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World Record Progression: Pokemon Red/Blue speedruns

Feb 27, 2020
Pokémon over the past 20 years has been fascinating to both children and adults who have spent hours and hours trying to catch them all in North America. The series began in 1998 on the original Gameboy with Pokémon Red and Blue and since then a subset of players have been obsessed with trying to beat that game as quickly as humanly possible, hundreds have tried but only a few have made it to the top. as the fastest people at speeding up Pokémon. Let's see how we get there. This is the

world

record

for Pokémon Red and Blue

progression

.
world record progression pokemon red blue speedruns
The true origin of Pokémon Red and Blue

speedruns

dates back to the mid-2000s. There's a guy named Jacob Macmillan who seemed to have complete control over any percentage of glitch-free runs. In 2008, he ran in 2 hours and 39 minutes before finally dropping it to two and a half hours. However, we are not going to analyze these races in depth today as they were not as optimized as the race I am about to show you, let's fast forward a few. years later in this particular career. of Pokemon glitchless was made by a fairly well-known runner his name is werster and on November 14, 2011 he completed the first truly optimized speed run of Pokemon

blue

one hour and 58 minutes, let's see how he did it so that werster had the option to choose Bulbasaur Charmander and Squirtle as starter Pokémon.
world record progression pokemon red blue speedruns

More Interesting Facts About,

world record progression pokemon red blue speedruns...

He ended up choosing Squirtle. He is the only water type of the three and the first of the eight gym leaders who also works would meet Brock. He was a rock type since water type Pokémon are super effective against rocks. Guy this money could easily be spent at the beginning of the game to level up Squirtle for later rangers. The general strategy throughout this run was to simply spend the game doing the minimum required rather than wasting time trying to catch other Pokémon and trying to level them up and using their moves for the most part just rode Squirtle throughout. the game by going to each of the eight gyms instead of fighting the Elite Four, also played with Pokémon Blue instead of Pokémon Red because Pokémon Blue gives you a higher Chance of getting Sandshrew after Mountain Moon.
world record progression pokemon red blue speedruns
Santro has the cut ability, which allows you to cut down a tree that blocks the path to the increase. It is a gym that allows you to continue progressing in the game. Werster is also careful to name all Pokémon players and rivals with a single character this way. each time the name scrolled on the screen it took less time to type, although this may not seem like a huge time saver, it adds up over the course of a run and eventually I was also looking for the diversification values ​​or DVS assigned to the squirrel. You see, once the game starts, it randomly assigns values ​​to four stats for your starting and special Pokémon attack defense speed on a scale of zero to fifteen.
world record progression pokemon red blue speedruns
Ideally, you'll want these values ​​to be as close to fifteen as possible, since the higher the value. The higher the possible value you can reach for that stat, if Werster had a bad DVS, he would simply restart the game and try again to get better ones. It was worth restarting a run right away rather than trying to play it with bad stats. All this careful planning paid off. werster was miles ahead of any other

pokemon

red and

blue

speedrunner. McMillan's race seemed much slower in comparison and it was clear to everyone that Werster was the dominant blue

pokemon

speedrunner and as is often the case with speedrunners, the dominant speedrunner tends to hold on to their

record

for a long time, as I mentioned before, Werster God is 158, which was the time the game gave you at the end after completing it in November 2011, well, all of 2012 passed and neither he nor anyone else could beat it, but at the beginning of 2013, Werster returned to make attempts, this time on his Twitch page, Twitch TV / werster, so that people could see him make his attempts live and he had a new trick up his sleeve, red bar, see you when your health goes down during a Battle for Below 20%, your Pokémon's health bar turns red and the game plays this constant beep throughout the battle.
It was basically the game's way of getting your attention and telling you, "You better be careful, you don't have much health left and you might die." It easily turns out that this beep has a convenient side effect for speedrunners. There are usually long sound effects and animations that play every time you gain moves and level up. The red bar. The beeping overlays these sound effects and causes them to not play, speeding up each fight. Ideally. Werster would reduce Squirtle's health to that health for as long as possible and gain as much benefit as possible from the red bar.
The problem was that he was often one attack away from dying when under the effects of the red bar, so there was no really consistent way to set it up repeatedly throughout the run and ultimately he was barely able to use the red bar in this race only in a couple of places, but partly thanks to a really strong start to the game, it was still enough to break the record. One more minute to an hour and 57 seconds, this time broadcast live for the

