Speed Demos Archive

Newcomer Dmitriy 'Shander' Chekrigin has taken 31 seconds off the total Starcraft time with three new runs. He ran Terran 2 "Backwater Station" in 0:01:12, 2 seconds faster, Zerg 1 "Among the Ruins" in 0:07:11, 23 seconds faster, and Zerg 2 "Egression" in 0:00:50, 6 seconds faster. The total Starcraft time is now 3:28:08.

The aesthetic barrier of three hours for Starcraft: Brood War has been broken with a new total of 2:53:00. The improvement of 0:10:40 comes mostly from Alex 'aresake' Eustis. He ran Terran 1 "First Strike" in 0:02:45, 0:01:25 faster, Terran 3 "Ruins of Tarsonis" in 0:05:36, 0:02:47 faster, Terran 6 "Emperor's Flight" in 0:02:09, 0:01:18 faster, and Zerg 9 "The Reckoning" in 0:06:30, 0:02:59 faster. Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell implemented the pause glitch in the bonus level "Dark Origin" resulting in a time of 0:01:30, 0:02:11 faster.

three years ago today the newly joined metroid 2002 speed demos archive presented kip's segmented 1:04 in metroid prime to the world. since then i have served sda as an encoder not only of metroid material, but of all runs in need of my services.

however, as my lower case writing is meant to indicate, i have not forgotten what brought me here. i am therefore honored beyond all measure to release today no fewer than three world record metroid prime speed runs: 1:03 segmented, 1:07 single-segment, and pal 1:17 single-segment.

all three runs were produced by the last active metroid prime runner, besmir 'zoid' sheqi. zoid is an avid collector of metroid prime speed runs and an aficionado of their contents. through careful analysis of past great runs as well as a great many attempts at each segment, zoid was able to trim an entire minute from one of the greatest and longest standing records sda has ever seen. on top of that, he cleaved six minutes from the single-segment record and two minutes from the pal single-segment record.

some of the approximately sixty seconds separating kip's very high 1:04 from zoid's very high 1:03 came from a tricky timesaver at ridley discovered by red scarlet. the rest of them, however, were shaved off one by one in a spectacular show of dedication to the greatest game ever made.

modern sda arose from exactly the kind of work you see here today. yet there is nothing mysterious about it—every one of you is capable of matching zoid's tenacity if you would only try. together we are creating a new world, and this is only the beginning.

1:03 torrents: divx avi | h.264 mpeg-4

Queue watchers will have noticed one run stuck in the "Waiting for author's comments" stage of submission for what seems like an eternity. That submission was Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho's long-awaited PC Half-Life run. We all know that Gordon Freeman is a fine soldier and a skilled research scientist, but in Blake's capable hands he now becomes an Olympic sprinter — just shy of 15 minutes have been cut from the old Hard mode attempt by David 'RandomEngy' Rickard, with this new 180-segment run clocking in at 0:31:00.

This video makes probably the heaviest use of scripting and binding we've yet seen in a run — according to Mike Uyama, one of the scripts used allows Freeman to do a perfect 180 degree turn and shoot, picking up speed instantaneously. This sort of thing presents us with a problem. There has been some controversy surrounding the use of scripts in PC games, with many complaining that defining macros to simplify tasks such as bunnyhopping is bordering on tool-assistance (even though the capability to do this is provided as part of the game engine itself). To appease those that feel this way we'll be listing PC runs that use scripts as a separate category — Blake's run is the first to be treated this way. Also, if 180 segments sounds excessive, please remember that every non-autosave has a half second penalty associated with it, so this hasn't gone unpunished.

Despite the above string of caveats, there's no doubt that this is a considerable improvement and well worth a watch. It's a shame that Blake's placeholder comments don't explain how he does what he does — without full explanations, this becomes a long chain of incomprehensible tricks. I'm making available both DivX and H.264 torrents. The original demo files are also available.

I've got a lot to get through today, so I'll spare you my usual florid prose and get on with it ...

First off is the run that I originally posted on the 7th and we had to pull because the audio was broken — one on PC action RPG Dink Smallwood. Arturs 'Sanitars' Demiters scorched through this in 7 segments, taking 0:49:22. Apologies go to Arturs for the bungled original release; let's hope nothing goes wrong this time.

Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson has been conspicuous by his absence for a little while, but he's back to knock yet more time off NES shooter Contra, still a hotly-contested favourite. Ten seconds have been slashed from Ray 'Croc Doc' Cullen's December 2006 effort; Freddy's new time is 0:10:40.

