World Record Progression: Pokemon Red/Blue speedruns

pokemon for the past 20 years it's been fascinating both kids and adults who have spent hours and hours trying to catch them all in North America the series started in 1998 on the original Gameboy with pokemon red and blue and since then a subset of gamers have been obsessed with trying to beat that game as fast as humanly possible hundreds have tried but only a few have risen to the top as the fastest people to ever speedrun pokemon let's see how we got there this is the world record progression of pokemon red and blue [Music] the true origin of Pokemon Red and Blue speedruns can be traced back to the mid 2000s there's a guy named Jacob macmillan who seemed to have full control of any percent glitchless runs the game back in 2008 he did a run in 2 hours and 39 minutes before eventually lowering it to two and a half hours flat however we're not going to be looking deeply at these runs today since they weren't nearly as optimized as the run I'm about to show you let's move a few years later this particular run of Pokemon glitchless was done by a fairly well known runner his name is werster and on November 14 2011 he completed the first really optimized speed run of Pokemon blue one hour and 58 minutes let's see how he did it so werster had the choice of picking from Bulbasaur Charmander and squirtle as a starter Pokemon he ended up going with squirtle he's the only water type of the three and the first of the eight Gym Leaders that works too would encounter Brock was a rock type since water type Pokemon are super effective against rock-type this money could easily breeze through the start of the game to level squirtle up for later foresters general strategy throughout this run was to just make it through the game while doing the minimum that was required rather than waste time trying to capture other Pokemon and trying to level him up to use their moves for the most part he simply rode squirtle throughout the entire game going to each of the eight gyms than fighting the Elite Four in addition he played on pokemon blue instead of pokemon red because pokemon blue gives you a higher chance of getting sandshrew after mountain moon Santro has the ability cut which lets you cut down a tree blocking the way to surge is gym allowing you to continue progressing through the game werster is also careful to name all Pokemon players and rivals just one character this way whenever the name scrolled on screen it would take less time to type it out while this may not seem like much of a time save it adds up over the course of a run and finally he was also looking for the diversification values or DVS assigned the squirrel you see once the game begins it randomly assigns values to four statistics for your starter Pokemon attack defense speed and special on a scale from zero to fifteen ideally you would want these values to be as close to fifteen as possible as the higher the value is the higher the possible value you can reach for that stat if werster got bad DVS he would just reset the game and try again for better ones it was worth restarting a run right away than attempting to play it out with bad stats all of this careful planning awarded werster a time far ahead of any other pokémon red and blue speedrunner McMillan's run looked so much slower in comparison and it was clear to everyone that werster was the dominant pokemon blue speedrunner and as it usually goes with speedrunners the dominant runner tends to hold on to their record for a very long time like I mentioned before werster God is 158 which was the time that the game gave you at the end after completing the game in November 2011 well all 2012 came and went and neither he nor anybody else could beat it but by early 2013 werster was back to doing attempts again this time on his twitch page twitch TV / werster so that people could watch him do his attempts live and he had a new trick up his sleeve red bar see you whenever your health gets low during a battle under about 20% your pokémon's health bar turns red and the game plays this constant beeping noise throughout the battle [Music] it was basically the games way of grabbing your attention and saying you better be careful you don't have much health left and you can die easily it turns out this beeping noise has a convenient side effect for speedrunners there's normally long sound effects and animations that play whenever you gain moves and level up the red bar beeping noise overlaps these sound effects and makes them not play speeding every fight up so ideally werster would get squirtle down to low health at that health for as long as he could do and get as many benefits as possible from red bar the problem was he was often one attack away from dying when under the effects of red bar so there was no real consistent way to set it up repeatedly throughout the run and ultimately he was hardly able to use red bar at all in this run only in a couple of places but partially thanks to a really strong early game it was still enough to push down the record one more minute to one hour and 57 seconds this time streamed live for the world to see by the way the splits you see on the side were for real time to give everyone watching an idea if he was on a good or a bad pace the time that runners were actually paying attention to in the end was the in-game time at the end of the game boid 57 did you get it congratulations man and I got trips on my money so by this point werster had had the record for close to a year and a half without anybody being able to challenge him his method of taking squirtle and running with him just wasn't working for anybody else well if people couldn't outplay him just yet maybe somebody could