World Record Progression: Donkey Kong 64

after rare made the famous donkey kong country trilogy on the super nintendo they knew they're gonna have some big shoes to fill in the future it's regarded as one of the greatest trilogies of games ever made and following it up on nintendo's next console the nintendo 64 was not going to be easy the result was this [Music] donkey kong 64. reviews came in and one thing that most critics commented on was the length of the game with most saying that it took at least 30 hours to get through all of it when speedrunners today look back at that 30 hour estimate we laugh [Music] over the past decade speedrunners have played donkey kong 64 with the goal of beating it as quickly as possible rare to sign a game with many seemingly foolproof ways of making sure you weren't abusing the mechanics to make sure you were actually playing through everything the way they wanted you to as it turns out they didn't do too great of a job of that let's take a look at the world record progression of donkey kong 64. [Music] we're going to start by going back to 2006. meet tom vodova he's a speedrunning legend known mainly for original nes titles one of his most famous scores was on the nes port of the original arcade donkey kong where he scored 3.1 million points over an incredible six and a half hour gaming session but on this particular day in 2006 november 15th to be exact he decided to play through donkey kong's nintendo 64 counterpart he beat the game in 4 hours 26 minutes let's see how we did it so here's the deal with donkey kong 64. the 30 hour estimate that many reviewers gave was actually fairly reasonable at the time if you want to beat the game there's a number of things you have to do it's broken down into seven main levels jungle japes angry aztec frantic factory gloomy galleon funky forest crystal caves and creepy castle you start out in an overworld dk isles where you can access each of them but before you can enter a level other than the first level jungle japes you need to first unlock that level's lobby with a key you get this key from the boss of the previous level then once you enter the lobby you're presented with a b locker you can't enter the level until you get past him either and how do you do that by collecting golden bananas which you can get from either puzzles or mini games you can collect a total of 25 of them in each level five for each character you play with donkey kong diddy kong lanky kong tiny kong and chunky kong although you can only initially play as donkey kong at the start you unlock the others as you play through the game each b locker requires an increasing number of golden bananas you need just one to start playing jungle japes but by the time you get to the end of the game you're going to need at least 100 of them and once you're in the level there's loads of collectibles that you need for various purposes such as crowns and nintendo coins but by far the most common one is the colored banana colored bananas are scattered all over in the levels in the overworld sometimes in bunches of five or in balloons of ten need to collect hundreds of these to enter the boss of each level which as explained before it's necessary to unlock the next level with the key you collect from it so yeah vodafone had a lot of work to do in those four and a half hours this was essentially most of ottawa's run he ran from level to level collecting banana after banana to progress farther into the game once he got to a hundred of the golden bananas he entered the game's final stage hideout helm where he had to unlock three doors to progress onto the final loss of the game by once again collecting various unlockables and executing a fairly long sequence of activities and all that was left was the boss fight with king k rool and tom vonneva had beaten the game in 4 hours and 26 minutes at least according to the in-game timer at the end of the game and donkey kong 64 had its first video recorded speedrun unfortunately all those components took a very long time having to play mini games to collect the golden bananas was time consuming collecting the hundreds of colored bananas you needed took forever and each boss fight you did to get the key took a few minutes as well getting all of those steps plus the other unlockables that were needed took an incredibly long time but ivanova did the best he could with the strategies that he had four and a half hours was miles ahead of a 30-hour estimate so people looked at his run with awe fonova himself claimed that the run was as close to perfection as he was willing to go so neither he nor anybody else was up to the challenge of trying to beat it now there had technically been a few runs before vadava's run a guy named joe weawell did a segmented run that clocked in at just over five hours and tom vodova himself had spent a few months gradually taking his time down but once he got the 4 hour 26 minute run it stood and stood and stood [Music] at least until 2009 when you think of important events from 2009 what pops into your head obama was sworn in windows 7 was released the yankees won the world series well how about the donkey kong 64 revolution in june 2009 the stars aligned on a long forgotten thread hidden in a dark corner of a largely dead internet forum runners came together and used all the knowledge they had gained over the past three years to completely change the way people ran donkey kong 64 in just a few short days the first revolution revolved around three major tricks that began to be utilized at the same time as explained before much of what made tom vladova's run so long was having to collect keys to get to the lobbies golden bananas to get past the b lockers and colored bananas to get to the bosses players were about to find a way around all three of these things trick one skipping the keys since players needed to use a key to get into the lobby of each stage it was necessary to fight the boss of the previous stage to get it but they found a way around that you could clip into the lobbies of certain stages bypassing the requirement to collect the key this means you could skip several of the boss fights and save multiple minutes not having to collect their keys well great you are in the lobby now but you still had to pass the b locker before you could enter the stage by giving them a bunch of golden bananas jungle japes required just one golden banana while angry aztec required five frantic factory required 15 gloomy galleon required 30 fungi forest required 50 crystal caves required 65 creepy castle required 80 and hideout home required 100 so there wasn't much of a point of clipping into the lobby if you still needed golden bananas to get past the b lockers this is where trick 2 comes in b locker skipping by playing as linky kong and stretching his arms out you can just barely touch the portal behind the b locker and you enter the level just a slight oversight on the game devs unfortunately though this trick worked on every stage except for frantic factory where you need 15 golden bananas and hideout home where you needed 100 meaning that even if