Pokemon TCG Was Accidentally Broken After 20 Years By Speedrunners

since the mid-1990s pokemon has fallen on the list of most recognizable brands in the japanese entertainment industry with the video games branching off into various pieces of media and collectibles one of which being the famous trading card game more recently i started playing one of my favorite pokemon games of all time again a spin-off of the main series that features the tcg staying close to the winning formula of the main series entries the goal is to collect eight master medals from club leaders defeat the grand masters in the pokemon dome and acquire the legendary pokemon cards to use in your arsenal seems pretty simple so simple a normal player can finish the game in just a few sessions given that they can pick up on the ins and outs of the tcg however the speedrunner community does this much faster to a point where something like this can happen four minutes i think we got four minutes flat let's ruin our childhoods by diving into how speedrunners beat this underplayed gem in under four minutes using an incredible trick that was found completely by accident before we dive into the mechanics of the glitches we're covering subscribe to the channel it really helps me out and it tells me what content you want to see in the future over the course of nine years of recorded speed run history for the game most of it has been spent taking on the challenge in a more traditional manner from an east lowell's 2011 speed demos archive feature run all the way to triple o aj's glitchless 48 minute and 13 second completion on june 3rd of 2019 so how do we get from there to all the way down here well in january of 2020 the community would get some help from an unlikely source in speedrunning there's the side that you see 99 of the time players attempting to improve times while streaming to a live audience is the most popular method of the hobby but there's another more technical part of the community that many will never know about passing or tool systems to be running involves meticulously playing a game frame by frame to achieve the fastest time possible this is typically done through an emulator and uses pre-recorded inputs set by the player this not only allows for frame perfect button presses but the inputs allow for other functions as well for example the inputs can be saved as a file and sent to others for something called a playback this playback of the exact inputs lets people verify the task is legitimate but more importantly it can also be used for collaboration between other taskers this brings us to two of our runners enter pinter and gif becks both being veteran members of the pokemon speedrunning community with gift backs notably having a hand in the pokemon blue tasks and other massive technical accomplishments they wanted to do a playback of an older task from a runner named anonymous user on actual console this is a complicated process that involves dumping the tas inputs making a bot that acts as a controller for these inputs and having a script that runs set inputs making a task playback work on console is incredibly difficult it mostly results in a desync due to how consoles handle inputs compared to emulators this means that the inputs on console won't register on the same frames they would for emulator and the task can't be completed these things tend to not go right the first time and that was the case for anonymous users tasks while this was an unfortunate wall for interpenter and giffex they let the inputs play to the end and observed something very odd the inputs let the run get through the game's tutorial but the dsync left the task stuck through the tutorial fight however after about 20 minutes in the game randomly exited the tutorial and the player went on to select a starter deck the initial theory from enterprinter was that the tutorial had a time limit but that was quickly dismissed as gift decks identified the quark as a side effect from a previously unknown glitch this glitch was called down plus a if you go to the play area screen and put your cursor on the lowest possible position on the player's side a down plus a input on the same frame will execute a glitch that exits the dual the simple reason why this works is thanks to the cursor going out of bounds for a frame and using an a press on the exact same frame executes specific values that are not meant to be read as data normally when you try to move the cursor out of bounds the game records the current cursor position and checks button presses if nothing is pressed then the cursor just returns to the same place it was before attempting to move it if the a button is pressed it overwrites the recording of the previous cursor position with a routine called open and play area screen selection and uses something called a jump table based on where the cursor position is to keep it simple this is what usually lets you jump to different screens after selecting something in the play area screen there's a specific range of values that are referenced when this happens so if you use a value that's outside the range of the intended set it will run through different parts of the game's memory until the game finds something it can execute in this case the game jumps through different parts of memory containing things like move animation data and text data until ending up at a point where it can actually execute something usable from there the game continues to find a specific script and exits the dual using the win loss result from the previous match with the tutorial you exit the duel with the win as that is the default value for the game this was massive because of a couple reasons over the last several years before this find real time and tool assisted speedrunners were both looking for ways to skip the game's 7-minute tutorial anonymous caesar's 2017 task that was the progenitor of this glitch complained about this fact in the author's notes section so this was something that was clearly sought after now this was huge but this glitch didn't just work in the tutorial no it worked on every required duel in the game this meant that the game could be completed without having to win a single duel even better but this glitch was viable in a real-time setting meaning the biggest gold rush in the community's history was about to happen giftbex and enterprinter shared this fine with the community in the middle of january 2020 and what came next can only be described as a mad dash from several runners to reach new heights in the game's newly made 80 glitch category in a matter of three days after this fine the game's fastest time went from a 4813 all the way down to a 1336 by triple o aj the game being completed in 13 minutes is an incredible feat but this is nine minutes away from the time i promised you all earlier so the question we have now is what could possibly be faster than instantly winning every duel in the game giffex and interpenter knew that if code could be executed using one part of the game's