out strategize him this is extra tricky [Music] yeah extra tricky decided to start with squirtle just like werster because he could quickly get through the first gym with him however instead of ignoring all other Pokemon it he captured one Nadeau ran he then proceeded to use him and level him up until he evolved into Nidoking Nidoking was really overpowered he has strong stats he's moves like thrash and horn girl to quickly take down enemies and was effective against most other types of Pokemon most importantly though he was a lot more effective than squirtle [Music] 1:59 yes I got 159 this meant a couple of things for extra Turkey the first being that he had to play on pokemon red instead of pokemon blue pokemon red gives you a 30% chance of encountering a male that iran which is needed to evolve into Nidoking vs pokemon blues 5% chance 158 alright but 157 definitely going to come definitely will come the second thing it meant was that the run was faster now right well not exactly yes Nidoking was an extremely powerful Pokemon but it's a time to capture him in the first place and low home up to where he needed to be it wasn't clear back then if werster's blue squirrel route for the new red and noodle king route was faster nonetheless extra trick he began doing runs of pokemon red with the new route he did his runs on emulator which I'm sure won't cause any controversy later or anything and as you've seen from these clips he was slowly closing in on Worst his record of 157 yes I got it yes one five seconds [Music] well there we go 157 somebody had finally caught up to werster if nothing else it proved that this Nidoking route could compete with the squirrel route and that even though he had brained the game for so long it wasn't impossible to compete against werster so then we go into June 2013 and honestly this was one of the greatest months of speedrunning for a game that I have ever heard of it all started on June 16th extra tricky was on a run with the Nidoking route that as you can see from his splits was a minute ahead of the record that meant that if you finished this run it would probably be a minute ahead of the 157 and he would get a 156 everything had gone smoothly but then no it didn't press left what does this guy have I press left what the hell what does he have what does he have he was trying to avoid this encounter with a trainer in general you want to avoid all encounters that are unnecessary since you gain nothing valuable from them and they waste time extra tricky was attempting to sidestep around him and stay out of his sight but he accidentally messed up his movements and forced an encounter with him in all it wasted about a minute essentially erasing his lead and leaving him with yet another tied world record of 157 so that was June 16th and this is what happened the next day June 17th [Music] this is B's he may not have heard of him before I haven't mentioned him before this point but you can see from his twitch.tv highlights page that he started streaming his runs sometime in early 2013 finishing runs a little bit over two hours long and after playing more over the following months boom he got the record he used the same red Nidoking route that extra tricky had used played really well and it paid off for him he was a full minute ahead of anybody else two days later June 19th extra Turkey did more attempts to get the record back he had this room that was looking really good to start in fact it was good enough to probably be the best pace he had ever been on then he entered into Mount moon I mentioned before that you wanted to minimize unnecessary encounters since you gained nothing from them you're at a large risk of getting some random encounters in Mount Moon and you're usually going to end up with a handful of them in an average run but on this particular run extra turkey got 18 random encounters about moon entrances I approach me as good as my best ever and also do the life aha this encounter rate is complete garbage and I have I have the goods this is stupid well [Music] he lost three minutes putting him at two and a half minutes behind overall remarkably though he didn't give up he kept going and started to bring the run back on the Misty split he got three critical hits saving him a turn for each one since he defeated them quicker this meant he didn't have to go into the menu to heal before Misty all of this save their on 35 seconds in his old personal best on the Polka fluke split he hid himself in confusion so he had the heal while he kept getting thrashed this run he was able to avoid that and he picked up 40 more seconds there luckily he also got incredibly good DBS on his Nidoking this run she was able to defeat opponents a little bit quicker and picked up seconds and many of the splits late in the game but the icing on the cake was the fact that the splits he was up against were the ones I mentioned before with the accidental encounter in the final split he was able to successfully side step around the trainer this time and with that he closed out one of the all-time greatest comebacks in speedrunning history bam bam yes [Music] one five six BAM this runt proved how much potential the categories still had extra trick he had gotten 156 but still lost multiple minutes early in the game he mentioned in the description of that video that a 155 or maybe even a 154 might be possible so who was gonna be the one to take it that low now that extra tricky and B's were tied for the record and had been going back and forth with it for a couple of months it might have seemed like the Pokemon read her out with Nidoking was the definitively better option if one was to go for a time that low but werster proved all who may have thought