The Quest to Beat Matt Turk

in the early 2000s one of the largest speedrunning communities out there it was for the classic NES game like Tyson's punch-out dozens of players from all over the world competed with each other to set the fastest times they could on each of the 14 fighters tracked with the in game timer displayed during and after the fight it was a thriving community these guys sent e-mails back and forth detailing the strategies posting on old websites like game FA cues and kept track of their fastest times using online leaderboards there was a really fun mix of randomness and skill involved new strategies for faster times were regularly found keeping the game fresh and encouraging others to see just what they could discover Freer's punch-out remain is one of the most popular speedrun communities in the world but by the mid-2000s competition slowed down people kind of just stopped playing the game IND in a matter of months one of the most played speedruns out there suddenly lost all of its competition and silently faded into the background while other games took its spot by 2008 just about nobody was playing the game anymore but then in 2010 a player known as sinister won became the first player to speed around the game in years what he found was a deserted community the game fa Q's pages with strategy discussion had been deleted email sent back and forth along been forgotten and pretty much all that remained it was a website called read Tom's punch out with a leaderboard that showed what the world record was for each of the 14 fights sinister one was shocked by what he saw here all 14 records were held by the same guy a person named Matt Turk none of them had any videos to proof and it was hard to even find evidence on how Turk did each of these fights after finding Matt Turks email address and talking with him a bit sinister realized a couple of things first all signs pointed to every single one of these records being legitimate and second Matt Turk skill level was way way beyond any other player in the world and there was pretty much no hope in anybody else feeding some of them at least that's what he thought [Music] [Music] these are the 14 world record times that Matt Turk had achieved by the time sinister rediscovered the leaderboard they didn't have video proof to go with them but especially given when they were performed that doesn't mean it didn't happen hardly anybody was uploading speedruns to the Internet in the early 2000s Turk did however write down some of his strategies in detail on read Tom's punch-out site explaining how he achieved many of his types and how others could do the same he played the game for a decade and came up with so much in my opinion it's very likely that he performed all of his times legitimately but to understand how good they were we'll have to first understand the basics of the game punch-out mainly involves dodging out of the way of your opponent's punches and hitting them with your own punches courtesy of the fists of little Mack punching your opponent lowers their health bar and can eventually lead to a knockdown three knockdowns in one round is a TKO which will end the fight it's also possible to ko some fighters where they don't get up after mario the referee counts to 10 and the fight ends so Turkish Eve these 14 times from either TK owing or KO in each fighter will break down how we did them later but for sinister one to beat or tie most in them seemed out of the question thankfully though two of them were world record freebies that anybody watching this could match with a little bit of practice glass Joe and Don flamenco glass Joe is an infamously easy fight and his world record is infamously easy to attain as well his strategy simply involved waiting until he did his attack at 40 seconds a well-timed punch to the face upon him charging forward will knock him down in 42 seconds where he won't be able to get up in the fight will end at 42.00 punch out runs at 60 frames per second and there's two frames to time this punch for glass Joe to get knocked down and stay down at 42.00 this world record has been at forty two point zero zero probably ever since the game came out in 1987 the second relatively easy record is on don flamenco the fourth fight in the game with the strategy discovered by Martin Charlevoix in the late 90s to tie this record sinister had the punch him dodge out of the way then weight and punch don flamenco in the face on the last frame before he would block the punch if he's able to land it in this 60th of a second window he'll get a star punch or an uppercut that deals more damage to don flamenco this punch does enough to automatically knock him down he gets up but upon dodging his punch and hitting him in the face five times don flamenco goes down again and doesn't get up it'll be a KO at fourteen point nine seven seconds a world record that has been tied for at least two decades sinister tied both of those records in early 2010 but after that it was going to be a lot tougher to knock any bound no more freebies now he had to practice and try to improve his skills at the game throughout 2010 sinister1 got a lot better at the game and lowered each of his 14 times down but they still remained comfortably behind Turks times thankfully though he got some hope later that year a player known as Adela caught was interested in the hippo record which was another one that Turk had reached the theoretical lowest time on 37.6 one to pull it off however was another story king hippo is a super random fighter on any punch he throws he can either open his mouth or not he has a three and eight chance of opening on any given punch and you can only hit hippo when he opens his mouth he needs to open his mouth three times in order for you to deal enough damage to beat him so to get the fastest time possible you need him to open his mouth on each of the first three times he throws a punch that's 3/8 times 3/8 times 3/8 or about 5.2 7% but that's not all half the time he also does a delay between his second or third punches to get Turks time of 37 seconds he can't do that delay which cuts the odds in half so the sheer odds and getting the luck needed for this time were only about 2.6 4% the execution was extremely precise as well because of how the in-game timer works it ticks faster than a real second with an indie game second being made up of about 20 individual frames or 1/3 of a real second for some reason the programmers only made certain decimals possible to achieve on each fight point zero zero point two five point four eight point six one point eight two point nine seven and point nine nine if you end the fight in the first