The History of Contra World Records

[Music] contra is known for being a really hard game there's enemies everywhere you look and one hit means you're dead of course there's some people who are masters of contra who can beat the game without even dying but there's a select group of gamers who can do even better they can speedrun it for the past decade speedrunners have spent thousands of hours trying to beat contra as fast as humanly possible you can't slow down you can't stop for anything you just have to keep flying forward level after level this is the story of the gamers who've conquered this record this is the history of contra world [Music] records [Music] for many years the earliest contra records were thought to be published on speed demos archive a site where players from around the world uploaded their fastest speed runs for everyone to see this was pretty much the place to watch speed runs in the mid 2000s and starting in 2006 the first run of contra was published there by a runner known as tmont these early speed demos archive runs were thought to be the earliest contra world records for many years but very recently a run predating the speed demos archive runs was discovered it was incredible for its time this run was performed in august 2005. the final time was 10 minutes and 55 seconds a half minute ahead of the run on speed demos archive from the following year and the runner was matt turk this is the same matt turk who held all 14 records in mike tyson's punch-out for almost a decade the guy whose record stood strong despite the combined efforts of some of the greatest players in the world it turns out punch-out wasn't his only interest in 2005 right in the middle of his record-setting spree and punch-out he noticed there didn't exist a full speedrun of contra on the internet so he decided to do one himself and unlike most of his punch out runs which had no video proof this one did this is a recording of a vhs tape that turk sent over so it's a little hard to see at times but we can still see what we need to he started off in the jungle the first of the eight stages in contra this strategy was pretty simple here run to the right and shoot any enemies in your way while slowing down as little as possible that was made a little bit more tricky by the random enemy spawns outside of the first few enemies in the stage most of the other backpack soldiers spawned in random locations turk had to stay on his toes to react to where they were and clear the path ahead he also picked up the spread gun this is by far the most powerful weapon in the game as it shoots waves of 5 volts to obliterate enemies in your way it definitely helped him a lot on the way to the boss of the stage where turk mashed fire and took it down onto stage 2 also known as base 1 base 1 features five rooms each with a blue target you need to take out to move on to the next room of course there's also enemies and bullets turk had to avoid too but a big focus was mashing the fire button hard enough to take out the blue targets quickly you have to repress the b button every time you want to fire another wave of shots without the use of turbo buttons so turk had to do his best to just keep pressing b over and over and over across the whole entire run now one of the fundamental problems with running contra is that it has a 10 bullet sprite limit that means you can only have two waves of spread on screen at once limiting how fast targets in the base stages can be taken out turk was occasionally able to get more than two waves on screen at once but he didn't entirely understand how and he couldn't do it consistently after the fifth room was a boss fight where four targets had to be taken out before the boss appears turk jumped up and destroyed them then moved on to stage three the waterfall this stage is an upward climb to the top jumping from ledge to ledge with enemies and projectiles spawning around you all the while he slowed down a bit and while going across the bridge in the middle of the stage he picked up invincibility to get through enemies cleanly next up was base two turk once again was able to get more than two spreadshots on the screen at times but wasn't able to consistently keep it he moved through the 8 rooms fairly quickly while skillfully dodging all shots that were fired at him base 2's boss fight features two heads that need to be destroyed when they're together they're vulnerable but they move apart for a few seconds between coming back together each time they're together is referred to as a cycle and turk managed to get a 5-cycle kill stage 5 is the snow field which is infamous in speed runs for having extremely random and unforgiving enemy spawns turk had to preemptively fire his spread gun all over to prepare for enemies that could pop up nearly anywhere he lost a lot of runs to this level just from bad luck so he was lucky to make it through safely the boss fight was pretty easy but also pretty random there's three locations it can spawn on the left in the middle or on the right you essentially just have to guess where it's gonna spawn and start firing underneath it turk lined up on the right and it spawned there allowing for a pretty fast kill stage six is the energy zone it's filled with lasers that kill you upon contact were activated when turk got close to them while others seemed to cycle on a random pattern he had to wait a lot to get out of his way but was able to get through the stage on skate stage six's boss fight is pretty tricky and like the others the way to beat him is to mash bullets into him he can randomly jump and shoot projectiles both of which lose time he jumped once and shot once for turk and then he was onto stage seven the hangar the hangar has claws that operate in a similar random pattern to the lasers of energy zone if one drops down and hits you you're dead turk had to wait a little bit for the claws and he had trouble mashing fast enough to get through the walls but once again he made it through the stage finally he was onto stage 8 the alien's lair this stage is perhaps the most set in stone of all the enemies mostly spawn in the same place at the same time and there's two bosses to defeat the head and the heart both are taken out by jumping up and mashing as quickly as you can press the button turk made his way through the stage cleanly and finished the game