that wrong just 10 days after extra trick he's 156 werster is doing attempts of the game with squirtle on pokemon blue and he got on our really good run 155 yep awesome awesome once again the record had fallen back into werster's hands he was the only top-level runner still playing on pokemon blue but that wasn't an issue for him at all he didn't care that he was the only person not getting Nidoking he was still able to beat the others anyway well except for the fact that the day after werster got this run extra tricky got a 155 on pokemon red a month later B's got himself a 155 on pokemon red as well and what happened from August 2013 through December 2013 was pretty great for separate runners were able to get a 154 already established runner extra tricky was the first to get it once again using the pokemon red Nidoking route over the following months runners mounts Bank and J pain trained or able to achieve a 154 on pokemon red as well and yes werster's who was able to get a 154 on pokemon blue with squirtle i'm not going to go into great detail for any of these four runs they were essentially just better versions of the 155 that had come immediately prior better TVs fewer random encounters utilizing red bar more that sort of stuff I'm gonna go off on a really quick tangent here in late 2013 it was around the same time that people began running a new category of Pokemon Red and Blue known as a glitched single segments everyone I've talked about up to this point and everyone I will be talking about after this point is from a category known as any percent glitchless meaning that you can beat the game as fast as you can without using any glitches glitched a single segment on the other hand allow you to use glitches walking through walls skipping Gym Leaders things like that this category originally let you beat the game in about an hour and has since been pushed down to under 20 minutes but that's a progression for another day now we had these four runners each with a 154 who would be the first to break the tie would it be extra tricky with this experience with the Nidoking route would it be one of the two newcomers or would it be werster with this PO on blue squirrel route well it was indeed one of the newcomers mounts pink he got a 153 in December 2013 but sadly for us it seems the video for this run doesn't exist anymore all that's really known about it is he played on pokemon red with the Nano king route and finished with the 153 as the in-game time at the end a few months later though in March 2014 worser more or less but the world of pokemon red/blue speedrunning on its head Wow so how in the world was a 151 possible the key was a route that mountebank had discovered a few months prior you play on pokemon red start with squirtle and then get Nidoking just like the old runs unlike the old runs however when you fight Koga wheezing there's a self-destruct attack this causes both Nidoking and Kota to die but Nidoking gets revived with low health because you use rare candies and you know what it means when you have low health [Music] you get red bar once you had red bar you could hang on to it while you one-hit ko would most Pokemon until Bruno this consistent method of getting red bar and hanging on to it for an extended period of time there's enough to save somewhere between one and a half and two minutes nobody ended up getting a run with the Koga red bar strategy until werster did so once he finally pulled off the run it was record by two full minutes the 151 stood unchallenged for a few months but on July 9th 2014 a video popped up on YouTube pokemon red any percent glitchless in 150 by somebody named egg sorry on nobody had heard of xre on before werster extra tricky mountebank none of them had any idea who he was he didn't have any videos on YouTube before this one the run was clearly done on an emulator which is allowed but historically whenever a speedrun pops up out of nowhere like this it's usually fake so when this run was posted many dismissed it in the same way but there was also no proof that the run wasn't legitimate either the top-level runners agreed that everything appeared to be in order and they figured that it probably was a real run X Ariane himself seemed to be very knowledgeable about the game as well going as far as posing his own commentary over the run I mean unless you're in like a really high rent bar or heel and give the Bellsprout a turn and the dough sprout has wrapped and it was just so difficult to tell for sure if the run was cheated or not since when he played Pokemon on an emulator there's no way to tell if it was tool assisted or not tool assisted speedruns are when you enter an emulator and manually tell the game what inputs will be pushed on each frame all the way through the game to create a perfect or near-perfect speedrun this can help you both manipulate random lists and execute everything perfectly the run was reluctantly put up on the official pokémon red and blue leaderboards after a while but it was quite a controversial decision nowadays we know for a fact that this run was 100% legitimate and as you'll soon see Eggs argon went on to be a very respected runner but back in 2014 this run was so debated that it led to a severe rule change for the leaderboards that December any run of Pokemon red and blue that would be considered an official world record had to be run on a console instead of an emulator so no tool-assisted runs could be passed off as legitimate this rule put the leaderboards in an incredibly strange positioned top runners of the game had been doing their world-record runs on emulator for over a year at that point that meant that the new official world record defaulted to a 154 that werster had