two frames of an in-game second you get point zero zero in the next few frames you get point two five and so on all the way to point nine nine his time of thirty seven point six one meant he could lose up to two frames before actually losing time in getting a thirty seven point eight two on average you have to hit hippo on either the first or second frame the opens his mouth on each punch that is some really precise timing now keep in mind even if you're able to execute that precisely you only have a one in forty chance of getting the correct pattern from hippo sinister ones fastest time was a thirty seven point nine seven but in October 2010 ad Ellicott came through in tied Turks thirty seven point six one which I mentioned before can't go lower at all what's crazy is that even with all that randomness and execution that was still considered one of Turks easier records to match with that the punch out community had managed to take down three of Turks times but these three all had something in common of Turks fourteen records it was known that four of them were at their theoretical limit and couldn't be beaten only tied it had been known for years that you couldn't go under 42.00 on glass joe under fourteen point nine seven on bond flamenco and under thirty seven point six one on King Hippo and all three of those times stand as the world records even today but for most of the remaining fights the limit on how low humans could go was unknown Turks times were incredible but for most of them it was at least theoretically possible to take them a decimal lower but in order to do that you would need to either beat Turks execution or get better luck or both enter mr. Sandin [Music] Terk Sandman time was two 20.00 the slowest of all 14 fights but that doesn't mean it was his worst you can't get star punches on mr. Sandman said the old damage quickly so even beating him in the first round is hard we'll get into the actual strategy behind this fight soon but in 2010 sinister1 was able to tie Turks to 20 it seemed like it was just another Turk time down but then Turk actually responded and beat Sinister's time with the claimed to nineteen point four eight once again with no video sinister would get a to nineteen point nine seven that wasn't recorded but he couldn't compete against a to nineteen point four eight so Turk was back on top and it's time once again stood unrivaled until a guy named dis Allard won got his hands on the game yes dude what zallard began playing Mike Tyson's punch-out seriously in early 2013 one fight he gravitated to early on was none other than mr. Sandman this fight from July 2013 shows his strategy to beat mr. Sandman quickly fights in punch-out can be broken down into phases with phase one being up until the Boxster's first knockdown phase two being until the second knockdown and phase three being until the TKO the first phase of the fight involves dodging out of the way of Sandman's rolling jabs ending him in the face you also get hit a couple of times on purpose and you'll see why later there's two fifty-fifty random delay Sandman to do and he did one of them leading to a 120 first knockdown phase two involved hitting Sandman a bit more then a random delay from Sandman before his dreamland Express pattern three extremely quick uppercuts that you have to avoid getting hit by zallard got the shortest delay from mr. Sandman and then pressed left up left up and left up really quickly in sequence to dodge the dreamland Express this allowed him to hit mr. Sandman in the gut 18 times in a row to deal damage extremely quickly and send him down for a second time now here's where getting hit comes into play it turns out that mr. Sandman is programmed to do another dreamland Express pattern if Little Mac gets knocked down at 1:59 or later into the fight so a player named jack wedge you doubt that by pressing select before the fight to lower your health to half taking damage early in the fight and then getting knocked down on purpose after Sandman's second knockdown you can end the fight quickly after he does a second dreamland Express oh holy [ __ ] this time from zallard tide Sinister's to 19 but he could still save a second and phase one by not getting the random delay that Sandman gave him but adding all that luck up across all three phases got crazy he needed neither of sandman's phase 1 delays the shortest delay for the first stream land Express then a good health refill for mr. Sandman for phase 3 and the short delay for his last stream land express that put the odds at 2.3 4% but even once Allard got all of that luck he also needed to just not mess up yes oh my god what is it what is it what is it holy [ __ ] dude oh my god I did it I actually this is it I beat a Matt Turk ton at long last one of Turks times had actually been beaten zallard one was the guy to do it and his time was celebrated across the punch-out community it broke new ground and made Turk seem not invincible for the first time since sinister came onto the scene in 2010 it had taken three years for anybody to officially beat any of Turks records four times down but Turk still had 10 records all to himself one of Turks finest times was his piston honda to record fifty point nine seven this time was remarkably close to the tool-assisted record for honda - which was fifty point two five seconds a tool-assisted speedrun or tas can create a theoretically perfect time by using save states slowing down time and even going frame by frame to enter inputs fifty point two five wasn't a real speed run but a demonstration of the fastest time possible and turk was just frames away from matching it he was able to get it by doing guard manipulation where you confuse piston honda by tapping and releasing up at strategic points to move his guard around so he can't block max punches it's extremely difficult and at one point requires a frame perfect punch to the face while his guard is in a moment of weakness Matt Turks time mirrored the theoretical tool-assisted time probably just losing a bit of time from losing frames from imperfect execution needless to say beating Turks Honda to time was nearly impossible so it stood unrivaled with all of his other records meanwhile in the years following sinister ones initial punch out grind he had focused much of his efforts playing single segments where you play the game from start to finish and add up your times in each of the 14 fights he streamed his attempts live on his twitch channel and people had gotten used to him speedrun in the full game but then one day in August 2013 he just started up a stream of piston honda to world record attempts keep in mind turks record is fifty point