On November 18th 2013, Sorceress Skip was
found by Touval. A skip that was seen as the holy grail for
Spyro 3, allowing you to bypass the 100 egg requirement to enter the final boss. When it was first found, it sparked a gold
rush within the community, and several players were attempting to set a new world record
with the skip. The record before the skip was discovered
was a 59:36 by Saboom, but after the skip was found. I guess you could say that the speedrunners
broke the game in half. As the record was below the 30 minute mark
by August of 2014, when the runner Grantchil would set a 29:02, where the record would
remain for the rest of that year. There was definitely room for improvement,
and a new player would begin to contend for the record in Spyro 3 any%. And his name is JeremyThompson. Jeremy would lower the record throughout 2015,
breaking the 29 and 28 minute barrier. Grantchil would take the record back in October
of 2015, but when Jeremy got it back himself the next month - He would never let go, and
Jeremy has been the world record holder for the category ever since. Occupying first place for over 6 years. But Jeremy doesn’t just care about the record,
he wanted to achieve perfection, and so, he set out to lower his time until he got a run
that was worthy of that title. When Jeremy set the first ever sub 25 minute
time in July 2016 you would think that, that was it. The pot of gold, at the end of the rainbow. But no, Jeremy wanted to take the record lower,
and was starting to approach sub 24. He would achieve a 24:21 in July 2017, and
pushing the record below the next minute barrier, would prove to be a tall order. In fact, it would take him 1 year and 8 months
of on and off playing. But after 20000 attempts the 23:58 was here. The run is still standing strong today, and
is coming up to its 3rd year at the top and is generally viewed as one of the greatest
Spyro records of all time. Today we’re gonna take a look at how Jeremy
did it, and how Spyro 3 was completed in under 24 minutes. What? What? What the f… Now this is a perfect example of a malding
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by clicking the link in the description, or by going to Keeps.com/Ricky. That’s K-e-e-p-s.com/Ricky Alright, let’s get into the run. From the get go Jeremy starts out in Sunrise
Spring. This is one of four homeworlds in the game,
all based around certain times of the day. Within these homeworlds, you can travel through
portals to get to different levels, and Jeremy begins by going to Sunny Villa, where he will
be using a trick you’ll see a lot throughout this run. “Proxy Jumping.” When Spyro does a charge jump and you try
to tap X as you’re descending from the jump, Spyro will do a tiny stutter in the air. If you kill an enemy and do this stutter on
the hitbox of the enemy’s dead body, you’ll be sent up into the air with high velocity. This allows Jeremy to go through the top of
a building and skip straight to the end of the level. Since this is the any% category, Jeremy does
not need to acquire all 100 eggs for the final boss entry. Instead, the objective is to rescue a character
at the end of each level, which is simply done by finding and talking to them. Upon rescuing them, they will exit the portal
and help you reach the next world once you’ve rescued them all. Jeremy compiled a big spreadsheet with his
consistency on all the major and minor hurdles in the game. As we go along, I’m gonna be pointing a
couple of these percentages out. It should give you an idea of how unlikely
it is for this run to have come together. Immediately after Sunny Villa, we have one
of the most precise tricks in the game, with Jeremy’s success rate being roughly 45%
for a first try. Jeremy first lines his camera up in a precise
way, and then charges forward to scrape the top most pixels of the waterfall, with this,
he triggers one of the most classic Spyro glitches, the Swim in Air. Spyro’s swimming speed is very fast, and
Jeremy can essentially go out of bounds wherever he pleases, but his next destination is Seashell
Shore. This level has a 14 egg requirement for entry,
but every level's loading zone in Spyro 2 and 3 is located directly beneath where the
portal would be. So if you can reach it, you can enter the
level early without getting the eggs, as Jeremy does in this run. In seashell shore, another proxy jump is used
to skip to a later part of the level. Proxies have a wide range of variable heights,
and Jeremy got the lowest possible height to make this one work. If Jeremy got a higher launch he would have
been able to save another second from going through the top of the wall, but the moment
the proxy happens, Jeremy has to react on the spot and go for a backup strat if he doesn’t
get the desired height. He then enters a bonus challenge and quits
out, otherwise the game won’t put you in a swimming state, where you won’t be able
to hit the squid and finish the level. Next up is molten crater, which requires 10
eggs to unlock, so once again, we’ll need to hit the loading trigger below the map. The entry into the level was said to be the
hardest skip back when touval ran the game, but Jeremy makes it look easy, and has it
down to a tee. The same goes for the boar proxy at the start