without dying in just 10 minutes and 55 seconds a sub 11 minute run of contra was simply incredible for 2005. years after this run matt turk would go on to set some of the most famous world records in mike tyson's punch-out history his legacy would be defined by these records and his name would become a legend among so many speedrunners but on that amazing day in august 2005 his focus was on playing contra and he did it so well that the entire speed demos archive community had some catching up to do it took until the middle of 2006 until anybody was able to match turk's run but that june well-known speedrunner freddie anderson tied it to the second achieving a 1055 of his own this run lost some time over turk in the early stages he got a bad boss pattern in the jungle had a tougher time getting through the targets in base 1 and was a little bit slower in the waterfall he gained some time back however in the base 2 boss fight saving about 4 seconds by getting a 4 cycle kill instead of turk's 5 cycle this up and down pattern of gaining and losing time continued in the second half he gained about 5 seconds from not having to slow down as much in the energy zone but got a worse pattern in the hangar and had to hesitate more in the end it was enough to tie turk to the second and a few months later a new challenger was able to top both of them with a 1050 a runner known as crockdoc he gained a few seconds in base 1 from fast movement through the rooms and taking out targets quickly and he hesitated less overall in the waterfall in the snow field he lost some time from worse laser patterns in energy zone but gained 5 seconds in hangar from great claw patterns 10 50 was a great final time and these types of runs more or less defined early contra speed running one player would get slightly better luck in one stage than slightly worse luck in another it usually got close to evening out by the end so world records would typically be very small that's just how contra speedrunning worked at least until 2007 see of those three early runners matt turk freddy anderson and croc doc one of them had a distinct advantage over the others a fairly big part of contra is how fast you can repeatedly press the fire button to take out bosses walls and other obstacles turk's mashing speed was the slowest of the three at about five to six presses per second croc talk was a bit faster at somewhere between 9 and 10 presses per second freddie anderson's on the other hand was estimated to be somewhere around 13 presses per second that was obviously a huge help but anderson was also able to master a technique in the base stages known as spread rhythm remember how early runners were able to sometimes get more than two waves of spread in the base stages there's a concrete reason why that happens when a wave of spread fires it's an arc of five bullets if you fire two waves of spread that's ten bullets on the screen the first of these ten bullets will leave the screen before the rest do leaving nine bullets left if you then re-press the fire button right after that first bullet is gone the game will allow one more bullet to be fired from the gun to get the number of bullets back up to 10. this cycle can then be repeated for the other waves of spread as they continue to fire allowing for a very steady stream of bullets coming down the center if you're able to mash in a steady rhythm this can be maintained indefinitely it's theoretically possible to have 10 waves of spread on screen at once all in a steady line but this is virtually impossible to achieve three or four waves is a good start but quite a bit more is possible with incredible matching finesse the normal gun has a four bullet sprite limit but spread rhythm combined with the spread gun's 10 bullet limit can lead to incredibly fast target destruction in the base stages add in anderson's skill and matching speed and there was a ton of potential to keep lowering the record just from the base stages alone so in may 2007 freddy anderson blew the competition out of the water with a 10 40 a solid 10 seconds ahead of second place this run featured a three cycle kill on the base two boss as well as some decent spread rhythm in the base stages with a 1040 anderson was very clearly the best contra player in the world his mashing speed was just too fast and his expertise at running and gunning outmatched everyone else he really didn't have to keep going but as time passed multiple new strategies were developed so in early 2008 already 10 seconds ahead of anyone else anderson came back and after a series of improvements dropped this time for the speed demos archive verifiers when this run was posted it was considered to be one of the greatest speed runs ever performed on the site that encompasses nearly every game on nearly every console ever released anderson's 1024 encontra was one of the best what made it so good well for one thing his spread rhythm greatly improved he was able to get streams of four bullets going and occasionally even higher there were also a plethora of new strategies he waited a bit longer in stage three to pick up invincibility so that he didn't have to slow down as much a move developed by fiesel he got better at dealing with the lasers and claws in stages six and seven it turns out that they operate on a global timer from power on every 128 frames their cycle resets and the lasers or claws restart from the beginning of their cycle so for instance if anderson arrived at the first set of lasers in energy zone and the middle laser was the first to fire he would know that he was at a good point in the global timer and could quickly jump up to the top if the top or bottom flame fired first he would pretty much always have to hesitate for longer in the 1024 he unfortunately got the bottom flame pattern but got a pretty good global timer and hanger to make up a bunch of time and after some intense mashing and aliens lair the 1024 was complete a masterpiece of a run from start to finish freddie anderson submitted this run to speed them was archive and was finally able to stop running the game for a while after all what else is there to do when you hold one of the greatest speedrun world records of all time well you could always beat it by seven seconds this was certainly unexpected there weren't any big new strategies or developments freddie anderson just