nine seven and it was impossible to go under fifty point two five so there wasn't much room to get a world record at least that's what everybody thought [Music] that's it that's it that's it I just beat the [ __ ] Taz oh my god I'm holding start so hard right now I'm holding start or never held in my life yes [ __ ] yes [ __ ] yes [ __ ] yes I just beat the Taz there's people [ __ ] it's gonna be a little for you were a flat oh my god I can't believe this is real he had just beaten the theoretically perfect tool-assisted speedrun by more than two seconds sister had just pulled off a fight with his own two hands faster than anybody had been able to even theoretically figure out with an emulator what had just happened well unknown to everyone watching a stream a few days prior someone had figured out how to beat that theoretical piston honda to record his name was macaws 'red and after discovering it he privately messaged sinister Wanda tome about his findings the main issue with the old tool assist the time was here in phase 2 where he had to wait a long time before throwing the star punch Honda normally starts dodging any star punches you throw at him after the third one but if you wait to throw it until he's doing his appropriately named-- eyebrow pattern it'll land and deal damage so the tool-assisted record had to stand still and wait until the eyebrow pattern began Makassar Digger doubt a way around that he discovered that piston honda too has a bizarre mechanic that few other fighters in the game have max damage uppercuts when Honda's guard is down you can press up and start to throw a star punch uppercut then let go of up when Honda brings his gloves up for whatever reason if performed correctly then not only can Honda not dodge this punch but it also deals more damage than a normal star so sinister simply implemented this max damage star punch one he would normally be waiting for the eyebrow pattern in phase two and sent him down about five seconds faster than normal over the following months Makassar did broaden his search for faster strategies through all 14 fights and ultimately made a new faster tool assisted speedrun of the entire game it featured improvements to 8 of the 14 fights meaning eight fights now had new theoretical load times that humans could try to get closer to for the past few years the only times of Turk that had been toppled were ones that were already theoretically perfect or ones that were more obviously imperfect like mr. Sandman though with this new tool assisted speedrun the horizon expanded so much Makassar had completely changed the playing field it was time to see what else these players could do the next big push to beat Matt Turks times came during one week in April 2014 where three of Turks records were about to go down it's here we see just how important Makassar dass was going to be coincidentally though the first one had nothing to do with his tasks I mentioned before there was a fourth record Turk headset that was at its theoretical limit that fight was great tiger with his time of 40 7.48 i remmber held don flamenco has that frame perfect punch to get a star well great tiger has four of them after punching tiger in the face you dodge out of the way of his jab then wait until the last frame before he would block and punch him in the face if you hit the perfect frame then you get a star punch before having to repeat this process three more times in the first phase thankfully phases 2 & 3 are free great Tiger gets up on a one count twice which means a single star punch from littlemac will send them down automatically there's no Rayna bliss in this fight and thanks to a couple of timing strategies saller discover to time a couple of the punches late in phase 1 the only difficult part of the fight is the four face punches but keep in mind you have a 60th of a second to time each of them someone just had to grind the fight out until they got the four frame perfect punches and on April 5th zallard was able to pull it off he got a forty seven point four eight tying Matt Turk and the theoretical perfect time meanwhile sinister1 was working on his own project Matt Turks piston honda one time of forty two point nine seven was a bit of a mystery since it was one of very few fights where he didn't reveal his strategy however thanks to the macaws ERDs new tasks as mister was able to come up with an even better one phase 1 was a variation of a strategy Smith Sarah discovered years prior using heavy guard manipulation to sneakin punches all over and get stars key parts to this phase included landing a gut punch at the start with a three frame timing window sneaking in an extra gut punch toward the end of the phase that a 25% chance of going through then not getting blocked at all on the last three face punches which is about 50% Honda gets up on a one count for Phase two so a single star punch is enough to send them down right away at the start of phase 3 sinister would do a max damage star punch similar to the ones make Hazzard found on piston honda to then hit him in the face and do a couple of star punches with a good health refill from honda it would be enough to get a low 42 second time and beat Matt Turk by just a little bit the odds in getting this fight were under 5% from randomness alone not taking into account the rather difficult execution nonetheless sinister very quickly got a run to phase 3 but unfortunately the bad refill from Honda meant yet to delay a couple of star punches and get a 43 instead of a 42 clock I got the bad refill yeah 43 flat goddamnit I got the bad refill guys got the bad refill sinister was getting really close he was now just three hundredths of a second away from taking another Turk time down all he needed was to get that good refill in Phase three but then quite literally out of nowhere this happened shouldn't I just quit right now while I'm ahead no [ __ ] that let's do the Vaughn Kaiser il strat see if I can do it again holy [ __ ] [ __ ] dude I think I just did what is happening oh oh oh my god oh my god oh my god hmm oh my god oh my [ __ ] god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my [ __ ] dude oh if you recall from before 30 5.97 matched Turks von Kaiser time where did that come from well Mike faison's punch-out has no level select and you aren't allowed to use save seats to get to whichever fight you want there is a password system but passwords only exists for a handful of the 14 fights so the fastest way to get to piss and Honda was to start a new game and beat both Glasgow and von Kaiser before getting your one shot apiece in Honda if it didn't work you'd have to lose intentionally and then beat Vaughn