of the level, something that used to be hard, but Jeremy’s is extremely consistent at
it. He simply cruises to the end of the level,
and moves on with the run. With two more levels to go in the first homeworld,
it's luckily smooth sailing. In Cloud Spires, the developers put the end
of the level just a little too close for us speedrunners, and of course, we’re gonna
take advantage of that, and complete the level in around 20 seconds. For the last level in sunrise spring, you
may remember this guy. Moneybags, who always want the gems that you’ve
worked so hard to collect. Luckily for us, we can rescue Sheila without
paying this greedy dirtbag. In the tunnel across from cloud spires there’s
a flight powerup that you normally use to get an egg at the end of the tunnel. But Jeremy turns around immediately upon grabbing
the powerup, uses it to fly out of bounds and grabs another swim in air from the water
texture that’s sticking out slightly from the wall. Where he then flies into the Sheila’s Alp
loading trigger. Skipping the moneybags payment completely This level is also fairly straight forward. You just have to take out some mushroom houses
and enemies to escort a goat to the end of the level. Upon freeing all 5 characters, you’ll get
a convenient teleport to the balloon, which is why the levels are done in a specific order. Before moving on to Midday Gardens, we have
to fight Buzz, which is a pretty easy fight as opposed to the later ones. Jeremy just has to stand near the border of
the arena to get Buzz to stop rolling. In the later stages of the fight, Buzz will
have a fire wall around him that you need to wait out. Jeremy turns the camera sideways in order
to despawn the fire wall to make him vulnerable as quickly as possible. Rinse and repeat until he’s defeated. Now it’s time for Midday Gardens, home to
some of the most difficult execution in the run. It’s very easy for speedrunners to be on
auto-pilot during the opening part of the run, but at some point, the difficulty starts
ramping up and you have to start paying attention. The turning point for Spyro 3 is definitely
Midday Gardens, and despite its difficulty, Jeremy delivers one of the fastest hub 2s
the world has ever seen in this very run. Jeremy first needs to head to Sgt. Byrd’s Base, which has a 700 gem requirement
for entry. We’ve barely collected any gems or eggs
so far, so we’ll need another way in. Another swim in air can be used, by going
into this pool of water and squeezing the bottom of the bridge with the surface of the
water to clip Spyro out of bounds with a well-timed charge. In Sgt. Byrd’s Base, you have to escort the hummingbird
to the end of the level, but the hummingbird's pathing is quite complex. There are a few mandatory checkpoints that
Jeremy needs to pass through to get the hummingbird to move forward, but you can also get optional
checkpoints by defeating certain enemies as you’re going through, which can save upwards
of 5 seconds over the course of the entire level. Jeremy takes care of this with ease and moves
on to the next level. Next is Spooky Swamp, where Jeremy climbs
some scenery to clip through a wall and once again enters the level early without fullfing
the egg requirement. In the level, Jeremy does another proxy jump
off of an alligator to soar across the water and get to the end quickly. With some additional egg hovering swag at
the end. 70% of runs make it past the crocodile proxy
at the start of the level, so it can cause some runs to end here. Proxies start getting a lot harder when the
enemy you’re proxying off of is smaller, but if the alligator is considered small,
just you wait for the next level. Jeremy now goes out of bounds to head to Bamboo
Terrace, which is home to the second hardest proxy in the game, with Jeremy’s estimate
being a 40% success rate. The strategy for a while was to defeat all
the enemies at the start and go for a trick that’s known as a squeeze proxy. Which was done by wedging yourself between
the wall and the rolling rock as the panda’s were pushing it, then gliding through a wall
to get to the end. However, the end of the level is straight
across to the right as you spawn, but the bridge to get across only comes down once
you beat the level. This is where our tiny bug friend comes to
our aid, as he provides us with a tricky proxy to get onto a rooftop. Afterwards a trick called the Sproderman is
used to climb along the wall without losing much height. And yes, those are the words Spyro and Spiderman
put into a blender. With 2 levels to go in Midday Gardens, Jeremy
tackles Enchanted Towers next. With his main goal being to flame 3 rockets
to destroy the sorceress statue at the end. The start of the level and the statue is separated
by a huge wall, and to get over it, Jeremy will use a unique strategy that doesn’t
include a proxy. He first jumps onto a ledge and makes his
way to a pillar that’s barely reachable with a charge jump glide into hover, where
he does it once more to get on top of the wall. He then drops down, and flames the rockets
to close out the level. Finally comes Icy Peak, which has always been
the level that’s been saved for last among top runners, due to how isolated the portal
is from the others. Jeremy starts out by jumping onto the cannon
and taking out the big ice wall at the start. You can in theory jump around it, but it’s