world

to see because of the way the splits you see on the side were in real time so everyone watching had an idea if it was on a good or bad rhythm. what the runners were really paying attention to at the end was the playing time at the end of the game boid 57 you got it congratulations man and i got trips with my money so at this point werster had had the record for about a year and a half without that no one could challenge him, his method of taking Squirtle and running with him just wasn't working for anyone else, if people couldn't outdo him yet, maybe someone could out-strategize him, this is too complicated, yeah, more.
Tricky decided to start with squirtle just like Werster because he could quickly get through the first gym with it, however instead of ignoring all the other Pokémon he captured one which Nadeau ran over, then proceeded to use it and level it up until evolved into Nidoking. Nidoking was really overpowered, has solid stats, moves like thrash and horn girl to quickly defeat enemies and was effective against most other Pokémon types most importantly though it was much more effective than Squirtle 1:59 yes , I got 159, this meant a couple of extra things for Turkey, the first being that he had to play with Pokémon Red instead of Pokémon Blue.
Pokémon Red gives you a 30% chance of encountering a male that will Iran, which is necessary to evolve into Nidoking vs Pokémon Blue. 5% chance 158, okay, but 157. It's definitely coming, it's definitely coming. The second thing it meant was that the race was faster now, well, not exactly, yeah. Nidoking was an extremely powerful Pokémon, but it's time to capture it first and get down to where it needed to be. "It was unclear at the time whether Werster's blue squirrel route to the new red route and the noodle king route was faster, however, an additional trick started making Pokémon red races with the new route, made his races on the emulator and I'm sure he won.
It didn't cause any controversy later or anything like that and as you've seen in these clips he was slowly getting closer to Worse, his record of 157 yeah I got it yeah five seconds well there we go 157 someone had finally reached Werster at least. proved that this Nidoking route could compete with the squirrel route and that although I had thought about the game for so long, it was not impossible to compete against werster, so we entered June 2013 and honestly, this was one of the Best fast-running months for a game I've ever heard of, it all started on June 16th.
The hardest part was running the Nidoking route which, as you can see from his splits, was a minute ahead of the record, which meant that if you finished this race he would probably be a minute ahead of 157 and get a 156. Everything It had gone well, but then no, he didn't press to the left. What does this guy have? I press to the left. What the hell does he have? What's wrong with it? I was trying. To avoid this encounter with a trainer in general, you should avoid all encounters that are unnecessary as you get nothing valuable from them and they waste your time.
The hardest part was trying to dodge him and stay out of his sight, but he accidentally ruined his movements. and forced a match with him in total, wasted about a minute, essentially erasing his lead and leaving him with another tied world record of 157, so that was June 16th and this is what happened the next day, June 17th, these are B, I may not have had them. I had heard of him before. He hadn't mentioned it before this point, but you can see on his twitch.tv highlights page that he started streaming his races sometime in early 2013, finishing races just over two hours long and after playing more during the following ones. months of boom he got the record he used the same red Nidoking route that he had used extra complicated he played very well and it paid off he was a minute ahead of everyone else two days later on June 19 extra Turkey made more attempts to get the record when I had this room that looked really good to start with, in fact it was good enough to probably have the best pace I'd ever had, then I went into Mount Moon.
I mentioned before that you wanted to minimize unnecessary encounters since you didn't get anything from With them, you run a big risk of having some random encounters in Mount Moon and you'll usually end up with a handful of them in an average run, but in this run In particular, the extra turkey had 18 random encounters about the moon entrances. I'm as good as ever and I make life too, aha, this encounter rate is complete rubbish and I've got, I've got the goods, this is stupid, well he lost three minutes, which puts him two and a half minutes behind in generally noticeably, although he did not. he gave up, moved on, and started heading back to Misty's division.
He got three critical hits, saving him a turn for each, since he defeated them faster, this meant he didn't have to go to the menu to heal before Misty. from this he saved his 35 seconds on his old personal best in the Polka Fluke division, he hid confused so he had the cure while still getting hit in this race, he was able to avoid that and gained 40 more seconds there, luckily. He also got incredibly good DBS on his Nidoking in this run, was able to take down opponents a little faster and won seconds and a lot of the splits at the end of the game, but the icing on the cake was the fact that the splits he hit faced were the ones I mentioned before with the accidental encounter in the final split, this time he was able to successfully avoid the coach and with that closed one of the greatest comebacks of all time in the history of speedrunning bam bam yes one five six BAM this The dwarf showed how much potential the categories still had.
Additional trick. He had scored 156, but he still lost several 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 going to be the one? taking it so low now that it was extra complicated and the 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 Pokémon read it with Nidoking was definitely the best option if one were to go for it. such a low time but werster proved everyone who might have thought that wrong just 10 days after the bonus trick he is 156 werster is trying the game with squirtle in pokemon blue and made our very good streak 155 yes amazing amazing once.
Once again the record had fallen into the hands of Werster. He was the only high-level racer still playing Pokémon Blue, but that wasn't a problem for him at all. He didn't care that he was the only person who didn't get Nidoking. He was still there. able to beat the others anyway, except for the fact that the day after Werster did this trickier run he got a 155 on Pokémon Red, a month later B also got a 155 on Pokémon Red and what happened from August 2013 to December 2013 was pretty good for separate runners, they were able to get a 154, an already established runner, very complicated, was the first to get it once again using the Nidoking Pokémon Red route during the following months, the runners they rode Bank and J, they trained through pain, or they were able to get a 154 in Pokémon Red. also, and yes, Werster, who was able to get a 154 on Pokémon Blue with Squirtle, I'm not going to go into too much detail on any of these four runs, they were essentially better versions of the 155 that had come out immediately before, better TVs.
Less random encounters that use the red bar and more that sort of thing. I'm going to go off on a very quick tangent here at the end of 2013, it was around the same time that people started running a new category of Pokémon Red and Blueknown as individual segments with faults for everyone. I've talked up to this point and everyone I'll talk about after this point falls into a category known as any glitch-free percentage, meaning you can finish the game as quickly as you can without using any glitches. He failed a single segment in the On the other hand, it allows you to use fails when walking through walls, skipping Gym Leaders, things like that.
This category originally allowed you to complete the game in about an hour and has since been reduced to under 20 minutes, but that's a

