World Record Progression: Super Metroid

[Music] [Music] Super Metroid one imminent endows most popular game since it came out back in 1994 it puts the player through an absolute adventure you get dropped onto the planet zaebis make your way underground exploring a vast world of enemies power-ups and other oddities along the way you fight several bosses which test both the player's skill and guts to push onward finally at the end of it all is Mother Brain an extremely difficult fight that lasts for several minutes and then a final escape back onto the ship many gamers agree that this game is one of the incentives masterpieces its popularity has stood the test of time and it still commonly played today as a way of honoring its greatness for more than a decade the group of speedrunners have been battling each other to beat it as fast as they can it's been race that games done 'quick events and thousands of hours have been poured into the streaming the game live on Twitch to either get a lower personal bests or even lower the world record in fact speedrun.com says that there's only three games in history that have been running more than Super Metroid given the game's legacy the world record for this game has gone through many changes whether it be new strategies or better execution so today we're gonna look at how the record for Super Metroid has gotten lower over time one quick thing to note about this game there are two ways of timing it the in-game timer that you were presented with at the end of the game and real time which is a more traditional approach of timing the run from start to finish with a timer speedrunners are originally used in game time since it was accurate and didn't require the hassle setting a timer this would eventually change but I'll explain that later we're going to start by going all the way back to 2004 Super Metroid speed runner smokey was they able to get the first Super Metroid run with footage that still exists today with an in-game time of 38 minutes or 56 minutes and 22 seconds of real-time here's how we did it there are four major boss fights in this game before fighting Mother Brain kraid phantoon Ridley and Dragan you can defeat these bosses in whichever world you want as long as you didn't feed them all at some point smokey started off his run by heading into brim-star and fighting kraid he was able to do a quick kill on create by shooting him with the super missile and creates mouth was like this walking it into position and finishing off the fight quickly normally great CEO could last over a minute as you'd have to rise all the way up like this from the ground with this quick kill it was over and only about ten seconds next smokey handed over to the wrecked ship and fought phantoon you known Lee hit phantoon in his eye they can only hit his Iowan that is exposed Benton also likes to move around a lot depending on what patterns he gives this fight can either take a very long time or be over fairly quickly this fight ended up taking smokey around 90 seconds then smokey went into meridia to fight dragon dragon is one of the most difficult sections of the game she can either swoop down or the mucus cycle the mucus cycles where she releases mucus and pretty much just waste time and the soup is where she well swoops down while smokey didn't have a perfectly clean fight it was certainly good enough given the time finally the last bosses smokey thought was Ridley in lower norfair Ridley can do a lot he can go invisible grab Samus charge at her go up and down and of course swoop across the screen with a bit of luck and a lot of skillful execution smokey is able to defeat Ridley in about 60 seconds the pattern of going through the bosses in the order smokey did kraid then phantoon then dragged on and then Ridley will be used as a template for how to go through the game as fast as possible for years it became known as the KPD our route taking the first letter from the name of each of the four bosses in the order that they were fought after going through these four bosses smokey headed back up to the ship to get his energy back and then headed over at the fight other brain this fight has three forms the first form is easy enough you just break open the glass tank with missiles then the second form appears and the player first sees how big Mother Brain truly is the best way to deal with this section is to just keep dealing charge shots directly with the mother brains face and dodge her attacks some of which can kill you in one hit smokey did a beautiful job of this in his run after this phase is a cutscene and the third and final form of mother brain where he must deal as much damage to her as quickly as you can Smokey's method of doing this was to just stand in the lower ranked corner of the screen and constantly land face shots it worked well enough and then all smokey had to do was escape the exploding planet and get on to the ship since he was trying to optimize game time instead of real time he called his run 38 minute run smokey would eventually lower his time down to 36 minutes but no footage of his later runs exists today a couple of years later in 2006 a runner named kuru boat was able to beat Smokies 36 minute run with a 34 minute run I was playing to shock the speedrunning community with it the right as he was about to submit it to the website speed demos archive where most speedrunners showed off their runs he got a major surprise a Japanese runner Dan already beaten him but two minutes and I got in a 32 this runners name holder Ruby for anybody who hasn't heard of Hoda ruby he was one of the most legendary speed runners of all time he saw the world record in Mario games Mega Man games several other games and franchises and many of his records were unbeatable for years there's not really much that I can say that would be enough to pay tribute to how amazing he really was the way he got to 32 was mainly just by executing everything like a god when the run came out nearly everybody thought that it was fake time was just too low for it to be real here's an actual quote from the speed demos archive verification team when the one who submitted ho to Ruby's level of play is so far beyond anything yet seen on the site that his run was stuck in verification for weeks while the verifiers tried to decide whether or not the video was legitimate however no evidence of