extremely hard and only saves a second and a half, so Jeremy deemed it to not be worth
it. Now he performs a jump from from the beginning
to the end, and this one is always a bit of a clencher. Jeremy makes this jump look easy, and gets
past it 80% of the time, but this long soar to the end is a huge killer for new players. All that’s left is climbing the stairs and
rescuing the final NPC in Midday Gardens. Now Jeremy has to face Spike, the second boss
of the game, and with an already difficult world, now comes a very difficult boss. It takes 6 hits to take down Spike, and Jeremy
wants to take his health down as low as possible here, for a trick later in hub 3. This fight is one of the highlights of Jeremy’s
run, so I'm just gonna let you watch it in full. A 25 second fight, with all of his health
points drained. Perfect. Jeremy was now 3 seconds ahead of his best
ever pace out Spike, in other terms, this is the fastest run in the world up until this
point. Let’s see how it continues to unfold. Evening Lake, a calm exterior, yet more brutal
levels await behind the curtain. Only a small handful of Jeremy’s runs make
it to Evening Lake, and while he's had some good runs to this part, none are as fast as
this one, so the nerves slowly start to settle in. The first level, Bentley’s Outpost luckily,
isn't too bad. To get into the level, Jeremy gets spyro to
the top of the ladder and initiates a glide to get out of bounds. The wall collision Jeremy flies through though
has a weird quirk. Spyro 3 has two NTSC versions of the game
in what the community calls 1.0 and 1.1. For some reason the collision on the walls
in evening lake was made significantly higher on 1.1. You can still get out of bounds to enter Bentley’s
Outpost early, but it loses about a second or two. The Spike is Born cutscene is also missing
on 1.0, which allows any runner with 1.0 to save 5 seconds heading into spike. 1.1 does gain back a few seconds in a handful
of spots, but overall, 1.0 saves around 6 seconds over the course of the run. So that’s the version Jeremy used to get
this run. The out of bounds into Bentley’s Outpost
also means that not a single gem is given to this mr monopoly lookin headass, so that’s
always great isn’t it? In Bentley’s Outpost, Jeremy makes sure
to load the seals onto the screen at the right time, to initiate their cycle of throwing
their snowballs, so when he gets near them, he can reflect them back without wasting any
time. Afterwards, you’re supposed to reflect a
snowball to hit the gong, but it’s easily reachable from the ground. The rest of the level is just pushing some
blocks to create a path to escort Bentley’s brother to the end. Simple stuff. Frozen Altars is more of what we’ve already
seen, with the developers putting the end of the level conveniently right at the start. A proxy off of a mammoth allows Jeremy to
get to the other side of the temple. As a side note, Jeremy got the lower proxy
height in this run. If you get additional height, you can go through
a hole on the right side of the temple to save a couple of extra seconds. Oh, and thank god we don’t have to do any
boxing in this run. I could almost make a separate video talking
about how bad this minigame is for speedrunning. Moving on though. Using the same out of bounds as before, we
now enter Fireworks Factory, home to the hardest trick in the game. The firefly proxy. A trick so impactful, the second fastest option
is 35 seconds slower. And yes that does mean running all the way
around the level the normal way. Jeremy actually misses the firefly proxy in
this run, so instead of going all the way around, it’s faster to die to get the firefly
to respawn for another attempt, which he hits on his 2nd try. This is the only major mistake Jeremy made
in this run, but it’s no surprise as he estimates a first try to be a 35% chance of
success. Again keep in mind, 35% is merely Jeremy’s
success rate with the trick as a whole, the movement of the firefly and also other creatures
you’re trying to proxy on can vary in its pathing. What threw Jeremy off here was the firefly’s
sudden turn to the left, causing him to miss his flame by a hair. Despite the death, the run was still well
alive, as Jeremy heads to Lost Fleet, where he uses two piggybacking enemies to give him
a little boost. Hey i’ve seen this before, now that’s
two playstation classics with a piggyback boost. Technically this trick doesn’t accomplish
all that much since we left Crazy Ed behind, who we have to escort to the end. But by running through the ship and getting
the checkpoint right before the end, then dying, Crazy Ed will respawn corresponding
to the checkpoint you’re on. This is why Jeremy wanted to take damage during
the Spike fight so he could avoid bouncing on the goop to die quicker, but the death
in fireworks factory set him back to full health. After respawning from the death warp, Jeremy
has to shoot a hole in the ship with the cannon, where he does a small shortcut by jumping
on the nose of the cannon. After completing the level, Jeremy doesn’t
quit out right away as usual. He heads back to the goop to trigger “the
zombie glitch.” Essentially by pausing right before spyro
is about to die from the goop, you can quit out of the level, making the game think he’s