decided to do on console just for the heck of it in April 2014 so all of a sudden the world record once again had an incredible time safe potential we knew from XR eons run that a 150 was possible so we're Stern xr/e on each took their turn stating the world record back to where it needed to be September 2014 it have been a been around in this I'm like really happy with that though like that's just because like second full run-on cut gonna save me 151 151 yes [Music] very nice very nice it's what I need it oh man [Music] to push the run to 149 however would take the help of some more work from its Ariane he made this incredibly extensive Google document that detailed different ways to play out the end of the game depending on what dvz earn it Oh King had depending on your attack speed and special values it would tell you the optimal order to go through the last gems the order to use certain items among a bunch of other things so more runs have made it deep late into the game now half attention will be a world record this turned out to be the key the decks Aria needed for a new world record in January 2015 he became the first person to complete a sub 150 run of pokemon red like this is surreal more than my original it's not just that I got the 149 I played so solidly thank you and he did play so solidly his work making the spreadsheet paid off and he finished off a run that wouldn't be challenged for a long time in fact 10 months passed without anybody being able to even tie XR yonce 149 but in November 2015 a Pokemon speed runner by the name of swap was in the middle of an 80% glitchless attempt of pokemon red his personal best was around the two-hour mark definitely not a world record contender but a respected runner nonetheless on this particular run he entered into the bike shop and opened the bike shop menu prepared to use a bike voucher he realized that he didn't have a bike voucher to use however and continued playing through the game lamenting over his mistake Wow yeah I did just do them but something strange that happened every time after that point where text appeared on the screen for fights he didn't have to type out like it normally did instead it just appeared instantly Swap had no idea what was going on I am so confused his chat had no idea what was going on and nobody in the community had any idea what was going on it was quickly figured out though when you enter the bike shop menu the game sets a flag for text to appear instantly if you don't have a bike voucher and eggs it out of the menu the game never gets rid of that flag all text done appears instantly just like it would in the bike shop menu and throughout the whole run this saves about one to one and a half minutes a runner named the gunner maniac used his trick to his advantage to get a one forty eight run in February 2016 148 but hang on a minute remember what this category was called an 8% glitchless was this instant text trick glitch think about it you were more or less making the game do something that it was not intended to do but then again all that was happening was the game not bothering to reset the flag the player wasn't doing anything strange it was the game doing something strange the community debated this for a while before gunner maniacs run ultimately deciding that it wasn't a glitch but after gunner maniacs run the topic was brought up again and it was decided that the trick wasn't allowed for any person glitchless so this 148 got reclassified into a new category called no major glitches and any percent glitchless record was still xr/e onto 149 from 13 months prior ultimately though gunner maniac would end up tying the 149 world record a few months later 149 and baby let's go that's a world record time however thanks to a run with a huge time-saving Mount moon due to very few random encounters sorry I'm fired right back in August 2016 with an incredible 148 we'll keep going here a couple of weeks after XR eons run a significant change was made to all Pokemon speedruns historically every game in the franchise had their runs timed with the in-game timer at the end of the game on August 18th however the community decided that all future runs of Pokemon would be timed with a traditional real-time timer from start to finish there were a few reasons for this decision the first one was that the only reason Pokemon was ever tons the in-game timer to begin with was because of old rules from the website speed demos archive were runners used to submit most of their speedruns for everyone to see them the rule said that if a game had an in-game timer then all runs had to be submitted with that in-game time speed demos archive reasoning at the time was that an in-game timer would be more accurate than any external timing method but this didn't always end up being true so most games communities such as Super Metroid for instance eventually abandoned this practice also with the in-game timer it was possible that our run could be nearly a minute faster than another run and still be tied with it the 149 that X Ariane and Gunnar maniac both got for instance it's possible that XR Aeons 149 could have been a 148 31 in reality while Gunnar maniacs could have been a 149 29 both these times would have been rounded to a 149 so even though XR eons are almost 58 seconds faster the world record would have been tied XR eons 148 world record was actually a 150 31 in real time since the in game timer tended to report times as being a couple minutes faster than the game actually took due to load times so now the new time to beat was 150 31 instead of 148 and the key to beating that time lied within a trick that had been theoretically possible for a long time but was about to have its door blown wide