took a nearly perfect run and shaved seven seconds off of it his spread rhythm in the base stages reached new levels of greatness making the spread gun look more like a constant beam of bullets right into the targets he got the middle flame in energy zone meaning the best pattern possible the boss jumped once but anderson was just pounding bullets into him to take it down the claw patterns in the hangar allowed him to barely have to hesitate at all it was brilliant nobody even wanted to try to beat it and so freddie anderson's 1017 stood as the record with no rivals throughout the rest of 2008 and into the next year it seemed like it was going to be a record that stood for years but unexpectedly in 2009 somebody else started playing contra again ladies and gentlemen matt turk was back [Music] his personal best may have been far off the record at 10 55 but in 2009 turk came back to try to lower his time it had been four years since his last attempts so he started off by doing practice attempts without even recording but on just his second day of doing runs matt turk was clearly a god gamer if it only took him a couple of days to get two seconds off of freddy's insane record there was no telling what he could do with a bit more time so he kept playing even harder than before the record was inevitable [Music] after several weeks of attempts turks still hadn't quite gotten there but that was okay his 10 19 happened so quickly that he still had some time to keep trying anderson's run was ridiculous but there were little things he could do better anderson had missed a jump in hangar that cost him a bit over a second and the stage 6 boss had jumped once so a time around 10 15 was at least possible but clearly was going to take time to achieve all he could do was keep pushing at last in december 2009 matt turk submitted a video to twin galaxies which at the time was one of the main places to submit speedruns when converting the run to the same timing method the speed demos archive used the final time was 10 41 that's 22 seconds slower than his alleged 10 19 from several months prior it's unclear exactly why turk wasn't able to get closer to the record after his initial attempts there was definitely a combination of some bad luck and unfortunate mistakes but it just goes to show how difficult it was to get a time under 10 20. matt turk may have had the record back in 2005 but by 2009 he just wasn't able to keep up with freddie anderson but turk wasn't the only one who couldn't keep up for the rest of 2009 and 2010 anderson's 1017 stayed on top as the world record other than the push by matt turk he had no rivals trying for it but in 2011 a player on the speed demos archive forum made a post explaining all of the little things a player could do to improve freddie anderson's 1017. he said that he was going to embark on a quest to beat it and his name was hydrage to pull this off hydrage was going to need both new strategies and improvements on the slowdowns from anderson's run as far as the slowdowns go there is the aforementioned missed jump in hangar and the boss jump in energy zone but hydrage also pointed out that the boss fight in base 1 was a bit slow he missed some of his shots on the first target causing the boss to appear about a second later than normal there were other smaller things too he lost a half second from needing to weave around bullets against the stage one boss his positioning could have been better for the stage five boss hydrage mentioned that you lose one frame from every extra jump that you do and across the whole run anderson did several extra jumps he also had one fairly big new strategy he would skip picking up invincibility in energy zone and jump straight across over this gap since he wouldn't have to go down and get invincibility it would save 2-3 seconds this new strategy combined with all the potential improvements from before meant hydrage had a real shot at doing this but getting enough of the improvements to save time combined with playing as well as anderson did elsewhere would prove to be nearly impossible months passed and heydridge wasn't able to beat it but then in july 2012 after hydridge had stopped playing for a while a contra player known as mr k came along with a breakthrough that boss fight in base 2 with the multiple heads that move apart remember how they're only vulnerable when the heads are together it turns out if you hit them on the frame before they start moving they stay vulnerable allowing the heads to take damage while moving apart successfully hitting the head on this 60th of a second window means they can potentially be destroyed in just two cycles saving about four seconds over anderson's three cycle so now hydrage had a few more seconds to work with if there was any time to pull off this run it was gonna be now hydridge got back to the grind and this time he wasn't stopping until he beat it it was time for this four-year-old record's reign to end [Music] in september 2012 hydridge posted a time it was 1016 beating anderson by one second instead of celebrating having beaten a four-year-old record however hydrage dwelled on the places he lost time his base stages had fairly poor spread rhythm compared to anderson despite his improvements on both of the bosses he got the bottom flame pattern in energy zone meaning he had to slow down and he hesitated a long time on some of the later flames too there were also reports from freddie andersen himself that he had achieved a 1016 of his own although he apparently wasn't proud of this run and never released video of it so hydrage wasn't done yet he may have beaten the 1017 but he knew it could go lower but what happened on september 30th 2012 blew expectations out of the water i'll settle for 12. i will settle for a 12. oh my gosh oh my gosh i will settle for 12 and i will submit hydrage had just completed an incredibly strong run he had saved four seconds from better spread rhythm in the base stages on top of nailing the two cycle kill on the base 2 boss his global timer patterns were great getting the middle flame and energy zone and little hesitation needed in hangar but he also knew he had lost some time mainly from missing the jump to skip invincibility in energy zone so he was really hoping the final time of this run would be 10 12. if it was a 10 13 he had decided he would keep doing