Kaiser again just to get another shot sinister randomly decided to go for this newly discovered Phase one strategy than the Kaiser has found and it happened to pay off it involves precisely tapping up at certain moments to manipulate Vaughn kaiser's guard up so that all of the punches went through he also had to get a random 50/50 star in Phase two and very precisely duck under a punch in phase one and phase three by double tapping down he also had the time the first punch of Phase two on the first frame possible in order to get a thirty five point nine seven he had to lose no more than a handful of frames across all of those locations and on literally his first attempt after getting the phase one strats at work he got all of that it was incredible and a couple of days after that sinister was able to get his good refill on on the one this is it this is it this is it this is it rip Dirk you are done I got the 42 [ __ ] yeah hi two [ __ ] five baby hell yeah hell yeah get high and with that over the course of four days thanks to the combined efforts of sinister zallard and macaws 'red three of turks times went down but of course Matt Turk still held six untied records and the more they played the more these six times seemed ridiculously impressive keep in mind that some of the game's top players have been trying for four years now and they were only able to match or beat about half of them let's take a look at Turks don flamenco two time one twenty three point nine seven this one was a bit of a unique case skill-wise it was actually one of the easiest times in the game but luck wise it was absolutely brutal see the way Don two works is whenever he's about to throw a punch you can hit him while he's winding up either in the gut or in the face on the first punch you throw and every seventh punch after that you'll get a guaranteed star on every punch between as long as you're holding a star you have a 1 in 16 chance in getting another star and believe me that is horrible from a speedrunning perspective for example you can theoretically get three random stars in a row on Don 2 which would be great but your odds in that are one in 4096 his health refill in Phase two is also random there's a one in eight chance he gives the lowest health refill a three and eight chance he gives a middle refill and a four and eight chance he gives the battery fill if you press select before the fight to lower your health to half as speedrunners often do on this fight that also makes his face 3 refill random with just a 1 in 8 chance he gets up with the smallest amount of health why the programmers made dawn to like this is unknown it's not like anybody would pay attention to these random stars or refills when casually playing the game but it leads to some pretty ridiculous fights if you get the luck the tool-assisted speedrun of dawn 2 gets five random stars and both of the low one and eight refills achieving a time of under a minute the odds of getting those stars and refills is about 1 in 6 point 7 million turks 123 point nine seven was much slower but punch-out players worked out that beating it still required odds of about 1 in 176 they would need a rain of star from one of the first two opportunities then the middle three and eight refill in Phase two then finally the one in a low refill in Phase three someone just had to grind it out and the guy who did it was a fairly unknown punch-out runner named Ken Anna phone whose specialty was speedrunning The Legend of Zelda but he had also done some work and punch-out and for some reason he gravitated toward fighting dawn - in on May 28 2014 after hundreds of attempts he got all the luck to align [Music] yeah there we go there you and on who he had only beaten Turk by one decimal but that didn't matter don t was done and another of Turks times had fallen Matt Turk still had five times left these remaining times in each stood unbeaten for more than half a decade in that same length of time the Ocarina of Time record had been lowered by 55 minutes Super Metroid had been lowered by five minutes and Super Mario Bros had been lowered by well two seconds but the fact that even serious efforts from several of the world's top punch-out players hadn't been able to break these five times was just extraordinary one of the most brutal times remaining was Turks bald bull one fight it featured a combination of crazy luck really precise timings and the need for persistence Turk said it took him over 1,000 attempts to achieve this time keep in mind to get an attempt at bald Bowl you have to put in the password for don flamenco 1 then beat him King Hippo and gray tiger so it took him a really long time to get his fifty eight point nine nine the way he did it was by simply attempting to replicate the tool-assisted fight as closely as he could and it was a brutal strategy indeed it involved needing three random 5050 stars throughout the fight two specific patterns from bald bull and numerous frame perfect or close to frame perfect punches throughout the odds worked out to just a 2.3 percent chance or about 1 in 43 there's actually been some confusion over what Turks exact time was initially being reported as a 57 point nine nine but years later being changed to a fifty eight point nine nine but regardless this time just seemed brutal to beat and then Makassar came along and changed everything in his tool-assisted speedrun one of the eight fights that Makassar improved was bald bull one in a few months later the zallard used it to do attempts to beat Turks of the eight point nine nine Makassar do phase one was discovered by martin Charlevoix fifteen years before his task came out it involved alternating face punches to get stars and using star punches into his rolling jabs it was easy it had no randomness and it always got bull down at 17 seconds with one star fees too was a bit tougher you need a 50/50 random start at the start of the phase then land a to frame punch just as bull is lowering his guard and get another random start just after you then need a 25% pattern where bull throws more rolling jabs and can send him down with three stars in her inventory for Phase three zallard use a slightly safer version of Makassar fight to pull it off you need the 75% pattern with rolling jobs then depending on his pattern after potentially needs to land a frame perfect' star punch after his uppercut that's how one sixtieth of a second window to Taemin across all three phases that works out to odds of about one in twenty one about twice as good as Turks fight and the execution was a bit easier to so his outward set out to improve Turks time and on June 22nd 2014 he came through and got a 