Andrew Gardikis of Super Mario Bros. fame has also fired up his NES recently and put Excitebike on the map. Andrew's performances are individual-track time trial efforts; follow the link above to see the details, but I'll tell you that the sum of his times for all five tracks is 0:04:10.96. I've also made zip files of all five tracks in normal quality DivX or H.264 format for easy downloading.

Next is cult PlayStation RPG Valkyrie Profile, with Kevin 'Enhasa' Juang bringing to the table a single-segment effort on the bonus Seraphic Gate dungeon. Kevin's time is 0:15:43.

Finally, we see the return of one Mr. Joe Stanski, who adds Genesis Castlevania: Bloodlines to the game list. Stanski beats the game on Expert mode using Eric Lecarde and notches up a single-segment 0:32:13 for his troubles.

Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson is nothing short of scathing when it comes to PC/Xbox shooter Soldier of Fortune 2: Double Helix; the comments for his new 62-segment Soldier of Fortune skill run promote it as "one of the most buggy and random games ever created", and herald it as "a total failure in game design". Indeed, he requested that I include a YouTube link to what is presumably an outtake just to demonstrate how badly broken the game is. Anyway, Peter managed to achieve a time of 1:41:24 against all the odds. He also claims that the DivX versions of his run don't look so good, so this is an SDA first: Today's normal quality torrent is only available as H.264.

Ben 'Cygnus' Goldberg has offered us an improvement to his own Game Boy Pokémon Red run. He starts with Charmander rather than Squirtle this time and beats his old 24-segment attempt by ten minutes to secure 2:09 using 41 segments.

There is a slight problem with this run — a segment is missing from the video, and I wasn't at all happy about posting a run with a missing part, especially as we've been penalising runners for video glitches recently. However the missing piece is very short; the verifiers gave Ben the all-clear; this is an improvement to a runner's own run; and (most importantly) the timing is all done in-game, so eventually I relented.

Long before I started working for SDA, I was avidly watching a topic on the SDA forum aimed at improving an existing run on a highly prestigious PC game. This topic was started way back in 2005 and has run to over one thousand replies. A lot of discussion seemed to be taking place but not a lot of running, and indeed at one point I'd pretty much given up hope of ever seeing an revision on one of the best games ever published — the genre-bending RPG/FPS hybrid Deus Ex.

Enter Quake veteran Karol 'dex' Urbanski, who was determined to take these suggestions and actually construct a coherent speed run from them, one that would beat Nick 'Thrull' Alward's old 1:29:02 from December 2004. No stone was left unturned (or ventilation shaft uncrawled) in the relentless quest for shortcuts, and 'dex' even restarted his run from scratch when a particularly appealing early timesaver was found. The results are highly impressive, and this run has it all: sequence breaking; huge shortcuts; meticulous planning; easter eggs; and even a novel use for a packet of cigarettes — all these combine to slice Nick's old run neatly in half. Karol's new Realistic difficulty time is a well-deserved 0:43:20 spanning 41 segments, and if you'll forgive a personal touch, this is now one of my favourite runs on the site. I've made both DivX and H.264 normal quality torrents — the HTTP mirrors are of course still there with the other qualities.

Great job, 'dex' !

Purist Adam 'Lucid Faia' Sweeney has long been an advocate of single-segment speed running, and four new such videos of his are posted today. If you're into biorhythms, you can probably assume that Adam's graphs were at their zenith on the eighth of April — three of the four runs were done on that one day !

Adam's signature game — one that he apparently "knows better than his own house" — is isometric NES adventure-puzzler Solstice. In order to celebrate an improvement in recording technology, he went ahead and beat his own 100% record on this game by 33 seconds, achieving 0:14:24. He also decided to populate this title's hitherto empty pure speed category — 0:06:23 was the result. One impressive factoid here is that this any% was recorded and wrapped up on the very first attempt !

The other game that Adam elected to attack on that fateful April day was SNES Demon's Crest. Again, a dual-category approach was taken — 0:50:59 for 100%, with the pure speed any% effort taking a more modest 0:12:24.

That's a good day's work by anybody's standards !

Joe Stanski moaned that my previous update announcing his Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog 2 individual-level improvements was devoid of all creativity, so this time I thought I'd do it in iambic pentameter:

All o'er the land the children run with joy,
To Emerald Hill, which grief could ne'er alloy;
As sages old and wise to tears are moved —
Joe Stanski hath his Sonic 2 improved.

Yeah, I'm better with Unix than I am with poetry.