attempts to go lower so he re-timed his run via a frame count begging that the final time would say 10 12. come on come on oh yes i love this game i'm done with this game oh my gosh oh hell yeah for the first time in five years someone other than freddy anderson was the contra record holder hydrage's 1011 would stand as the record well into 2013 when players once again began looking into finding new strategies to go even faster their run was starting to get close to the 10 minute mark getting under 10 minutes wasn't realistic but getting closer to it began to seem more possible but toward the end of 2013 a new competitor began to rise today he's known for his cuphead speedruns and for having beaten every nes game ever released but in 2013 he was a fairly small speedrunner just trying to get some records this is the mexican runner better known as tmr by october 2013 while playing on emulator tmr had lowered his personal best down to right behind hydrage's world record thanks to some new strategies and hangar he knew he could save the few seconds he needed to get the record the biggest was found by dussler and tmr if you pick up invincibility and take the bottom path you can then go straight through the claws without stopping saving about 2 seconds so he began doing some attempts to beat heidrage and on october 7th 2013 he had a good run going into base 2 with great spread rhythm unfortunately he missed the two cycle kill on the boss which made tmr a little angry however he would ultimately pick this time back up in the later stages he successfully made the jump in energy zone where hide rage fell then executed the new route through hangar in the end it was enough to get a 10 11. it beat high rage's recording by a tenth of a second but when adjusted to the same frame rate as his it was actually slower by just a fraction of a second tmr would go on to beat this time twice more that same week officially taking the record and lowering it to 10 10. these times were all performed on an emulator but by november 2013 he made the switch to playing contra on a real nes he saw results almost immediately getting a 10-10 on console after just a couple hundred attempts but he wasn't satisfied yet so throughout the next couple of months he kept doing attempts to lower the record closer to 10 minutes on december 2nd 2013 tmr had a run going that was about even going into base two after some good spread rhythm and a two cycle kill on the boss he knew he was on a really good pace [Music] he got the good boss spawn in snow field then was on to the energy zone where he unfortunately got the bottom flame pattern and two jumps from the boss still because his 1010 got an even worse global timer he picked up about a second and a half the hangar was excellent he got a great global timer and executed the invincibility route well going into the last stage he knew all he needed to do was not mess up and he would have a big new world record [Music] that's it man that's it goodbye this was pretty huge congratulatory messages poured in from across the community he had played for nine hours straight only to get this incredible record at the very end a fitting reward and in the description of the video was this sentence enjoy the run because this time might stay for a while [Music] yes world record [Music] well that was unexpected a 1005 this run had a very clean opening with some good spread rhythm and was even with a record through stage four the difference between this run and the 1008 came from an even better energy zone and hanger tmr got the ideal middle flame pattern with just one jump on the boss and flew through the hangar even faster than before this run pretty much cemented it tmr was the king of contra he had set the last several records in a row and nobody was showing any signs of making a push to beat him he was on top of the world but there was one other top level player his name was dk28 he didn't have a super fast time but that's partially because he had focused on other categories like the japanese version which skipped cutscenes and allowed for an overall lower time in january 2014 he started focusing his attempts on any percent where tmr had just recently achieved his 1005 but it quickly became clear that dk28 had one very distinct advantage over tmr see as the record became more optimized the quality of the player's spread rhythm in the base stages was becoming more and more important there's two main components to how good your spread rhythm is how fast you can mash and how well you can mash in a rhythm on screen is the estimated mashing speed of the last two contra record holders measured in presses per second you can see that hydrage's mashing speed was significantly faster than tmr's however hydrage struggled to maintain a consistent spread rhythm he had the tendency to over mash and often lost the rhythm after getting a good start tmr on the other hand was quite good at getting and maintaining a good rhythm but his mashing speed limited how many waves of bullets he could get on screen the ideal contour masher was somebody who had the mashing speed of hydrage with the rhythm of tmr enter dk28 dk's mashing rhythm was excellent once he got a rhythm going he was pretty much always able to maintain it and keep it strong but his mashing speed wasn't as good as hydrage's it was even better this was the magic combination for amazing spread rhythm which gave him a big advantage folks we're about to enter the reign of dk [Music] 28. we got it 1004 yes two weeks after tmr's legendary 1005 dk beat it with a 1004 the way he did it was by saving three full seconds in base two his spread rhythm was amazing enough to save that much time in one stage alone but he wasn't done yet a month later he got a 1002 with a cleaner boss fight in base 1 and less hesitation in hangar it was quite clear at this point that dk's skill set would be the future of contra speed runs incredible spread rhythm combined with precision elsewhere he had a three second lead over anyone else in the world so he took a break from contra in mid-2014 but after four months dk saw just how close he was to breaking the 10 minute barrier ever since matt turks 1055 from 2005 every single contra record had begun with a 10. when looking at his splits he knew he could make it start with a 9. he could save 4 seconds in energy zone since he got a