57.00 beating Turk by nearly a full second keep in mind though Makassar each task time was fifty five point two five so although Turk was off of his task by about point one five zallard was slower than his by almost two full seconds that's how much Makassar strat was able to help four bald bolt - it was once again Makassar to the rescue Turk achieved this time of one twenty one point eight - by landing extremely random punches called bulldozers when Bulls guard is down if you hit him in the face but let go of up all the punches going off it's possible the punch will get through his guard and hit him for a start problem is when I say possible I mean it has a 1 in 16 chance of actually going through it was possible to beat Matt Turks time using two bulldozers and getting a specific pattern from Bo laughter but the odds in it or over one in a thousand so Makassar found a way around it when Bulls guard is up he found you can punch him in the gut and tap up while the punches going off to potentially sneak the punch through his guard it was called a misdirected gut punch and you could do it whenever you'd normally do a bulldozer and rather than a one in 16 chance in going through the misdirect that got punched had a one in four chance so instead of odds of over one thousand of beating Turks time the odds were only about one in 64 that was enough to get sinister to start grinding to beat it the execution wasn't too hard the two rolling jab counters at the start were the hardest part and they each had a three frame window on July 5th 2014 sinister1 took down Matt Turks 11th world record yes yes thanks the macaws 'red both of the bald bull records went down in the span of about two weeks Matt Turk now only had three untied records to his name sodapoppin ski super macho man and Mike Tyson these three records had stood the test of time these three records had stood through thousands of attempts from top players in the world these three records stood head and shoulders above each of the other eleven records Matt Turk had said to see why let's take a look at that super macho man time forty eight point eight two [Music] so the good news about this fight there's a password that you can put in that sends you straight there that made it so you could do a lot of attempts really quickly the bad news the execution was really hard and the luck needed was the worst of all 14 fights let's break it down ma chose usual patterns to throw 5 punches before staining still for a while on the build-up to his mini spin pattern where he spins around quickly and tries to punch you for the first 5 punches of the fight the first second fourth and fifth punches all need to be uppercuts for Turk's strategy to work so Terk strategy was to raise his guard and punch him in the gut then to intercept his first uppercut with a punch to the face before he ducks down his second uppercut is then taken care of by raising macho's guard to hit him in the gut again then hitting him in the face before he ducks down punches three four and five are canceled before he can throw them by hitting him in the gut then macho stands still for his mini spin pattern turk unleashed a barrage of max damage star punches and punches to the face and gut all while moving his guard around by pressing and releasing the UP button at strategic times in order to get all the punches in needed to knock him down macho needs to stand still furs and long as possible which is only about a 1 in 4 chance so altogether not counting attempts miss for execution there was just a 1 in 34 chance of getting out of the first phase of the fight for phase 2 macho once again needs to stand still long enough to sneak in enough punches and uppercuts and 3 stairs need to be in your inventory by the time macho backs up that bumps the odds up to just over 1 in 90 the execution on sneaking each punch in also needs to be tight enough for the clock to not roll over to 37 seconds before beginning a spin pattern and to give you an idea of how hard that execution is these are the inputs that need to be done to sneak in all of those hits macho's guard is in transition so you begin the phase by pressing up in B to throw a face punch but must release up while the punches being thrown so macho doesn't raise his guard the pocket then the uppercut is done by pressing up and start but releasing up right after macho brings his guard up so it does max damage then a technique Turk invented called the dizzy destroyer is performed you tap up then immediately release it and throw a gut punch then press up and beat to throw a face punch but let go of up while the punch is going off so macho lowers his guard and the punch can hit his face finally one more gut punch is snuck in by tapping up to bring macho's guard up then pressing B to throw the gut that's a lot of inputs and it's all performed right here the start of phase 2 then macho backs up to go into a spin pattern in macho spin pattern he spins around between three and eight times before stopping free to land your start punch the clock stays frozen this whole time but in order to throw your star punch fast enough you need to know when he stops instead of doing another dodge the two ways to do this were one to listen for the last spin punch which is slightly higher pitched than all the rest [Music] or to stare at the clock and then as soon as it starts moving again throw the star punch phase three is a repeat of Phase two except instead of needing the long delay before a spin pattern you need the short delay since macho gets up with less health the second time and doesn't need to be hit as much that pushes the odds to about 1 in 181 in getting the luck needed to beat macho in 48 seconds like Turk did not to mention the precise tight and essentially flawless execution needed the whole way through so we're looking at odds of about half a percent an execution harder than just about any fight in the game who would be crazy enough to try to top that well as Allard won of course he gets up I'm like okay and he's just like nope in the middle of 2014 zal 'red began doing attempts to beat Turks forty eight point eight two he was a veteran of the game at this point so he saw results very quickly getting times of fifty and forty nine in July and August respectively these fights both lost time in Phase two because the clock ticked over 237 before the spin pattern meaning his execution was a little too slow but hundreds of attempts later that 48 was still untouchable his Allard realized that tying Turks time would be hard enough but actually getting under a decimal of point eight two was going to be essentially impossible unless he added in something that Turk didn't