open this trick was RNG manipulation for anybody who may not know what RMG is it stands for random number generator and it's essentially just a fancy way of saying look so it's a way of manipulating the luck in the game to get exactly the stats or items that you need the quickest and easiest way of explaining the RNG manipulation is that the way the game determines what RNG it will give you is from the instant you start up the game boy the game tracks your inputs and based on which buttons you're pressing when it will change the RNG that you get over the course of an entire run your inputs will vary drastically so controlling the RNG this way seemed impossible but if you saved and quit the game right before a point where you wanted something be it stats or an item you could turn the game boy off to get rid of the inputs our already tracked then turn it on and do the exact few inputs you need to load into the game based on what these few inputs were you could then control what RNG you get immediately upon returning to the game these inputs were usually fairly simple stuff like holding a while the game powers on but the difficulty that prevented people from utilizing it for so many years was that you needed a frame perfect' a press to clear the save info box the frame after pressing continue you have a one sixtieth of a second timing window to do this so doing it repeatedly whenever you want to manipulate RNG wasn't going to be too viable but then that same August people notice the video called pokemon blue in 69 a presses where somebody beat the game while only pressing the a buttons 69 times and funnily enough this person was able to just hold the a button down all the way through clearing the save info box this oversight meant that there was no need to do a frame perfect' a press since you could just hold down the a button instead initially players found three places where the RNG manipulation could definitely be helpful while more places have been discovered since then these three remain crucially important before Nitto bush you could save and quit to get a Nitto ran with a good level and good DV in mounts moon you could save and quit the skip all random encounters until rocket and finally outside of surges Jim you could save and quit to manipulate which trashcan as the two switches were under student have to waste time guessing with these three new tricks so much RNG and randomness was now taken out of the run using the RNG manipulation to his advantage Diggs Ariane was able to get a run of 149 48 in September 2016 then in early 2017 gun remaini act once again VTX Ariane with a 149 41 interestingly the indie game totter was a 147 in this friend compared to a 146 in ex re ons run but the in-game time didn't matter anymore the record was still gunner maniacs this brings us to the most recent world record 14850 by poke guy 84 in June 2017 the large time save over the previous record mainly came from a different late game route that involves fighting Giovanni first and getting earthquake later so you skip having to fight an optional trainer but lately poke guy has been trying to push the record even farther by using a trick known as extended manipulation extended manipulation is essentially an extended version of RNG manipulation normally you'd want to manipulate a Pidgey outside of mount moon so you can capture him by saving and quitting and performing the correct inputs to get back into the game to make him appear but you also want to manipulate a Paris into a puree right after you get into mountain moon so you can capture him as well this would mean you would have to do to save and quits nearly back-to-back to perform two separate RNG manipulations turns out it's possible to play through the game from the Pidgey encounter until one you need to do the Paris encounter with close enough inputs to still get the Paris to appear without needing to do that second save and quit but the amount of precise inputs you have to chain together is really difficult in addition to the extent of manipulation a new early game route has been routed as well where he skipped the route 3 Center and fight the route through last and pick up mega punch and mount moon these strategies were all much more risky though since you have less HP when fighting less nobody has been able to complete a run with either extend a minute or thus new early routes so as of today Pope guy 84 is 14850 is where the world record stands Pokemon Red and Blue has certainly had one of the craziest speedrun journeys of any game out there the anypercent glitchless category may not have had the most ridiculous game breaking bugs of the game like super mario 64 did or the insane optimization of a category like Super Mario Bros but instead a combination of rule changes controversy and the frequent discovery of new routes and strategies and this is just the beginning of this games world record progression the new extended manipulation and early game route I talked about before will be used in the future to drop the games time even more there's also been talk of reeling the instant text glitch and merging the Japanese and American leaderboards so be sure to keep an eye out for any of the runners listed in this video or possibly even a new runner to continue writing this games record history in the future thanks for watching so this is the part of the video where I normally just have a black screen with links to other videos but since I can't link it here I also just wanted to mention that I sometimes do speedruns on my twitch page twitch.tv slash summoning salt so feel free to follow me there if you want to watch me play or just talk about speedruns or give me feedback or whatever you want to do thanks [Music]