foul play was ever found and so today on behalf of Metroid 2002 flash speed demos archive I am proud to present Super Metroid again 32 single segments people use things like the fact that Hoda Ruby did arm pumping on a downward slope before speed boosters try and prove that the run was fake normally arm pumping like that down a slope would interrupt samus's running speed but if these people had actually tested it for themselves they would have realized that this only applies on certain slopes the one before the speed booster was fine too arm pump on probably the best part of this run was at the end o Durer we knew that he had a 32 on walk but also knew that he wasn't going to be fast enough to get a 31 so just for the hell of it he decided to save the animals' for anybody unfamiliar with what this is during the final escape sequence you can take this path into another room and shoot this door behind a room filled with animals to save them all this changes is at the end you see a tiny pixel float off into the distance which is supposed to be the animals that escaped all in all this weights about 25 seconds and it's supposed to just be a meme done at games done 'quick events sometimes but no owner who we decided that he would create a run so amazing everyone thought that it was fake and saved the animals just to annoy everyone a little more after this run came out a couple of super metroid runners azor and zero 72 decided they wanted to try and beat ho to room he's run by getting a 31 minutes segmented run as opposed to hood a ruby single segment run which is a traditional run completed from start to finish without stopping the segmented run is a run completed in multiple segments runners can grind one segment will run over until they get it how they like and then move on to the next one once they get a great run for each segment they can piece them together and becomes known as a segmented run people figured that this was probably be the only way to beat Oda Ruby's 32 but then moto Ruby just decided to get a 31 single segment run and once again people were completely in awe of his skill one interesting thing that Hoda Ruby did during this run was the side to focus more on renewal time strategies rather than game time strategies one such strat was the murder beam this normally creates a vertical beam during mothering three that continuously deals damage but it is much slower for real time about a minute slower so he decided to not do it for this run amazingly even though he decided to use real strategies total ruby was still able to beat his old run in game time since he was going for real time this run gradually stopped being referred to as a 31 and began to be called it's real time equivalents a 4925 for a few years pota ruby was completely untouchable people began to race Super Metroid instead of going for the world record attempts because they knew that nobody could possibly beat Oda Ruby as a result of those real time races the category universally began to be ran in real time and the game time was pretty much completely thrown out eventually in early 2012 runners finally were able to get sort of close to Hoda Ruby's run seven people garrison MSDS Casius dbx Luciana Emma Doran and hypo were all trying to get their own sub 50-minute run eventually two of these runners rose above the rest and got a sub 50 Luciana and Mo Doran I was unable to find footage of these runs but regardless these two runners were close to doing the unthinkable taking down Kota Ruby's nearly perfect world record unfortunately though neither of them were able to pull it off they got close but Hooda Ruby's run was just too good it seemed like Laura Ruby's record would stand for years more but after foo Siana and Emily Doran faded away from the Super Metroid community another one of those seven runners was able to pull off a sub 50 garrison garrison streamed as his attempts to live on Twitch see who's able to share his excitement with his viewers live as he slowly closed in on holder Ruby's record after a steady series of improvements the garrison was just a few seconds away from jota ruby finally on June 6 2012 it seemed like he was going to beat it it was going to be close you know is all coming down to the final escape are you kidding me dude CWR his timer showed that he had beaten it by one second but in reality garrison tried to go down into this ship too too early and stop the timer then - he actually went down about a second later he was officially tied with Hoda Ruby but a week later he had another chance [Music] [Music] bad escape after having the record for six years Hoda Ruby had finally been topped it wasn't by much and it was slower in the in-game timer but garrison had done with so many thought was impossible and taking the record from Hoda Ruby over the next few months garrison continue to run Super Metroid the combination with better movement better RNG slightly improved strategies allowed him to keep pushing his record time down lower one such strategy was the full halfie which allows her to skip the entire Coliseum for months garrison and msds spent countless hours trying to figure out these new strategies leading to garrison calling MSDS unsung hero of the Super Metroid eventually garrison is able to push his time down all the way to 4750 but while garrison was doing this another Super Metroid player was quickly improving in the background caught power originally a pal runner or a runner of the European version of the game cop power became aware of the grind for the NTSC record after was showcased at ESA 2012 set out to improve his time a mid-2012 his PB was 54 minutes just a few months later he improved so much that gives you a little take the record from garrison out of nowhere on November 13 2012 [Music] for a few months after that garrison and kottpower took turns lowering the record mostly they just kept out executing the other but call power also found a semi consistent way to do an extremely difficult trick in a big Metroid skip which allows you to skip getting grabbed by this Metroid at the end of the game and save a few seconds while garrison and comp power continued to trade the record back and forth a new runner zoast proved his skill and took it from them oh yeah [Music] they have my heart is beating so lord it was pretty clear to most that zoast was a pretty big force to be reckoned with