Casino Night Zone, Act 1: improved by 1 second to 0:00:27;
Hill Top Zone, Act 2: improved by 1 second to 0:01:01;
Mystic Cave Zone, Act 1: improved by 2 seconds to 0:00:32;
Metropolis Zone, Act 1: improved by 5 seconds to 0:00:56;
Metropolis Zone, Act 2: improved by 2 seconds to 0:01:01.

It's pretty crazy that Joe is still able to go faster at this game: These revisions chop off another 11 seconds, slashing the total summed individual-level time to 0:16:47, and I thought we'd seen perfection from Stanski a long time ago ... If you'd rather not download all the levels individually, you can get a zip file containing the five improved videos in normal quality DivX or H.264.

Mike Uyama's existing PlayStation 2 Contra: Shattered Soldier run is joined by an attempt that opens up a novel new category on this title. A tag team made up of Danny 'DonG' Ong and Alex 'XeaL' Ong has ripped through this game in two-player mode, achieving 0:26:52.

Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe is also back today, providing two revisions to his own Super Nintendo Star Fox runs. 'Sir VG' has improved his Level 1 with warps path time by 21 seconds to 0:14:56. By achieving better luck on the slot machine he has also culled 2 minutes and 45 seconds from his secret ending path time, which now stands at 0:10:26.

It would appear that Jim Hanson was not content with merely improving his own Ninja Gaiden II run; he wraps the black cloth around his head and takes to the shadows once more to beat Freddy Andersson's incumbent NES Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom run as well. Jim's new run is exactly one minute faster than Freddy's old one, but we had to penalise him by one second again for a video glitch, so his time is listed as 0:15:09.

A new SNES gamelist addition arrives in the shape of cartoon platformer The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse. Rob 'Mickey_Mage' Whitener is the man gripping the gamepad this time; his hard mode effort earned him 0:16:56.

Normal quality torrents:

Ninja Gaiden III 0:15:09: DivX, H.264;
The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse hard mode 0:16:56: DivX, H.264.

If the miasma that is the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess topic on the SDA forum can be likened to an ugly green caterpillar, then Daniel 'Jiano' Hart's speed run of this Nintendo title might be considered the resulting butterfly. Various differences between the GameCube and Wii versions make separate categories for the two systems an inevitability: Daniel's 43-segment 5:39 run is on the Wii version. It's nice to see those who claimed we would never list a run on LoZ:TP proven wrong !

This morning's other item is an attempt at one of the Resident Evil Gun Survivor games: Resident Evil: Dead Aim for the PlayStation 2. Brandon 'Ekudeht' S. Armstrong scored 0:23:43, single-segment style.

We have finally added another HTTP mirror to our arsenal to replace the two accounts we lost in April, so feel free to give the new hosts a whirl !

If you'd rather get the normal quality encode using BitTorrent, here is the link:

Twilight Princess 5:39: DivX.

The Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness run in the previous update suffered from a timing error. Rather than being 28 segments as we suggested, this run was actually 33 segments spread across 28 files; some extra save penalty should therefore have been added to the time, which has been revised from 1:57:53 to 1:57:55. We apologise for this change.

Meanwhile, back at SDA headquarters, a new run on the PlayStation Portable has showed up. Like the other PSP runs we list, it's a Mega Man game — Mega Man Maverick Hunter X to be precise — and once again it has been contributed by Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk via his trusty Innovation PSP TV adapter. Chris managed a 13-segment 0:42:52.

Maciej 'groobo' Maselewski returns with some business that didn't quite get finished in the previous update - he adds a Metal Slug X run to his Metal Slug 4 one. Maciej again used the PS2 Metal Slug Anthology and played on easy mode, achieving 0:18:47. If you read his comments you will learn that this time would have been better if he hadn't smashed his PS2 controller following a failed attempt and been forced to use an apparently inferior third party one. Speed running can be an expensive hobby, you know ...

Another Xbox 360 run gets itself listed courtesy of Robert 'Valarnin' Kontz. Robert attempted Dead Rising's Overtime mode, single-segment, and scored 0:25:00. You may wonder why we're listing a "new game +" run without a from-scratch one; the reason is that the normal mode of this game is beaten by surviving for six hours, so attempting such an out-of-the-box run would be pointless.

Tomb Raider specialist Aleš 'Ewil' Horák adds another of Lara Croft's adventures to the game list; this time it's the notoriously bug-laden Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness for the PC. 1:57:55 was Aleš's time - achieved using 33 segments.

Here are the normal quality torrents; please try to seed them for as long as possible. These and other versions are as always also available via HTTP.

