World Record Progression: Donkey Kong 64

After Rare made the famous Donkey Kong Country trilogy on the Super Nintendo, they knew they were going to have big shoes to fill in the future. It is considered one of the best game trilogies ever created and will continue on Nintendo's next console, Nintendo. 64 was not going to be easy, the result was this Donkey Kong 64. Reviews came in and one thing that most reviewers commented on was the length of the game and most said that it took at least 30 hours to complete the whole thing when speedrunners today , look back at that 30 hour estimate, we laughed at the last decade.

Speedrunners have been playing Donkey Kong 64 with the goal of beating it as quickly as possible. It's rare to sign off a game with many seemingly foolproof ways to ensure you don't overuse the mechanics. to make sure you were really playing everything the way they wanted, since it turns out they didn't do a great job. Let's take a look at the

world

record

progression

of Donkey Kong 64. Let's start by going back to 2006. Meet Tom Vodova. He is a speedrunning legend known primarily for the original NES titles. One of his most famous scores was in the NES version of the original arcade Donkey Kong, where he earned 3.1 million points in an incredible six and a half years. one hour gaming session, but on this particular day of November 15, 2006, to be exact, he decided to play through the Nintendo 64 counterpart of Donkey Kong.

He beat the game in 4 hours and 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 pretty reasonable at the time, if you want to beat the game there are a number of things you need to do, it breaks down into seven main levels, jungle japes, angry aztec frenetic factory, gloomy galleon, funky forest, crystal caves and spooky castle, you start in an over

world

, dk islands where you can access each of them, but before you can enter a level other than the first jungle level, you must first unlock the lobby of that level with a key that you obtain this key from the boss of.

In the previous level, once you enter the lobby, you are presented with a locker B. Neither You can enter the level until you pass it. How do you do it by collecting golden bananas that you can get from puzzles or mini-games? You can collect a total of 25 of them in each level five for each character you play as Donkey Kong Diddy Kong Lanky Kong Tiny Kong and Chunky Kong, although you can initially only play as Donkey Kong at the beginning, you unlock the others as you play . In the game, each B square requires an increasing amount of Golden Bananas.

You only need one to start playing jungle, but when you reach the end of the game you will need at least 100 of them and once you are in the level there are many collectibles that you need for various purposes such as crowns and Nintendo coins. , but the most common is the colored banana. Colorful bananas are scattered throughout the levels of the overworld, sometimes in groups of five or balloons of ten. You need to collect hundreds of these to enter the boss of each level which, as explained before, requires you to unlock the next level with the key you get, so yes, Vodafone had a lot of work to do in those four and a half hours.

Basically, most of Ottawa's career he ran from level to level collecting banana after banana to advance further in the game. Once you reached one hundred golden bananas, you entered the final stage of the game's hide and seek helm, where you had to unlock three doors to advance towards the final stage 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 speedrun

record

ed on video , unfortunately all of those components took a lot of time, having to play mini-games to collect the golden bananas took a lot of time to collect the hundreds of colored bananas you needed.

It took forever and every boss fight you did to get the key took a few minutes, plus getting all those steps plus the other unlockables that were needed took an incredibly long time, but Ivanova did the best she could with the strategies she had. Four and a half hours was well ahead of an estimate of 30 hours, so people watched his run in amazement. Fonova himself stated that the race was the closest to perfection that he was willing to run, so neither he nor anyone else was up to the challenge of attempting it. to top it now, technically there were some races before the vadava race, a guy named joe weawell did a segmented race that lasted just over five hours and tom vodova himself had spent a few months gradually reducing his time, but once he got The 4 hour and 26 minute run time stayed and stayed and stayed at least until 2009, when you think about major events of 2009, what comes to mind, Obama was sworn in on Windows 7, it 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. The racers got together and used all the knowledge they had acquired over the last three years to completely change the way people ran Donkey Kong 64 in just a few days, the first revolution revolved around three main tricks that began to used at the same time, as explained before. A big part of what made Tom Vladova's career so long was having to collect keys to get to the lobbies, golden bananas to get past the b. lockers and colored bananas to reach the bosses, players were about to find a way to avoid these three things, trick one by skipping the keys, since players needed to use a key to enter the lobby of each stage, it was necessary fight the boss of in the previous stage to get it, but they found a way around it: you can access the lobbies of certain stages without going through the requirement of collecting the key, this means you can skip several of the boss fights and save several minutes when not having to pick up the keys properly.