do so that's what he decided to do he would assume that macho would stop spinning on the third spin punch of phase 3 allowing him to throw the uppercut faster since he didn't have to wait for the audio or a visual cue this didn't guarantee a time under 0.82 but it at least gave him a better shot unfortunately it made the luck needed even worse macho has just a five and sixteen chance of stopping on the third spin punch so the odds of the entire fight were now over one in 500 zallard stream some of his attempts to be Turks time but most of the attempts just looked like this this 48.8 2 was legendary zallard through attempt after attempt at macho but it wasn't happening he adds a hit punch after punch be precise in every location and wait for one in 500 odds it didn't look like it was happening and then his aller got this attempt passed phase 1 okay oh my god at 25 with a star that's [ __ ] crazy okay because I got that 25 that saved it oh my god please tie it tie it as he sat there waiting for the time he was praying that it was fast enough to tie Turks point eight to but he knew there was a slim chance he had gone even faster and gotten the point six one all he could do now was wait for the fade out and see the blue screen a forty eight point four eight Turks time wasn't tied it wasn't edged out it was thoroughly beaten by zallard 1 1 in 500 oz were defied and Matt Turk now only had two untied records to his name this 213 on Mike Tyson was by a long shot the hardest fight to pull off out of all 14 on don flamenco 1 turkey a frame perfect punch on great tiger Turk had to land 4 frame perfect punches to get his to 13 Tyson Turk had to land 20 frame perfect punches Tyson's pattern is to throw uppercuts for the first minute and a half of the fight you can hit him twice after each one the first one deals five damage as long as it's from the same side of the screen that Tyson threw from and the second one normally deals one damage no matter what however if you delay the second punch to the last frame before he would block it it deals five damage it's set at one that's a frame perfect punch you have a sixtieth of a second to time it and for the first phase of the fight literally all you're doing is landing frame perfect punch after frame perfect punch [Music] Tyson begins to fight with 96 health since you could deal 10 damage on each punch Tyson throws that means Tyson those throw 10 punches for you to be able to send them down the first time and you need to be frame-perfect on nine of them to get an optimal first knockdown even if you hit the nine frame perfect punches though Tyson's pattern largely determines what time you get he can randomly delay for an in-game second between certain punches or potentially even do a long delay called the eight second delay which immediately kills an attempt in turks 2:13 he got a pattern from Tyson where he flat out didn't delay at all a pattern that was only about three and a half percent likely and led to a first knockdown time of 54 seconds for the second phase he gets up with 56 health that means 6 punches from Tyson and you need to be frame-perfect on five of them Tyson could give random delays here too so what's important is that you get Tyson to throw that sixth uppercut before he switches his pattern from uppercuts the hooks at 130 as long as the uppercut comes out before 130 it's all good even if the knockdown comes a few seconds later since you have to punch him down Turki one delay from Tyson and phase two but thanks to his perfect phase one it led to a blazing fast 128 second knockdown in phase 3 Tyson switches to throwing hooks if you wait to the last 60th of a second before hitting him after he throws a hook that single punch will deal 5 damage if you're early you'll have to punch him twice for 4 damage total and if you're late you'll get blocked and deal no damage these frame perfect punches are generally regarded as tougher to hit than the uppercut ones Tyson gets up with 40 health for phase 3 so 8 frame perfect punches would be a perfect phase 3 Turk hit 6 frame perfect punches and got a bit of a slow pattern from Tyson it was enough to set a world record of 213 this 213 stood apart from his other records in a way it's legacy reached far past his other 13 times and for years it was just this impossibly fast time that the top players couldn't even get close to not only did it land 20 frame-perfect punches but the pattern he got from Tyson was just ridiculous he achieved this time in December 2007 with knock down times of 54 128 and 213 as of mid 2014 nobody else had ever gotten under 55 for the first knockdown or 129 for the second knockdown Turk not only was able to get that 54 at 128 but then capitalized on it and phase 3 and played almost perfectly of course other top players fought Tyson years later but their best efforts came up short in February 2011 sinister1 said his long-standing personal best of 219 he got a second knockdown of 132 thanks to a slower Tyson pattern and then hit for frame perfect hits in phase 3 to end up with his time for years that was the fastest time with video then in April 2014 the zallard got a 217 with a 133 second knockdown 6 frame perfect hits in phase 3 led to the fast time but still Turks time from 7 years prior was four seconds faster they couldn't touch it it's little owned but then in July 2014 sinister1 decided he was going to try to do it nearly all of Turks records had fallen by that point but his 213 was still standing sinister had two viable pasts beating it the first was the long shot where he would get the second knockdown by 133 which didn't require too much luck then hit all eight frame perfect hits in phase 3 hitting all 8 frame perfect hooks in phase 3 could save 5 or more seconds over Turks phase 3 meaning his face 3 pattern essentially didn't matter hitting all 8 frame perfect hits guaranteed he beat Turk and could potentially beat him by several seconds but of course hitting all eight was ridiculously hard and had only been done a handful of times in the game's history over several years so he had another plan the second method was what semester was aiming for getting a first knockdown closer to 1:30 then getting a better pattern from Tyson in Phase three and hitting six or seven frame perfect like Dirk did he essentially just had to match Turks execution then get better luck at the end of the fight and would end up with a time like 211 or 212 Sinister's personal best was at 219 over the course of a few months in 2014 he put in thousands of attempts to beat Turk and get a 212 on Tyson here's how it went [Music] [Music] Wow 2:16 dude holy [ __ ] I just beat Ally [Music] oh my god yes yes