progression

for another day now that we have these four. runners with a 154 each who would be the first to break the tie. Would it be more complicated with this experience with the Nidoking route? would it be one of the two newcomers or would it be better with this OP on the blue squirrel route? Well, in fact it was one of the new arrivals riding pink, he scored a 153 in December 2013, but unfortunately for us it seems that the video of this race no longer exists.
All that is really known is that he played Pokémon Red with the Nano King route and ended up with 153 as the game time at the end a few months later, although in March 2014 he more or less got worse, but the world of red/blue speedrunning of Pokémon was upside down. Wow, so how in the world was a 151 possible? The key was a route that Mountebank had discovered a few months before, you play in Pokémon Red, you start with Squirtle and then you get Nidoking like in the ancient races, unlike the ancient races, however, when you fight Koga's wheezing, there are a self destruct attack, this causes Nidoking and Kota to die, but Nidoking revives with low health because you use rare candies and you know what it means when you are low on health, you get a red bar, once you have a red bar, you can keep it. while a one hit ko would be most Pokémon until Bruno, this consistent method of getting the red bar and holding on to it for an extended period of time is enough to save between a minute and a half to two, no one finished running with the Koga red bar strategy until Werster did it once he finally managed to run, was a full two minute record, the 151 remained undisputed for a few months, but on July 9, 2014 a video appeared on Youtube.
Pokémon red with any percentage without failures in 150 by someone. called egg, sorry no one had heard of xre before werster, extra complicated charlatan, none of them had any idea who he was, he didn't have any videos on youtube before this, the run was clearly done on an emulator which is allowed, but historically always. A fast race appears out of nowhere like this, it's usually fake, so when this race was published, many dismissed it in the same way, but there was also no evidence that the race was not legitimate and the high level racers they agreed that everything seemed to be in order and thought it was probably a real race very high rent bar or heel and give the Bellsprout a spin and the mass sprout got wrapped up and it was very difficult to know for sure if the race was cheated or not since when you played Pokémon on an emulator there is no way to know if it was assisted by a tool or not.
Tool-assisted