Great, now you're in the lobby, but you still had to get past the black box before you could enter the stage by giving them a bunch of golden bananas. Jungle Pranks required only one Golden Banana, while Angry Aztecs required five. A Frenzied Factory required 15. A Shadow Galleon required 30. The Mushroom Forest required 50 Crystal Caves required 65. The Spooky Castle required 80 and the Hideout House required 100, so there wasn't much point in entering the lobby if you still needed Golden Bananas. to get past the lockers, this is where trick 2 comes in. B Locker jumping playing as Linky Kong and stretching his arms, you can barely touch the portal behind the B Locker and you enter the level, just a slight oversight on the part of the developers of the game, unfortunately, although this cheat worked on all levels except the frenetic factory where you need 15 golden bananas and a hideout where you needed 100, which means that even if you skipped all the previous doors using this lanky

kong

cheat, You'll still need 100 when you get to the hideout, so you'll still need to spend time collecting. all of them in the other stages, so this trick wasn't that useful, but on June 9, 2009, Mano Cheese uploaded a YouTube video about hiding the house early.

He was standing right in front of the entrance to the hideout where there was a bee locker that required 100 gold and bananas to get through, it only had 17 gold bananas so it seemed like he couldn't access the stage. He then did a trick known as ledge clipping where he cut himself into a small space on the floor using a precise shape. press the controller while avoiding death in the lava using invincibility frames obtained by hitting himself with his own orange and after very carefully maneuvering forward while trying to deal with the uncooperative camera controls, he jumped and hid at home with less than a fifth. of the number of golden bananas you would have needed to collect to get there, so now all players needed was to collect the 15 golden bananas needed for the frenzy factory and they were home free in terms of golden bananas, but once you were actually at this stage you still needed to unlock the few bosses you still needed to fight with colored bananas, which took a long time to collect.

Welcome to trick 3, bypassing the colored bananas using the ledge clip, once again the player can clip on the ground and skip any boss door in the game you will no longer have to run to collect hundreds of colored bananas but Perhaps the craziest part of all of these tricks is the rapid speed at which they were discovered. Every trick I just described was discovered June 9-12, 2009 by jumping. golden banana keys and colored bananas, so suddenly a game that Tom vonneva seemed to have completely optimized suddenly opened on June 9th. The world record was the four and a half hour race in Vladivo on June 10.

The pmit runner posted to the speed demos archive. who beat the game in three fixed hours on June 12, Maynoche decided to cut an hour from that finale by two hours and eight minutes, and on June 13, Mayo Without Cheese reduced it to one hour and 39 minutes over the course of four days, the record. it was down three hours, it was only a third of the length it was half a week before, unfortunately there are no videos of any of these races because the mentality of speedrunning was a little different back then than it is today, people didn't just stream races. to move it and highlight it like they do today pb maybe they wouldn't bother showing the race to anyone unless they were really happy with it and these guys still weren't at that point but those few days in June 2009 have passed in the history of speedrunning as one of the craziest route

progression

s in history.

Donkey Kong 64 was changing and just at the beginning, the first revolution was over, but there was still much more to come in the coming months. Mano Cheese continued to dominate. about the game every few months he would make a post announcing that he lowered the record a few more minutes, another guy left, these heroes apparently held the record for a few days and then were quickly surpassed by manoj once again, there was also a japanese racer. Cass, who did a real-time timed run that clocked 1 hour, 12 minutes and 52 seconds, but is not recognized by most today as a legitimate world record.