dude oh my god PV all right at least I got a PV holy crap man yes tighter candies baby a tiny at I'm a tired time sinister had tied Turks legendary to 13 but he wasn't satisfied he didn't want to match Turk she wanted to beat him it was 212 or bust [Music] you on September 6 2014 the punch-out community woke up to this a 210 not a 212 achieved by zallard not sinister while all eyes were on sinister zallard had quietly been doing attempts in the background his personal best was at 216 3 seconds behind sinister but on one magical attempt he dropped it by 6 seconds after landing all 8 frame perfect hits off of a 132 it was the first time zallard had ever hit all eight in phase 3 the 213 was done zallard was the new Tyson champion and Turk only had one untied record to his name sodapoppin ski in 40 6.48 what was it about this fight that made it stand so long why did it outlast Don - with his absurd random stars why did it outlast macho with the one in 500 pattern for the 48 why did it outlast the 20 frame perfect punches on Mike Tyson the answer is actually pretty simple nobody had any idea how Turk did it yeah while sinister and zallard were spending months trying to beat each of Turks 14 records this one always just stood in the background it was like a bad itch that just couldn't scratch for all the other 13 records they at least had a path to beating them they knew what he did and they knew how they could improve over it for sodapoppin ski they had no idea and since there was no video to go with it they actually thought it could be a bogus time let's look at the fight itself beating soda fast takes advantage of a bizarre glitch like mechanic when soda throws an uppercut if you press down to block or duck soda freezes in place you're free to hit him in the gut when he does and the star you get from that punch will automatically knock him down no matter what so you just do that once in each face that beat him very quickly soda is also very random he always starts each phase with two hooks but then he only has a 75% chance of doing the uppercut pattern you need to beat him quickly he can also randomly delay before the uppercut with only a 25% chance he'd as the shortest delay so you'd counter each of sodas first two hooks then duck and hope soda does the fastest uppercut freeze him in place to get the star then cancel his next uppercut and use the star to send him down and if he did that in each phase your time would be 49 seconds three seconds behind Turk you couldn't cancel his hooks any faster you couldn't force a faster pattern a 46 was just too fast and so long after each of Turks other 13 records were beaten this one stood and stood and stood and then macaws 'red came to the rescue by early 2015 allard was very interested in finally taking Turks last time down so he asked Makassar for some help in figuring out how macaws 'red pointed out that there were aspects of the tool-assisted speedrun for soda that could probably be utilized in a real-time run namely getting the frozen punch for a start quicker the old process was holding down then waiting for his uppercut then having him freeze and punched him in the gut with Makassar death--it you could press down then assume he does the shortest delay and press beads a gut punch then press down while the punch is going off to freeze him in place this works to get the star just the same and it saves about 2 seconds meaning faces could potentially be just 15 to 16 seconds long and as it turns out this is likely the method Turk used to get his time the problem was even with this strategy beating Turks time would be incredibly tough you need both uppercuts and the shortest delay for each phase of the fight which works out to odds of 1 in 150 1 the execution was tricky too since the input of gut-punching then tapping down was very precise and what's more Turks time of 40 6.48 was very optimized for this strategy meaning his execution was probably really tight but at least salad had a strategy now on January 24 2015 he did attempts on soda with low expectations given the hard execution and one in 151 odds but on attempt number 8 he was able to get out of phase 115 we got one now we just need two more in a row oh [ __ ] okay all right what all right okay um by some miracle it had taken zallard just eight attempts to get one in 150 odds but this time fell short of turkic by half a second and as zallard kept playing he realized that Turks forty six point four eight seemed to have better execution than he could get with the strategy he was doing a high forty six seemed way more likely than a mid forty six so he had reached a dead end but just a few days later someone found something huge his name was Jack wedge and he had played the game alongside Turk more than the decade prior at one point holding the bald bull one world record but he had come back all these years later to share a new strategy he had just discovered this screwdriver after cancelling sodas first two hooks you could hold down a right dodge then press B and then down to hit him in the gut right as Matt goes back to the center this right dodge wasted the exact number of frames low at the gut punched his soda on the first frame possible to make the strategy work guaranteeing the fastest phase possible with this zal 'red knew he had a legitimate shot at beating Turk he did more attempts to see what he could get and on January 29th 2015 he got this [Music] [ __ ] [Music] oh my god dude is that it is that it holy [ __ ] holy [ __ ] when sinister1 started to run this game in 2010 he had no idea what was in store for the future mat turks records were just too good to quote himself they have little to no chance that even sniffing some of those times instead over the next five years this is what the community accomplished that's it that's it that's it I just beat [ __ ] tennis oh my [ __ ] high dude this is it this is it this is it this is it holy [ __ ] no [ __ ] way yes holy [ __ ] it's [ __ ] done it's legend yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes [ __ ] yes it's over dude that's it that is it you [Music] and with that all 14 of math tricks legendary times had been tied or beaten it took half a decade but thanks to the combined efforts of a delicate jack wedge cañedo phone macaws 'red sinister1 and zallard won this monumental task had been accomplished in the years since nearly every world record you've seen in this video has been broken there's been huge advancements in strategy and improvements in execution as well so let's jump forward in time and take a look at how today's records chalk up to math Dirk's times thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,036,973