Metal Slug X easy mode 0:18:47: DivX.

Two items to download by Maciej 'groobo' Maselewski - he's been a busy boy.

First up is a further improvement to Maciej's own PC Diablo time as the sorcerer. Some further strategy refinements and the inclusion of a trick to skip a cutscene combine to bring the time down by another 34 seconds to 0:06:07. The nature of the luck manipulation employed means that this run still uses a whopping 40 segments.

Groobo's other offering is an effort on the easy mode of Metal Slug 4, played on Metal Slug Anthology for the PS2. Loading breaks have been subtracted from the run time to make the Anthology times comparable to the times we already list, but this is a new category regardless. Maciej's time is 0:18:03.

There is a normal quality DivX torrent available for Diablo.

Two improvements to existing runs and one new addition make up today's update.

Jim Hanson was one of the runners who starred in the Ninja Gaiden triple update back in March and his martial arts mastery is on display once again as he beats his own NES Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos time by 35 seconds (36 if you count the fact that we penalised him a second last time round for providing glitched video). No such deficiencies mar his performance on this occasion, though: Jim's new time is 0:12:09.

The GameCube Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 record has also been self-broken; Simon 'Sorcerer88' Schmid revised his routes and strategies and ground off another 2 minutes and 30 seconds, landing a single-segment 0:06:23.

And the new listing comes courtesy of Benoit 'TJazZ' Boudreau who generously provides us with a run on Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures for the SNES. Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde were left in the dust as Benoit scored a single-segment 0:32:03.

Yu 'inichi' Morimoto has submitted a new run on the Super Nintendo RPG Chrono Trigger, everyone's favorite paradox filled game. The original run by David Gibbons was just under five hours and completed near the end of 2005 so it's been around for a while. Back when David was planning his run, there was one idea I suggested to him that I was sure would be necessary to make a good speed run - but unfortunately he didn't use it.

Yu has used this idea, and the result is a much faster time, 3:34. He defeats Lavos so early that he never even got Epoch. I have personally watched the final battle about four times - it's so crazy how much planning obviously went into making this run. If you've played this game you must watch this run. And if you haven't ... well, play the game, then watch the run! Oh yeah, it's in Japanese. But that doesn't matter cuz you know what's going on anyway, right?

Also available in the usual torrents for speediness: DivX or H.264.

Mike Uyama described it as "pure undistilled awesome". Nate chose to tag it as "worthy of heralding game number 350". What were they talking about ? Why, Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson's adding SNES Mega Man X2 to the game list, of course.

Yep, the Swede of Speed has ripped through this title, single-segment, in 0:36:29. April has already been a big month for runs, what with the releases of SMB1 and FFIX, and all indications are that this one is something of a classic. I suppose you'd better watch it, then ! Get it via HTTP or using BitTorrent in either its DivX or superior H.264 normal quality incarnations.

Andrew Gardikis has finally taken advantage of the fact that SDA's rules allow NES Super Mario Bros. to be beaten more quickly than is allowed by the rules of a certain other site which amusingly considers itself to be the authority on speed records. The result of this evolutionary step is that the existing SMB1 run by Scott 'sdkess' Kessler has been beaten — by a whole five seconds. Andrew's new 0:05:00 run exploits a couple of glitches on 4-2 to climb the outside of two pipes as if they were vines, and he also throws in an astonishing walljump on 8-4. Put simply, you have to see this ! You can download all qualities via HTTP as usual, but for download speeds that match Andrew's pace through this game, you'll want to get on either the DivX or H.264 normal quality torrents.

Congratulations, Andrew Gardikis.

Prior to today, the only NES Mega Man 4 run was an effort by Freddy Andersson on the European version. However this is now joined by a submission on the US version by Tom Radovich, who achieved 0:41:52, single-segment style. Tom's run comments promise us a sub-0:41:30 effort sometime in the future.

You may think you recognise the surname Feiertag as belonging to 'InsipidMuckyWater'; however the other item today — Genesis Comix Zone — was not run by Adrian. A staffing change in the Feiertag household sees his brother Elliott Feiertag on D-pad detail for this contribution. Elliott achieved 0:17:41, but he managed to persuade 'InsipidMuckyWater' to do the donkey work of writing the comments — clever lad !

To some extent we botched releasing Essentia's Final Fantasy IX run mentioned in the last update by distributing solely from archive.org. Given the size of the run, we should have realised sooner that it wouldn't take many people downloading it to cripple the server it was on. Nate rescued the situation by building a torrent of the normal quality DivX, which you might prefer if you're having trouble downloading it from archive; please seed this and the other torrents for a while after you've finished leeching. Anyway, back to business.