and we'll get to zoast again later but anyway least we kept trading the record back and forth and once the time came now in 245 36 by kottpower it seemed as though the run was getting pretty close to the boundaries of what was humanly possible these strategies were coming out all the time but nobody could have expected what was coming next on July 26th 2013 Super Metroid fans woke up to find that the record had changed once again only this time it wasn't so scarce in' or kottpower it was by a speedrunner who didn't even stream on Twitch behemoths this run was done thanks to a number of new strategies that he had figured out with the help of other runners in secret in a private thread some of these strategies included climbing up the red tower super quickly similar to how the tool-assisted run did it and defeating the plasma priorites with a super bomb this method of crying strategies and getting the record offline became known as behemoth thing so one could say that so scott behemoth with this run so scott back to grinding and using these strategies he's able to get the record back from behemoth a couple of weeks later the chat was pretty excited including this runner named oats and goats remember that name at this point the new strategies a lot for the time to come all the way down to a 44 sews was the first one to get it although runners Ivan and krauser also we're trying to get the record these three runners in garrison ended up race in the game at agdq2014 and what has gone down is one of the greatest speedrunning races of all times well after that agdq it was all as those he wanted to push the game as far as he could the in-game timer was at a twenty nine Stoll for all of his runs and he wanted it if maybe he could get it down to a 28 he pushed him more and more and to his surprise in August 2014 he got the 28th Oh the time of that run in real time was a 4408 it seemed like that might be a fitting ending to the game speedrun the game had started by being timed by in-game time and while it had switched to real-time sews had pushed the game time down as far as it seemed it could go in the process but then zoast got behemoth again for the past 10 years are maybe even longer learners have been following the same route that smokey did at the beginning of the video cram first then phantoon then dragged on and finally ridley in early 2014 he began to search maybe there is a faster route through the game he looked with Reeve forensic and even smokey who was one of the first runners to use the KPD our route and after a few months of searching and a few more months of practicing working out quirks he must have himself a new route to use antoon first then Ridley then created a finally grade on this route ended up having a huge potential save time it's executed correctly and given great RNG he could save up to 100 seconds of real time although it would lose two minutes of game time but nobody really cared about game time while the minute and 40 seconds of game seemed fantastic the only problem is that it's harder a lot harder and a luck required with the bosses patterns to get all 100 seconds is pretty unlikely still that didn't stop the e-myth from behemoth things most once again and taking his record but 20 seconds with this new route just five days after so Scott the 44 le the reaction to this new route being discovered was overwhelmingly positive from almost the entire super metroid community the potential to lower the record was great so so stood behemoth got to work slowly executing the route better and better and getting better RNG oh yeah not bad not bad hell yeah go Steve still got it ah what a nail butter man bug by mid-2015 it was pretty clear that his oast was just a complete God at Super Metroid he pushed it more and more simplify executing they're out better getting better RNG and by being zoast the month of October 2015 was pretty solid for Super Metroid so she's got a new record of 42 32 on October 10th 8 days later it took 2 seconds off of it the next day he took another 2 seconds off three days later another 3 seconds came off and finally four days later on October 26th took 13 more seconds off holy good Oh 42:13 that's a 28 he improved the Super Metroid record five times in one month and took half a minute off the record and process so seem to be the undisputed champion of Super Metroid speedrunning but do you guys remember that guy oats and goats I was talking about whoo yeah dude we got it yes dude yes yes after having steadily improved his own personal best for months oats and goats was able to take the world record from the legendary zoast by a few seconds the time was down to a low 42 so naturally as all speedrunners would do everyone was anticipating the 41 minute time zoasty notes both wanted it so they both started grinding it Zeus wasn't screaming attempts quite as often but oats was streaming 41 attempts nearly every day ultimately though dose was the first one to find success he started by tying oats 42 10 then lowered their record by 5 seconds a few months later finally in September 2016 he did it he got a 41:58 offline and then replayed it on his stream but oats wasn't about to give up he knew that he had the skill to get the record back so he kept pushing forward even though it was incredibly frustrating sometimes and then on October 18 2016 everything was coming together he cleared boss after boss difficult section after difficult section and then it was on to the escape not looking not looking that's it baby that's a and as of February 2017 that's where the world record stands Super Metroid has been on the forefront of the speedrunning community ever since speedruns were even a thing it's been one of the most coveted records and every time the record has changed hands it's brought in a wave of attention to the game and to the runners this game requires so much an insane amount of skill a ton of RNG in a seemingly endless amount of patience and persistence while the record keeps getting so optimized who knows what new strategies will be discovered for behemoth newest thing again and completely revolutionize the game although he does scream out hoots unlikely that he would find it in secret this game has a long and treasured past it's sure to have a thrilling future as well thanks for watching everyone we'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 1,843,734

