order to eke out more booths he would use a technique known as quick reload the standard reload for the Phoenix is painfully slow but you can do it much faster by simply switching weapons back and forth he would begin boosting immediately after picking up the mauler threading the needle through the door with complete look down even with these improvements I still would have said 24 was out of reach but alas on the 18th of March exactly one month after the oldest world record in Goldeneye history was baitin Brown is Rhon achieved this run [Music] the movement in this run is perfection and the difficulty involved in navigating the level while looking straight down and self boosting can never be overstated I still can't quite believe 25 was beaten and it will likely take a while before it truly sinks in for such a short and simple level war agent has seen its fair share of controversies and ground breaking runs some of the most talented and successful Perfect Dark champions have christened to their careers on this stage this might be the end of this story however and I'm inclined to believe that war 24 will never be beaten but who knows what the future holds and what crazy discoveries lay ahead thank you so much for watching you legend I hope you're all staying safe and healthy I hope you are having a fantastic day and I will see you in the next video you

Channel: Karl Jobst

Views: 646,427

Keywords: karl jobst, speedrun, speedrunning, new world record, speedrun world record, n64, nintendo 64, nintendo, james bond, world record progression, speedrun documentary, perfect dark, perfect dark speedrun, world record history, rayan isran, world record

Id: 7db-dRm2KSA

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020