He played in the Japanese version, which was slower overall and used sheets that allowed infinite animation oranges among other things, but as for many cheeses, we don't know many details about his careers and he may have obtained other records among which published, but we do know that he gradually lowered it from one hour and 20 minutes to one hour and 10 minutes before finally breaking the sub-hour barrier on June 8, 2010. Finally, although in August 2010 runners were able to see a video de mano cheese playing for the first time, remember how I said before that the runners weren't going to show a race unless they sent it somewhere.

Well, he submitted a 54 minute sprint to the sprint demos file and once it was verified, it was public for the world to see that there were golden banana jumps, colored banana jumps, and key jumps everywhere. Combined with perfect gameplay elsewhere in his show notes, he said he was done with the game and who could blame him. He had reduced the three-hour record to less than an hour through sheer optimization and mastery. He also said that he thought no one would do it. could once run 53 minutes unless new tricks were discovered, but two years later, one man was finally up to the task, however, he decided to do things a little differently for mano cheese, the first thing he did was Switching to timing the race in real time with a start-to-finish stopwatch instead of using the in-game stopwatch at the end of the race, this allowed you to reset the game at various points to speed things up so you could maintain your real time.

The time runner was running while he restarted, so where did he restart the game? The first place was in the hideout because he wanted to skip turning off the blastomatic, which usually requires a long and complicated checklist of things you have to do, usually pausing and exiting in stages. allows you to return to the lobby, but in the hide and seek it counts as a game over which is not allowed for a single speed segment, so Ring Rush used a more brute force method by simply restarting its game, but the real revelation was that Ring Rush used was a trick known as early Aztec, remember how I said there were some lobbies you could access early by clipping them.

It turns out that it was also possible forangry aztec lobby, but the problem was that it was ridiculously difficult, you had to do it extremely precisely. Timed movements and actions in the air with an uncooperative camera and if you make a mistake it will take you half a minute to get back to the position where you can try again, it was a trick that defined the game, but if you can make it work, save three minutes armed with these ring rush tricks he set out to break the record over the course of a few months in mid-2012 he broadcast his attempts to break the hand cheese record of 54 minutes in-game or 52 minutes and 17 seconds of real time on The Way in which Ring Rush would be timed, but the problem he and many other runners at the time had was that he didn't save any of his races.

He probably thought Twitch's previous streaming system, which automatically archived all streams, would save him, but Twitch. I ended up removing most of these a few years ago. We know his races are there, they existed at some point and people watched them live on Twitch from May to July 2012. He broke the world record nine times, reducing it to 47 minutes and 18 seconds, sadly, although the only one we can see today is part of 4718 because they talked about it in an old speedrunning podcast, the Sunday sequence is interrupted correctly and here I cancel it, yeah, yeah, there's a long scene where diddy says like hey, free me, ring rush later would happen to discover an incredibly important cheat that broke the game even more than it already was.

Delay trimming. The game tries to account for areas of lag when speeding you up to preserve constant movement. This means you can artificially create lag by shooting a bunch of oranges on the screen if you want to go faster than normal, sometimes fast enough to be able to go through walls. Hey, look, there's the entrance to Angry Azteca. You're supposed to do the really difficult early Angry Azteca trick. I wonder if you could do it against that wall. to hook yes yes you can so now that early aztec was a lot easier there were a couple of racers who wanted to fight for the record in the ring and they had been crushing the record over and over again for months and see fox7 a super mario 64. and ocarina from the time corridor, but someone else ended up getting the world record first, you may know him today from his legendary super mario bros speedruns, it's that tidal record, his name is cosmic d12, but years before to do any of his super mario bros stuff, he was actually also a high-level Donkey Kong 64 speedrunner and was the first man to get the new Donkey Kong 64 record on November 18, 2012.