Rating: 4.9391699 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: dNL8rdn00IU

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/fffggghhh]

I wish there was more information regarding the how in these videos. i first watched this guy's original SMB video and he went to explain the strategies involved.

Here for example, after so much effusive praise for Hatorubi(sp?), and the clisp he showed demosntrated an otherworldly level of control, did the other players simply show more skill. Or did they employ different strategies...what?

It sort of gets boring saying Guy A had the record, then Guy B took it, then Guy A improved upon it. Were they just improvements in execution or was something else going on? Did Guy A win it by employing a different strategy, did he get lucky, did he not get screwed at a certain spot...

I realize that would maek the videos incredibly long, but as it is, these vidoes just leave me wanting more. They feel kind of incomplete.

[u/ACEJester]

As someone who follows this community very closely (you can even see me in Zoast's chat in this video hah) [EDIT: Watched on mobile last night, today I see I mixed myself up with Acmlm! my bad], I'm super impressed with how thorough and accurate this video is.

Something to note as well, there are many categories for speed running this game (any%, glitched%, 100%, reverse boss order, map completion, and many more), and at one time Zoast held the record in every single category that Deer Tier keeps track of (except for Ceres escape, which was Oats' original claim to fame).

[u/Minifig81]

These videos are quality, damn near Mark Brown of Game Makers Toolkit levels of quality for the history of Speed Runs. I love em. Thanks for sharing /u/siphillis ...

[u/IgnazSemmelweis]

I love these videos. I'm prone to getting sucked into marathons of watching speedrun videos on YT and it is really nice to have a pretty good overview of some of the players and the history of the runs.

This video had the bonus of being about my favorite game of all time. I just wish that he did a quick explanation of some of the techniques that are used so consistently through these runs (Arm pump, damage boosting... etc). Not that I could ever pull these things off.

[u/credomane]

I decided to watch this video thinking the world record was now 23:09 and got through the whole video before realizing that was the length of the video not the record. I really wanted to know who managed to optimize so much they shaved off nearly 20 minutes. lol

[u/Kasc]

I really like these videos but I've seen some fairly harsh criticism of them in the comments from runners and speed run enthusiasts. I'm talking about the Super Mario 64 video. Before I say this I want to state that I am just as nerdy as the average speed runner. It feels like some people who use speed running as an escape from their (perhaps) difficult lives don't want speed running to become 'mainstream'. They are overly critical of these videos to the point where it all becomes vitriolic. Whilst understandable, it's still a shame to see. There's a lot of drama surrounding the community; in particular, GDQs seem to garner a lot of hate.

[u/PlaySalieri]

Here is a question I've always wondered about speedruns. How does one accurately stop the clock from running? Is there some script involved or does someone have to manually push a button?

[u/LordHayati]

I'm surprised he didn't talk about the SGDQ run where everyone but Behemoth died.

but the research on this video is really well done. I would've delved into the room names a bit more, like the terminator room, but thats just a nitpick.

[u/whoeve]

These are nice history videos. Please keep making them.

That said, I'd also love to see technical videos, talking about what, mechanically, has changed over the years. What specifically changed about the route? What new tricks are required? What makes someone god tier at that specific game (ledge grabs, three tap shine sparking, smooth wall climbing, mock ball, etc for Super Metroid). I'd love to see more of those. That said, I also realize that would take an insane amount of work.