Rating: 4.9619384 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: TBR9ypSOTGQ

Length: 59min 33sec (3573 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MyLittleWaIrus]

LOVED the premise of this one: stumbling upon a deserted community dominated by one mysterious runner, and working with each other to put the pieces back together.

If you're checking these comments after being slightly concerned that this is his third video on this one game (that isn't even super popular), seriously just start watching.

[u/ZillaSmasher]

The casual reveal at the end that he has the world record for Tyson. Legendary.

[u/Afronerd]

I love the vibe of this video. The community being revived to try to take down an absolute beast of a player.

[u/Itsthejoker]

I can't believe that he doesn't mention that HE IS THE WORLD RECORD HOLDER FOR SINGLE-SEGMENT PUNCHOUT

https://www.speedrun.com/mtpo/run/y81lwwnz

[u/transizzle]

Loved this video, might have been Salt's best yet. I have to ask, though - why did the community seem to unanimously accept Turk's times as legit? He seems to have had the forum posts to back up the strategies that he used but usually exceptional times require exceptional evidence, even in the mid-2000s. We still had SDA and other such platforms. The amount that he pushed these games without any realistic competition seems crazy. (Not saying he didn't do it, but wow.)

[u/Thoron_Blaster]

A new Summoning Salt video!? Yessss!

[u/uglidoll]

hey i beat don 2

[u/mcmoor]

The Summoning Salt video keeps getting longer each upload lol. The next one maybe will be a feature-length movie.

[u/about_350]

Such a great video