you skipped all previous doors using this lanky kong trick you were still going to need 100 by the time you got to hideout home so you still needed to spend the time picking all them up in the other stages therefore this trick wasn't all that useful but on june 9th 2009 mano cheese uploaded a youtube video hideout home early he was standing right in front of the entrance to hideout home where there was a bee locker that required 100 gold and bananas to pass through he only had 17 golden bananas so it looked like he couldn't gain access to the stage he then did a trick known as ledge clipping where he clipped into a tiny gap in the ground using a precise c up press on the controller while avoiding death to the lava by using invincibility frames gotten by hitting himself with his own orange and after very carefully maneuvering forward while attempting to deal with the uncooperative camera controls he jumped out and was in hideout home with less than a fifth of the amount of golden bananas that he would have needed to collect to get there so now all the players needed was to collect the 15 golden bananas needed for frantic factory and they were home free in terms of golden bananas but then once you were actually in this stage you still needed to unlock the few bosses that you still needed to fight with colored bananas which took a long time to collect welcome to trick 3 skipping the colored bananas using the ledge clip once again the player can clip into the ground and skip any boss door in the game no more running around to collect hundreds of colored bananas anymore yet perhaps the craziest part of all these tricks is the rapid rate at which they were discovered every trick that i just described was discovered from june 9th through june 12 2009 skipping keys golden bananas and colored bananas so all of a sudden a game that tom vonneva seemed to have completely optimized was suddenly blown wide open on june 9th the world record was vladivo's four and a half hour run on june 10th runner pmit posted on speed demos archive that he beat the game in three hours flat [Music] june 12th maynoche's decided to chop an hour off of that finishing in two hours and eight minutes and june 13th may no cheese dropped it down to one hour and 39 minutes over the course of four days the record went down three hours it was just a third of the length that it was half a week before sadly no videos exist of any of these runs because the mentality of speedrunning was a little different back then than it was today people didn't just stream run to twitch and highlight it like they do today pb maybe they weren't going to bother showing the run to anybody unless they were really happy with it and these guys weren't at that point yet but those few days in june 2009 have gone down in speedrunning history as one of the craziest route progressions ever donkey kong 64 was changing and they were only at the start of it the first revolution was over but there was still so much more to come in the following months mano cheese continued to streak of dominance over the game every few months he would make a post announcing that he lowered the record down a few more minutes another guy left these heroes apparently held the record for a few days and then quickly got beaten by manoj's once again there was also a japanese runner cass who did a run timed with real time that clocked in at 1 hour 12 minutes and 52 seconds but most today don't recognize it as a legitimate world record he played on the japanese version which was slower overall and he used sheets that allowed for infinite animation oranges among other things but as for many cheese we don't know too many details about his runs and it's possible that he got other records in between the ones that they posted about but we do know that he gradually lowered it down from an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and 10 minutes before finally breaching the sub hour barrier on june 8th 2010. finally though in august of 2010 runners got to see video footage of mano cheese playing for the first time ever remember how i said before that runners weren't going to show a run unless they submitted it somewhere well he submitted a 54 minute speed run to speed demos archive and once it was verified it was public for the world to see there were golden banana skips [Music] colored banana skips and key skips throughout combined with perfect gameplay elsewhere in his submission notes he said that he was done with the game and who could blame him he'd brought the record down from three hours to under an hour through sheer optimization and domination he also said that he thought nobody would ever be able to get a 53 minute run unless new tricks were discovered but two years later one guy was finally up to the task ring rush however he decided to do things a little bit differently for mano cheese the first thing was he decided to switch to timing the run in real time with a timer from start to finish instead of using the in-game timer at the end of the run this allowed him to reset the game at various points in order to speed things up and he could keep his real-time runner running while he reset so where did he reset the game the first place was in hideout home because he wanted to skip turning off the blastomatic which normally requires a long and complicated checklist of things that you have to do typically pausing and exiting in stages allows you to go back to the lobby but in hideout home it counts as a game over which isn't allowed for a single segment speed run so ring rush used a more brute force method just resetting his game but the real revelation that ring rush used was a trick known as aztec early remember how i said there were some lobbies you could access early by clipping into them it turns out it was possible for the angry aztec lobby as well but the problem was it was ridiculously hard you had to do extremely precise movements and timed actions in midair with an uncooperative camera and if you messed up it would take you half a minute to get back to the position where you could try it again it was a game defining trick but if you got it to work you'd save three minutes armed with these tricks ring rush set out to beat the record over the course of a few months in mid 2012 he streamed his attempts to beat mano cheese's record of 54 in-game minutes or 52 minutes and 17 seconds of real time the way ring rush would be timing it but the problem that he and so many other runners from back then had was that he didn't save any of his runs he probably figured that twitch's past broadcast system which automatically archived all streams would save it but twitch ended up deleting most of these a few years back we know his runs are out there they existed at some point and people watched them live on twitch from may through july of 2012 he beat the world record nine times bringing it all the way down to 47 minutes and 18 seconds sadly though the only one that we can watch today is part of the 4718 because they talked about it on an old speedrunning podcast the sunday sequence break right and here i cancel right yeah yeah