really bad global timer in the 1002 and a slow boss fight there was also a bid he could save on the boss fight in base 1 and potential for a little bit of time save from tighter jumping in the waterfall the potential for a time in the 950s was more real than ever if anyone could do it it was dk in july 2014 he got back on his quest trying to get the first ever sub 10 in contra [Music] pb tv oh we finally broke the wall we finally broke the wall [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's done no spiders take your immortality bill holy [Music] this was dk 28 self-proclaimed holy grail it was a 958 that smashed the 10-minute barrier the community celebrated and dk was simply overjoyed his only significant time losses were from unoptimal jumping in the waterfall and getting some lag in the energy zone from a sprite overload that was really about it his spread rhythm was once again excellent he got the two cycle kill he got the middle flame pattern zero jumps from the boss and virtually no hesitation in hangar echoing freddie anderson's 10-17 from years prior this run was called one of the greatest speed runs ever performed and so it stood unrivaled all right so far so good this is a better run through [Music] that was weird what what what just happened what just happened tell me tell me you guys saw that what i just skipped half of stage one holy crap on december 15 2014 dk was doing some contra attempts when the level end theme played and he walked off of a ledge when he respawned he was suddenly in stage two he had just skipped the second half of the jungle and he had absolutely no idea how this opened all sorts of doors if this could be used consistently and levels could be ended early minutes could come off of the run contra speedruns would completely change now all they had to do was figure out how it worked so the community began a huge search effort people broke down the code of the game to determine exactly what the cause was and how it could be replicated a guy named al yosha was leading the search and he broke down his quest every step of the way documenting exactly what he was looking at the community was following him with every update he posted anticipating the discovery that would change contra speedrunning forever finally three months later he posted his findings he couldn't figure out what caused it after searching everywhere he could alyosha couldn't find any way for a player to trigger anything to end the level early his conclusion was that it was most likely a random hardware error meaning it wouldn't be reproducible on command to this day it's unknown what caused this glitch although there have been reports of a level n glitch happening to other players too if it ever gets figured out contra speedrunning as we know will be revolutionized and its discoverer will forever go down in speedrunning history even without this glitch by may 2015 dk was wanting to go back to any percent he was reliably able to save a second in stage three from better jumping and a better boss kill and without the lag and energy zone he could save over a second there as well so he decided his goal would be to take the record down 2 more seconds to a 956 and on may 21st he got halfway there [Applause] oh baby later that same day dk would get some more ammunition to help him out speedrunner zallard one found a new strat in the waterfall that could save about a second the objective of the waterfall is simply to jump to the top as fast as possible but the height of each jump actually varies slightly sometimes you would get a higher jump that allowed you to skip some platforms but for years it was thought to be random when this occurred mr k later determined that your jump height can be somewhat predictable if you take the same moves up every time and hold each right facing jump for their full duration you can ensure that your jump heights will be the same each time you play the waterfall so zallard figured out a new route to the top that could be taken every time that had two built-in higher jumps at strategic points to skip a couple of ledges this allowed the waterfall to be both really consistent and about a second faster than before thanks to this extra second and some potential time save in base 2 in snowfield dk got paces going quite a bit ahead of 957 however something always tragically went wrong game over that's it [Music] oh my god those spawns despawned my minecart we just lost record because of spawning and then on june 1st 2015 he got on this run [Music] unbelievably dk was on 953 pace there was no way this could last something had to go wrong but as energy zone started he got the middle flame pattern the perfect global timer this was it this was actually happening dk was on his way to smash his own world record no [Music] or maybe not 953 was just a little bit too unrealistic but in the meantime there were still more records that dk knew he could get a week later he took the record down to a 955 thanks to some big time saves in the waterfall on base 2 but energy zone had some lag and a slower boss fight he just knew that there was a little more he could do every run had time losses somewhere even if they were small because of his matching skill he had the potential to get times that nobody else in the world could get the question was how low was that potential well he was on 953 pace once maybe he could do it again oh baby 953 953 this run got a fast boss kill in base 1. this run got the new waterfall route this run got the 2 cycle kill in base 2. this run got the best boss spawn in snowfield this run got the middle flame pattern in energy zone and this run had the perfect global timer in hangar dk called it his masterpiece and it really was it was the result of months of grinding and a skill set that nobody else possessed a couple months after this run dk stops speedrunning and at this point he hasn't done contra attempts in over five years but what he did to the game won't be forgotten he had the skills to do things that nobody else could and used them to grind for times way ahead of anybody else and since he was so far ahead his 953 sat on top of the leaderboard for years but in 2017 someone new started making a push up the board his name was angry links and in january 2017 he became just the fourth person in the world to get a sub 10. a month later he was in second