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 5,364,595

Rating: 4.9053507 out of 5

Keywords: speedrun, speed run, pokemon, world record progression, world record history

Id: u0aRVjtjmB4

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/jmking]

This was actually super fascinating.

...and holy crap, he has a whole channel filled with these mini documentaries. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w/videos

[u/IronGolem_]

I love this dudes content soooo much. Super underrated. A very unrepresented topic with such an interesting and intriguing presentation.

[u/Jorfredo]

I've been subscribed to this guy for a while now. Great channel, even in video games I know nothing of, it's really interesting.

[u/nickhinojosa]

Not sure why I just watched what was essentially a documentary on the world record pokemon “speed run” (something I did not know existed before today), but I have to admit that I was kind of riveted by it.

I can only imagine the love that must have gone into the editing and filmmaking.

To the person who made this - I hope you know how much talent you have, and I hope you’re not doing some BS job that you hate. You should be a filmmaker, editor, etc.

[Edit: Spelling]

[u/EllipsisBreak]

people noticed a video called "Pokemon Blue in 69 A presses" where somebody beat the game while only pressing the A button 69 times. And funnily enough, this person was able to just hold the A button down all the way through clearing the save info box. This oversight meant that there was no need to do a frame perfect A press, since you could just hold down the A button instead.

LOL

I was not ready for that.

[u/CptLande]

This morning I was thinking "I haven't seen any new World Record Progression videos lately..."

And then he delivers.

[u/[deleted]]

i really enjoy that there's only one of these every few weeks. i barely play video games (let alone speed run) but the genre is fascinating.

that is, fascinating enough for me to spend less than an hour per month following it. but no more.

[u/lite951]

Watched the whole thing as soon as I saw it was out, as always. Love this guys videos.

[u/Screw-Driven]

Glad to see this video posted here!

This channel has been a fantastic way to introduce me (Who knows very little) to the complicated world of speed runs. Easily digestible and somehow pretty intense as times!