there's a long cut scene where diddy says like hey free me ring rush would later go on to discover an incredibly important trick that broke the game even more than it already was lag clipping the game tries to account for laggy areas by speeding you up to preserve constant motion this means you can artificially create lag by shooting a bunch of oranges on screen if you want to go faster than normal sometimes fast enough that you're able to clip right through walls hey look there's the entrance to angry aztec you're supposed to do the really hard angry aztec early trick i wonder if you could do it against that wall to clip in yes yes you could so now that aztec early was way easier there were a couple of runners that wanted to battle it out for the record ring rush who had been crushing the record over and over for months and see fox7 a super mario 64 and ocarina of time runner but somebody else ended up getting the world record first you guys might know him today from his legendary super mario bros speedruns is that tide record his name is cosmic d12 but years before he did any of his super mario bros stuff he was actually a top level donkey kong 64 speedrunner as well and he was the first guy to get the new donkey kong 64 record on november 18 2012 [Music] see fox beat it by three seconds about a week later but just like so many others he didn't bother highlighting it but our boy cosmic d12 sure did with his next record one week later don't think i can eat this by the end of 2013 ring rush had taken the record down to 42 minutes and 18 seconds but by early 2014 yet another trick was discovered that would greatly change the category once again main menu mode donkey kong 64 has this cut scene at the start of the game that you can just skip over if you want so that's what people were doing for many years until it was figured out that you could press a right when it's fading in and then have the cutscene play in the background while you're playing the game and it creates some strange side effects the most important one being that you can enter a place where the game temporarily gives you every move in the game then trigger the cutscene to pull you out and boom you can play through the game with every move you used to have to get these moves by unlocking each character which you did by going into the first few levels and doing various tasks so now you could skip doing that since you had all the moves to begin with the issue was by far the easiest known way of clipping into hideout home early was by using tiny cog we had to unlock it turns out that it was technically possible to do it with donkey kong 2 but it was just way harder ring rush ended up lowering the record eight minutes very quickly with these new strategies so all of that being said what was there left in the game to do there was no need to collect golden bananas or colored bananas no need to collect most of the keys no need to unlock any other characters no need to collect most other collectibles and no need to even enter most stages in the game the route now consisted of simply collecting key 8 and key 3 turning them in and then fighting the final boss but don't be fooled that didn't mean the run was any easier than before it was actually just the opposite doing all these tricks in a single speed run like clipping into the lobbies and skipping so many collectibles is ridiculously difficult to do anyway in 2014 a japanese runner cigna and ring rush took turns lowering the record further down they brought it down to the 30 minute mark but on august 7 2014 a different runner was trying to beat the record znurnicus and he had a run that was on pace going into the final boss fight [Music] yeah and that is dk 64 in under 30 minutes this was the first time that the game had ever been beaten in under half an hour 29 minutes zernik znurnicus had an amazing run but how long would it stand as the world record a few hours ring rush got it back later that same day that would ultimately be the last time that ring rush ever held the dk-64 world record later on in 2015 three players took their turn lowering the record down a bit more iso targe [Music] cigna and tiffany fruit and then any percent went dormant for a few months nobody ran it and the world record was 2656 by tiffany fruit why was that well here's the thing in april 2015 dk was released on the wii u virtual console and this version of the game had nearly no lag in it that seemed like great news because that meant the game wouldn't slow down if there were too many objects on the screen like it did sometimes on the n64 version so maybe it would be faster for speed runs and it would save around 2 minutes overall but remember the lag clipping that i mentioned earlier yeah that wasn't going to work on the wii u virtual console version throwing the oranges simply wasn't going to create enough lag to build up the speed that you would need and the place where that mattered the most was for frantic factory early that lag created by the oranges that you see now couldn't be created on wii u virtual console there is an alternate method that you could do on wii u virtual console but that method alone made the entire run so hard that nobody even bothered trying so tiffany fruits 2656 on the nintendo 64 was as good as anybody was willing to get at least until october 2016 on october 29th kiwikiller 67 was able to pull off frantic factory early on wii u virtual console in a run and closed out a run 40 seconds ahead of the world record [ __ ] yeah g [ __ ] g and here's the best part about this run nobody even wanted to try to beat it getting a run that fast on the nintendo 64 was essentially impossible and frantic factory early was so hard that nobody else wanted to mess with it so nine months later kiwi killer 67's run remained the world record but as they always were new strategies were found in mid 2017 players discovered that if you went to the frantic factory entrance did a moon kick to a rafter on the ceiling and then did a ledge clip out of bounds you could enter frantic factory bypassing the needs to do the ridiculously hard version of frantic factory early on the wii u virtual console with this new discovery there were new world records and a lot of them gg [Music] we [ __ ] did it boys let's go first main category world record on stream [Music] 2459 by falcon x falcon is where the world record stands today well more than a decade later and several hours taken off of the world record i think it's safe to say that donkey kong 64 has had one of the most drastic progressions of its any percent record ever tom vaught of his 2006 run was little more than playing through the game as intended while still going as fast as you possibly could it was a very skillful run but look at what we have today clipping into walls skipping collectibles and abusing nearly every mechanic that the game gives us who would have thought that all this was possible 10 years ago i'm sure tom vodma didn't and who knows what craziness we're going to be doing 10 years from now thanks for watching everyone [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 2,600,253