place and quickly closing in on dk's world record and as the months went on he got even closer as you would expect angry links as mashing couldn't quite keep up with dk's it was around 12 presses per second but he was still quite good at keeping it in a rhythm he didn't have much in the way of new strategies either there is a new route in the waterfall developed by chambers to make a jump over a flame on the bridge much easier and some new ways of shooting in base 2 to speed up a couple of the rooms but beyond that there wasn't a lot that he could do to improve over dk take this run on july 29th 2017 even with his new strategies he lost 0.9 in base 1 0.7 in the waterfall and 1.7 in base 2 putting him at 3.3 seconds behind the record halfway through the game he just couldn't keep up with dk's mashing and it made paces like this all too common this run seemed like a lost cause but believe it or not it wasn't despite over three seconds of deficit there was still theoretically a way angry links could pull this back as he moved into the snow field he committed to going for an incredibly risky jump that tmr popularized the yolo jump there's a section toward the start of the stage where the grenades being thrown are just too close for comfort so speedrunners usually briefly hesitate for it but it's technically possible to make it over them without hesitating if you execute a frame perfect jump 1 60th of a second too late or too early and you hit the grenades and die lynx went for the yolo jump and timed it right so he saved a fifth of a second he had about a second to save an energy zone from dk's slowdowns like the slight lag and the jump from the boss but one second wasn't enough for this run so lance decided to go for another incredibly risky strategy a trick nicknamed the leap of faith this particular flame isn't tied to a global timer and it randomly fires out players usually sidestep it by taking the top route which is slow because of the need to dodge this flame and jump down afterwards however it's possible to just go for the jump and hope the flame doesn't fire you only have about a five percent chance of not dying but it saves a second over the top route angry links decided he had to go for it and pray he didn't die sick no way he also got a good global timer and zero jumps from the boss incredibly he saved more than two seconds over the world record in hangar he saved just over half a second from dealing with the final set of claws better dk had paws buffered while lank simply jumped over the claw miraculously lynx was less than half a second behind the record going into alien's lair there were a few tenths of a second he could technically save there from better mashing into the head see he had a slim chance at this it was gonna be close [Music] oh are you serious did i split early oh my god this run would be retimed to a 953.80 a new world record by 3 100th of a second for the first time in three and a half years someone was faster at contour than dk28 but angry links wasn't done yet because just a few days after his record the biggest development in years was made this is the one cycle kill [Music] back in 2013 when mr k posted his findings on two cycling the base two boss he pointed out that a one cycle kill was theoretically possible too by doing the vulnerability glitch on both heads instead of just one they can both be taken out while moving apart however his setup involved wasting time to destroy the top target which normally wasn't taken out and was noted for being incredibly precise the general consensus was that it wasn't worth doing for a small time save however in july 2017 speedrunner dexter came along with a brand new setup that didn't involve taking out the top target you add the fire in the center have a bullet hit both heads on the exact frame before they start moving then move to the right in a precise spot and fire them down it was still incredibly difficult but it was doable and it saved two and a half seconds over the two cycle kill so with an extra chunk of time to save lynx had no choice but to keep going and on august 25th he had a run that saved nearly five seconds in base two half from the one cycle kill and half from really good spread rhythm however he bled time pretty badly in the back half losing almost four and a half seconds from no leap of faith or yolo jump a worse energy zone boss pattern and a slower claw pattern and hanger but he was just able to keep it together in alien's lair for a modest world record so now he had two incredible halves if you take the first half of his second record and add it to the second half of his first record it comes out to a 9 48 that wasn't a realistic time to achieve but getting closer to it certainly was so throughout much of 2018 lynx grinded contra to clean up the run and push it even lower i split late it's definitely a new world record [Music] sweet [Music] yo this might be a 952 yes dude yes [Music] yes yes yes dude yes dude holy oh my god dude yes 950.55 is where the record stands today aside from not going for the super risky jumps in snow field and energy zone and a couple of imperfect global timers this run had practically everything that links could have gotten that being said sub 950 is pretty much inevitable but who's gonna get there and how to this day angry lynx has been doing lots of contra attempts to try to get the coveted 949 it's getting really tough to save time though there's about a second that can be saved from better global timers but beyond that he needs to go for super risky moves like the leap of faith and he definitely can do it his consistency is incredible and link string together a nearly perfect run is certainly feasible however the potential for this record is even lower if you take someone with the mashing level of dk28 and give them all of the knowledge of strategies of today getting a time in the mid 940s can't be ruled out his 16 presses per second and incredible rhythm abilities are so important and they can save enough time in the base stages to take the record a couple seconds lower but still beating angry lynx's record is going to be incredibly hard regardless of who's playing will dk ever come back to try for the sub 950 will a new player rise up to the challenge or will the reign of angry links continue on we'll just have to wait and see thanks for watching [Music] you