dead when he’s really not. This is a frame perfect pause, and if you
pause early, there’s no super easy way to advance the game 1 frame forward, just a good
gut feeling and timing, making this trick a rough 70% chance of success. The zombie glitch has a couple of side effects. But the one we’re looking for in this run,
is this one. Yup. You can carry the swimming state through the
surface of the water, which is how Jeremy makes his way into Charmed Ridge. Here, you have 3 enemies to attempt the proxy
to the end with, making the success rate fairly high. In this run, Jeremy doesn’t need any of
that, and nails it using the first guy, and gets the best proxy height too. He glides to the end with ease and finishes
off the final level in Evening Lake. Up until this point, every trick that’s
been labeled with a percentage has more or less been in Jeremy’s control. Sure there’s some different pathing the
AI can take for the proxies, and the Spike fight had a bit of luck involved. But all of that pales in comparison to what’s
next. Now it’s time for Scorch. This arena might as well represent hell. RNG hell. Your main assistant in this fight is Bentley,
who will circle the arena and spawn rockets for you. You can either get 1 big green rocket, or
50 small red rockets. You would think the big green rocket does
more damage than the small red ones, but see that’s where you decided to use logic. There’s literally no damage difference between
the two, meaning you always want the 50 red ones. With all of the tricks Jeremy’s had to do
thus far, less than 1% of runs make it to Scorch on pace, and to keep that pace going
for the sub 24, he flat out needs to hit a coin flip right at the end. If you get a green rocket, you need to wait
an extra 11 seconds for another attempt at the coinflip. It's slow, but you can continue the run if
it’s fast enough. Luckily for Jeremy, he got the red rockets
he needed, but his past runs were not so fortunate. Jeremy’s 8 best runs to Scorch prior to
this one, all got double green rockets, instantly killing every single run. The odds of that happening are 1 in 65536
or 0.0015%. Completely ridiculous, I know, but I'm not
even done talking about luck in this fight. Scorch has 2 main attacks, the lightning balls
and the eggs. Ideally you want as many lightning ball attacks
as possible, as it lowers his shield faster, meaning you can hit him more frequently. Jeremy only got 1 lightning ball attack in
this run, which lost him some time, but he was overjoyed with the idea that the string
of green rockets was finally over. With first try red rockets, Jeremy finally
had a run past Scorch that was fast enough to potentially be the world's first 23 minute
time for Spyro 3. We’ve now come full circle, back to where
this video started. With Sorceress Skip being the next goal for
Jeremy. You've previously seen how most loading zones
in the game are stored directly beneath the inactive portals, which allows for early entries. But for some reason, the Sorceress loading
trigger is a different kind than the ones we usually see for the normal levels. This time, the loading trigger is where it
should be, but is way larger than what’s visible, and extends far above the door itself. It is reachable if you can get spyro onto
the castle walls, then jumping into it. As touval did when he discovered it late 2013. But how exactly does Jeremy get Spyro onto
the rooftop? Well. Here’s how.. Let’s take a look at that again. Jeremy gets Spyro stuck under the helmet where
the desert ruins portal normally is. To prevent Spyro from getting permanently
stuck anywhere, the developers put in a mechanic that ejects him out if he ever does find himself
stuck. This is similar to the old boulder pushing
strat in Bamboo Terrace, a so called “squeeze proxy,” where upon the game ejecting Spyro
from the helmet, he has so much speed that he gets flung up the wall and is able to glide
onto the castle walls to enter the final boss. Now it’s time to confront the Sorceress,
and this fight is like a complex game of chess. It would take me an extremely long time to
cover everything here, so I'll just cover the basics. The sorceress has 3 phases. The cannon phase, the tank phase and the ufo
phase. Jeremy is going to attempt to skip the final
ufo phase since killing the sorceress with the tanks is much faster. Jeremy has labbed this fight religiously,
and has studied things like spawn points for the cannons and tanks, how agent 9 behaves
in regards to shooting down the cannons and tanks, and how the sorceress moves and attacks. I’m just gonna let the fight unfold, and
explain some things along the way. Jeremy first starts by going to the outer
ring where Agent 9 is to get a better overview of where the cannons are flying in from. There’s 5 spawn points for the cannons but
only 3 will fly in, and some cannon locations have priority in dropping over others. Jeremy has this all figured out and simply
waits beneath the cannon with the highest priority to drop. Once on the cannon, you have to hit the sorceress
two times for the cannon phase to end. When a phase ends, it forces you off your
current vehicle and wipes out all other vehicles on the field. However, you can sneak in a third hit as long