Fox He beat it by three seconds about a week later, but like so many others, he didn't. I bothered to highlight it, but our cosmic d12 guy sure did it with his next record a week later. I don't think he can eat this. By the end of 2013, Ring Rush had reduced the record to 42 minutes and 18 seconds, but in early 2014, another trick. It was discovered that it would greatly change the category once again. Main menu mode. Donkey Kong 64 has this cutscene at the beginning of the game that you can skip if you want, so that's what people were doing for many years until it was discovered that you can press right when it's fading and then have the cutscene play out. play in the background while you play and creates some strange side effects, the most important being that you can enter a place where the game temporarily gives you everything. move in the game then activate the cutscene to take you out and boom you can play the game with every move you used to have to get these moves by unlocking each character which you did by entering the first few levels and doing various tasks. now you can skip doing that since you had all the moves to start, the problem was by far the easiest way to access the hideout early was by using a little gear we had to unlock, turns out it was technically possible to do that. with

donkey

kong 2, but it was much more difficult, the race for the ring ended up lowering the record by eight minutes very quickly with these new strategies, so with all that said, what was left to do in the game was not necessary to collect golden bananas or colors. bananas most keys do not need to be collected no other characters need to be unlocked most other collectibles do not need to be collected and most stages of the game do not even need to be entered the route now consisted of simply collecting the key 8 and key 3, hand them over and then fight the final boss, but don't be fooled, that didn't mean that the race was easier than before, in fact it was quite the opposite, doing all these tricks in a single speed, like entering the lobbies and skipping so many collectibles, it's ridiculously hard to do anyway.

In 2014, a Japanese racer, Cigna and Ring Rush, took turns lowering the record, they lowered it to the 30 minute mark, but the August 7, 2014 a different racer was trying to beat Znurnicus' record and had a run that was on pace before the final boss fight, yeah and that's dk 64 in under 30 minutes. This was the first time the game was defeated in less than half an hour. 29 minutes. Zernik znurnicus had an incredible career, but how long would he last? As Ring Rush's world record for a few hours was reclaimed later that same day, that would ultimately be the last time Ring Rush held the DK-64 world record.

Later in 2015, three players took their turn to lower the record. a little more. iso targe cigna and tiffany fruit and then any percentage went dormant for a few months no one ran it and the world record was 2656 by tiffany fruit why? Well here's the thing in April 2015, dk was released on the wii u virtual console and this version. The game had almost no lag, which seemed like great news because that meant the game wouldn't slow down if there were too many objects on the screen like it sometimes did in the n64 version, so maybe it would be faster for quick races. and it would save about 2 minutes total, but remember the lag clipping i mentioned before, yeah that wasn't going to work on the wii u virtual console version, throwing out the oranges just wasn't going to create enough lag to increase the speed . you would need and the place where that mattered most was for early frentic factory that delay created by the oranges you see now couldn't be created on the wii u virtual console there is an alternative method you can do on the wii u virtual console but that method by itself it just made the whole run so difficult that no one bothered to try, so Tiffany Fruits 2656 on the Nintendo 64 was as good as anyone was willing to get until at least October 2016, October 29th.

Kiwikiller 67 was able to carry out a frenetic factory early on. on the wii u virtual console in a race and closed a race 40 seconds ahead of the world record, yes, g, and here is the best part of this race, no one wanted to try to beat it, getting a race that fast on the Nintendo 64 was essentially impossible. and the frenetic factory at the beginning was so difficult that no one else wanted to mess with it, so nine months later, the kiwi killer 67 race remained the world record, but as it always was, new strategies were found in mid-2017 , players discovered that if you went to the frantic factory entrance Moonkicked a beam on the ceiling and then clipped the out-of-bounds ledge, you could enter the frentic factory avoiding the needs of doing the version ridiculously difficult from frentic factory at the beginning of the wii u virtual console with this new discovery, there were new world records and many of them gg we achieved it guys, let's go to the first world record of the main category in the broadcast 2459 by falcon x falcon is where find the world record today, more than a decade later and I think they took several hours off the world record.

It's safe to say that Donkey Kong 64 has had one of the most drastic progressions of its record percentage ever seen. Tom Vaught's 2006 run was little more than playing the game as intended while going as fast as possible. It was a very skillful career, but look at what we have today cutting through walls, jumping over collectibles and abusing almost all the mechanics that the game offers us. Who would have thought all this was possible 10 years ago? I'm sure Tom Vodma didn't do it and who knows what. crazy thing we are going to do in 10 years thanks for watching all of you