memory to win a duel something much bigger could be on the horizon it wouldn't take them long to figure out what that big discovery could be it was found that the down plus a glitch did more than just let players escape from duels and here's where things get a little more complicated the duo noted instances when doing the glitch where the player would become stuck on a weird infinite party screen this is due to a few aspects of randomness from some of the glitches inherent mechanics the first of which is a technical term called bank switching you can think of this as the game jumping through various aspects of its memory after hitting certain points of each bank when the game switches from bank 06 in this case to bank 17 the game normally wants to call a routine that keeps track of what bank to return to if something called an interrupt occurs more on that in a second but even after the bank switch the routine still has bank 06 as the return point referring to what we were talking about earlier doing the down plus a glitch results in a jump to move animation data when executed as code it switches the bank to bank 17 or the text data i mentioned earlier this is just half of the process because now we get to talk about that interrupt i just mentioned the game has a mechanic called a timer interrupt handler that increments a value called w timer counter the timer interrupt triggers four times every frame and once that timer counter value is divisible by four it will run some extra code what this code does may sound pretty complicated but its main job is to count play time however another part of the code updates music and guess what that's in another bang if this happens the game goes to that bank to run those routines and then returns back to the bank stored in memory which is bank zero six so why the heck is this important there are these two cpu halts that happen while on bank 17 on certain values these cpu halts are points when the game's timer counter value can run the extra code which does the crazy stuff i just mentioned normally we want the game to run past this point during the down a glitch and do another bank switch to bank 20 which is where all the crazy glitches start to occur okay is everyone with me because i'm about to blow your mind what this means is the trick has nearly a 50 chance to just fail randomly and cause the infinite party screen to happen i say nearly 50 because there's also some other stuff that can happen that's literally defined in the technical document is weird but we're not going to dive into that today now that you know how hard this trick is let's talk about the aspect that really matters after a ton of testing gift bags found something interesting that can happen if specific criteria are met in battle there's an effect that can hit the player which basically switches out the active pokemon with the pokemon on the bench this can be one of a few moves but the important one we're going to focus on is whirlwind if you have two pokemon in the play area the game will have you select the replacement pokemon and this is where things start to break hitting select twice in this menu to go back into the play area and then doing the down plus a glitch in this situation will cause the game to eventually bank switch back from bank 20 to bank zero six and then this returns an address of c300 this c300 return address is only possible due to several addresses being shifted in association with the whirlwind ability and glitches that just occurred now this memory address isn't entirely important by itself but the memory address of c400 right near it contains something very interesting the contents of the player's deck most of the aspects of the game's memory we've executed as code up until this point were not really controlled by the player this is where things get really good if you edit your deck in a certain way prior to the situation happening it can be set up to safely execute that data as code which ends up being a credits warp all this was put into a workable document on january 24th 2020 and a task was quickly submitted just five days after that by gift x just a couple days after that gift x brought the tech to the realm of mortals and showed a demo run to the community with the credits warp in real time this route would be a little bit slower than a task but the idea is the dual science club member joseph after doing a specific deck setup for the ace in order to do this properly though there was one last piece of the puzzle runners needed to implement in the game there's an rng value that starts from a set point and constantly changes in a predictable manner from a soft reset if timed properly with the starter joseph stool you can ensure specific cards are played and moves are chosen in particular we want joseph to play pidgey on his first turn and use warwin to set up the ace for the credits warp the results of this would cause yet another subcategory split and make any percent ace into a new beast that runners would quickly take on however this would be short-lived as it only took a week to see attempts at the new record fizzle out with the game coming down to getting the down plus a glitches and manip first try no one wanted to torment themselves any longer than they had to many felt that the spirit of the game lay within the longer categories such as glitchless in all cards so after triple o aj's final ace record of three minutes and 24 seconds the competition for that category was buried six feet under and that was the end of it at least for the most part giffex would leave a final parting gift for the community on june 10th of 2020 one final task that used one of mason's lab members to do the same code of execution off of ryhorn's ability this task would finish with a time of 2 minutes and 55 seconds with it being the very last this is b-run submitted by giffex to this day it's incredible to see how a single accident could spawn such a game-changing glitch upending the very idea of how fast the pokemon trading card game could be completed the hard work and research of just two people brought the game down by about 45 minutes in the matter of a couple weeks after the discoveries were made and while many runners stick to the glitches category these days the ability to beat the game in just three and a half minutes is at their fingertips if you have a copy of the game try it out yourself and tell me if you're able to do the down plus a glitch i just showed off in the comments below a quick note before we end the video i want to extend a special thank you for my patrons who support me on patreon they've allowed me to increase my production quality through both equipment and software upgrades and these videos as they are wouldn't be possible without their help anyways stay hydrated folks and thanks for watching

Channel: DoctorSwellman

Views: 282,883

Keywords: speedrun, world record, speedrunning, pokemon tcg, pokemon, pokemon speedrun

Id: VdAxty0TYaM

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022