as there is a cannonball in the air as the phase ends, saving a tiny bit of time. Agent 9’s targeting is a little wonky in
this fight, so occasionally you’ll get a second cannon drop during the tank phase. This is what happened during Jeremy’s run,
but he doesn’t want to do too much damage and end the tank phase before the tanks themselves
are on the field. Once the first tank is dropped, Jeremy shoots
the sorceress once and jumps off the tank immediately, by doing this, he does enough
damage to start the UFO phase, but Agent 9 is already on his way to shoot down another
tank. At this point in the fight, this is the final
phase, so you’re never forced off of your vehicle, so Jeremy uses the tank to take down
the sorceress. For how complex this fight can be, Jeremy
actually had one of the most simple scenarios. In his own words: “The fight can often be
more intricate to navigate than it was in my 23, but, in receiving a random second cannon
drop, I was able to create the vehicle drops I wanted pretty naturally and without much
manipulation.” And that concludes JeremyThompson’s Spyro
3 speedrun in 23 minutes and 58 seconds. To this day, no one has managed to get even
remotely close, and Jeremy’s days at the top will keep on building. Some might be watching this run in confusion. Why would anyone go through 20000 attempts
to get this kind of run? The only real answer is personal accomplishment. As an old saying goes, the harder the battle,
the sweeter the victory. And the reason this run has stood on top for
almost 3 years, is because Jeremy tasted that sweet victory. He worked for several years to get this kind
of run. He spent countless hours in the lab, figuring
out things like the sorceress fight. And threw himself at the game over and over
again, until the stars aligned. Just like anyone sets goals for themselves
in learning an instrument or running a marathon, some find pleasure in speedrunning video games. An introspective hobby that some take quite
seriously. Not only in the quest to improve your own
time, but also in the involvement with the friends you make along the way in the games’
tight knit communities. If you can’t respect someone like Jeremy
for his efforts, then.. that’s a shame, because some were very impressed. And that’s the developers themselves. In april of 2018. Jeremy got invited to the Insomniac studio
to play Spyro 3 in front of the very people that created the game. He was able to showcase an impressive run
that clocked in at the half hour mark, but most importantly he was able to showcase what
he, and the community had discovered in the many years of speedrunning the game. Additionally, he was able to hear insights
on game’s design choices, and was able to show off cool bugs that gave everybody in
the room a a bit of a chuckle Insomniac definitely deserves some credit
for putting this together. Not every game company welcomes their speedrun
communities with open arms, but Insomniac has always been very accepting. They even threw together a similar event for
Ratchet and Clank speedruns, where they brought in my good pal Xem. I’ve always had respect for runners like
Jeremy. Runners that don’t stop playing a category
until they believe it’s reached the human limit. While there’s an obvious mistake in fireworks
factory you can point out, it’s easy to ignore the countless amount of things that
went right. The raw combination of execution and luck
in his 23:58 is an estimated 0.012%, or 1 in 8574. Staggeringly low odds. If anyone wants to topple this run, they would
need even cleaner execution, better luck, or find new strategies to save more time. There does exist a tool-assisted speedrun
of Spyro 3 that was created by lapogne and Nitrofski, but Jeremy has claimed that virtually
no strategies in the TAS were viable in actual speedruns. The TAS itself is also worth checking out,
and I've put a link to it in the description, but I mainly wanted to cover Jeremy’s journey
to achieve his ultimate run in this video. As of right now, Jeremy also holds the world
record in the 100 egg category, where he achieved a new record of 50:34, as recently as august
2021. He was gonna push the category to a 49, but
ran out of free time to grind the game. Jeremy, of course - has a life to live outside
of the game, but sees a possible return to Spyro around april 2022, but that’s just
an estimate he told me. Jeremy is a guy who’s never seemed to care
about popularity, money or anything else that speedrunning and streaming can net you. He’s just a guy that embarked on a personal
journey. A man and his game, - a man and his goal. Whether or not Jeremy’s return to the game
is later than expected, staying safe in this chaotic state of the world is definitely the
main priority. I wish the absolute best to Jeremy. Thank you for being an inspiration to others,
and thank you for keeping Spyro speedrunning alive. Thanks for watching, if you like the content,
please consider supporting me on patreon. Take care, and have a good one.
This is great. Amazingly informative. Classic Spyro should be way less of a niche speed game being as popular and competitive as it is. Forget about the remakes. Hope it gets the attention it deserves.
Always love Ricky's stuff, was just catching up on it today! Classic Spyro speedrun content is always a treat to watch.