A certain young SDA staff member by the name of Mike Uyama has found time in between sorting out everyone else's contributions to complete one of his own. Mike has tackled GBA Justice League Heroes: The Flash on Justice mode and achieved 0:27:26 in a single sitting. Good to have you back, Mike.

Now for something a little crazy. Maciej 'groobo' Maselewski has sent us a further improvement on PC Diablo. The previous run achieved substantial savings over its predecessor through segmentation and severe luck manipulation, and Maciej's new attempt features more of the same. So much more, in fact, that his 0:06:41 Sorcerer run makes use of 40 segments ! As usual we apply a time penalty for each save employed on games where free saving is allowed, so this heavy use of saving and reloading has been punished to the tune of 19½ seconds, but the new run is still nearly eleven minutes faster than the old. The high save density employed here will probably not be to everyone's taste (which is why SDA's save penalty rule exists in the first place), and I find myself wondering how long a single-segment attempt at this game would take. Nevertheless, this is an impressive achievement.

Next up is GBA stalwart Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. This revision by Tomi 'sarou' Salo lays waste to Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody's old "Boss Rush as Julius" submission. Tomi got 0:03:28.63, which is over 30 seconds quicker than the run it replaces.

Und schließlich, the periodic attempts at Postal games continue. This time it's PC Postal²: Apocalypse Weekend, Postal²'s expansion pack. Peter 'ZeRo' Kornatz played on Remedial difficulty and took 23 segments to achieve 0:58:43.

Here are the normal quality torrents of today's releases:

Justice League Heroes: The Flash - Justice Mode 0:27:26: DivX, H.264;
Diablo Sorcerer 0:06:41: DivX;
Castlevania AoS Julius Boss Rush 0:03:28.63: DivX, H.264;
Postal²: Apocalypse Weekend 0:58:43: DivX.

Two long-awaited runs go up today, the first of which is a mammoth ...

Kari 'Essentia' Johnson's 68-segment domination of PlayStation Final Fantasy IX is ready at last. Just getting this run to SDA HQ was a mindboggling piece of logistical wrangling. Perhaps Mike Uyama said it best:

"Nate, you're going to get 19 tapes soon;
I'm not making this up ..."

Kari's run clocks in at over eight hours: 8:32, to be precise; its video run time is in excess of nine hours, and even the normal quality version totals over two gigabytes of data, so you'd better make sure you've levelled up your hard drives before downloading this one.

The other item we're supplying today is Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson's death-abusing PlayStation Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped 100% attempt, which joins his similar treatment of Crash Bandicoot 2. Having never played this game, I've not closely followed the progress of said run ... however, judging by Mychal's comments, its colourful history represents an epic tale of blood-chilling terror which will be told around the campfire for generations. This 18-segment effort worked out at 2:41:28.

Most sites would be permanently crippled by having a hosting account and its contents deleted with zero warning or grounds for appeal. We have just lost two such accounts, with one of those losses occurring only yesterday. Is that going to stop us ? Is it hell !

The tit-for-tat shenanigans on the SNES Mega Man X page continues, with Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson now reclaiming the any/low% single-segment category that was stolen from him by Sattik Ghosh back in March. Freddy has gone 33 seconds faster than Sattik, achieving 0:34:09. Another round, gentlemen ?

Freddy also currently holds two records on the European version of NES Duck Tales and he has now decided to take a crack at the US/NTSC version too, achieving 0:09:02 on Difficult mode.

A new category has also been added to PC Doom 3 by Jérôme 'tagh_azog' Bouzillard, who provides us with a 27-segment effort on Marine skill in 1:09:37. For the record this is about 15 minutes faster than the Nightmare skill run we list already, although obviously the skill level difference means that these runs cannot be compared directly.

Finally, ActRaiser for the SNES has been the object of another speedup with Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe the runner improving his own time. Over two minutes have been sliced off the single-segment category to yield a new analysis of 1:10:06. This run abuses death to save time.

Recently we received a new submission on the SNES classic, Super Mario World. But this run was barely an improvement over the run we have posted, by Scott Kessler, done back in July of 2004. In fact, after checking the timing on the new run and comparing it to the old run we found that the old run was in fact timed wrong somehow. I honestly dont know how it happened, as the timing points I had for the old run in my excel spreadsheet did not match the actual video at all. I don't think scott ever recaptured this run or anything, so we're just going to list his run on the SMW page as 0:10:54 now, instead of 0:10:56 as it was before.

*shrugs*