Rating: 4.9307108 out of 5

Keywords: speedrun, speed run, speedrunning, world record

Id: 3QtK0MB_PDE

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/The__Good__Doctor]

Man, I've still never beat this game just because of that dang Nintendo coin that FORCES you to beat the original DK arcade game TWICE!

I have never seen a game that forces you to beat a much harder game twice in order to beat the game you actually were playing.

[u/Torque-A]

I wasn't expecting DK64 to be the next game showcased. I mean, it's one of the bulkier collectathons out there.

[u/MaGoGo]

I don't care about speedruns at all, but these videos are so engaging and interesting that I find myself compelled by the drama and innovation that goes into these runs. I wish someone did stuff like this for esports. It's something I want to like, but haven't found anything compelling about it yet.

[u/[deleted]]

100% is even crazier in this IMO. I remember seeing the first sub 6 hour and thinking the run was absolutely insane. It's now 40 minutes faster.

[u/kebab4you]

Hmm, why is dying not allowed in a single segmented run but restarting the console is?

[u/Shredzz]

Wow. This guy is great, that was really interesting. I can't imagine the time it takes to put these together, finding all the videos, forum posts and everything. He's got a subscribe from me

[u/goug]

I really enjoy those videos. I don't often watch too much stuff that is pointless, but this is so neat. (I mean this as a compliment).

On the one about Half Life 2 speedruns, when I heard we had no videos from some of the best runs (deleted from Twitch), I felt a true loss, as if something very important was lost. Very weird.