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Keywords:

Id: GgOE64kgjjo

Length: 51min 22sec (3082 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/supper_is_ready]

Summoning Salt continues to be the gold standard for covering the history of speed running.

[u/zinthos8]

Did NOT expect Matt Turk to pop back up. Fantastic Video as always. Hope DK comes back someday.

[u/Pro_Hybrid]

51 new minutes of sweet, sweet Salt

[u/NotJigglyMan]

Sweet! I only knew TMR from Cuphead so this is awesome! Plus everything else obviously!

[u/haroon_shahzad]

<3 Summoning Salt

[u/11448844]

>MRW When I hear Matt Turk's name again

[u/Irjorjeh]

Summoning Salt is why i know anything about speedrunning

[u/Tetra-76]

DK28 was the first person I ever followed on Twitch!

I was very invested in the Smash Bros. competitive scene, and one day I stumbled upon one of DK's Smash 64 speedrun streams. I offered to help with some of the knowledge I had on SSB64, and we figured out some sick strats together, ones that didn't necessarily require competitive SSB64 skill to achieve. I was more of a Brawl player and he was more of a speedrunner than a fighting game player, so we had to be smart about it lol

Even years later, some of those runs were still slightly faster than the times listed on speedrun.com, done by pikashy, who's got an actual handle of competitive 64. He's most likely beaten them by now but I was so proud when I learned about that!

I really miss DK, he hasn't been active online at all in over 5 years, to my knowledge. I hope he can come back one day, if just to do some more laggy, Bees only Smash games with him and Zallard.

[u/[deleted]]

Never stop making these videos! <3