speedruns

are when you go into an emulator and manually tell the game which inputs will be pressed on each frame throughout the game to create a perfect or near-perfect speedrun. This can help you manipulate random lists and execute everything perfectly. The race was reluctantly included in the official Pokémon Red and Blue leaderboards after a while, but it was a pretty controversial decision nowadays, we know for a fact that this race was 100% legit and, as you'll soon see, Eggs Argon She went on to be a highly respected racer, but in 2014 this race was so debated that it led to a severe change to the leaderboard rules in December, any Pokémon Red and Blue race that was considered an official world record had to be run. on a console rather than an emulator, so no tool-assisted racing could be passed off as legitimate.
This rule put the leaderboards in an incredibly strange position. The game's top racers had been achieving their world records on the emulator for over a year at that point, which meant that the new official world record defaulted to 154 which Werster had decided to make on the console just for the hell of it. doing so in April 2014, so suddenly the world record once again had incredible potential for safety over time. We knew from the XR eons that a 150 was possible, so we are Stern I'm very happy with that, although it's only because it's the second one. The full cut is going to save me 151 151 yes, very nice, very nice, that's what I need, oh man, to get the analysis to 149, however, I would need the help of a little more work from Ariane.
He made this incredibly extensive google doc detailing different ways to play the endgame depending on what dvz wins. 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 elements among many others. things so more races have reached the end of the game now half the attention will be a world record this turned out to be the key the decks needed Aria for a new world record in January 2015 she became the first person to complete a race pokemon red sub 150 like this is more surreal than my original, it's not just that I got 149, I played so solidly, thank you and he played so solidly, his work making the spreadsheet paid off and he completed a career that no would be challenged.
In fact, for a long time 10 months went by without anyone being able to even tie personal best was around. the two hour mark is definitely not a world record contender, but a respected racer, anyway, in this particular race, he walked into the bike shop and opened the bike shop menu prepared to use a bike voucher, he realized he didn't have a bike voucher to use though and continued playing the game regretting his mistake Wow, yeah I just made them but something strange happened every time after that point where it appeared text on the screen for fights that I didn't have to type like I normally did. he 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 no one in the community had any idea what was going on. However, it was quickly discovered when you enter the bike shop menu. The game sets a flag so that the text appears instantly if you don't have a bike coupon and removes it from the menu. The game never gets rid of that flag. All text appears instantly just as it would on the bike shop menu and everywhere else. the entire race this saves between one and a minute and a half a runner called the gunner maniac used his trick to his advantage to get a run of one forty-eight in February 2016 148 but wait a minute, remember what this category was called a 8% No glitch was this instant text cheat glitch, think about it, you were more or less making the game do something it wasn't intended to do, but then again all that was happening was the game not bothering to reset the flag, the player was not doing anything. strange, it was the game that did something strange, the community debated this for a while before gunner maniacs run finally decided it wasn't a glitch, but after gunner maniacs run the topic came up again and it was decided that the trick was not allowed. for anyone with no flaws, so this 148 was reclassified into a new category called no major flaws and any flawless percentage record was still xr/e at 149 from 13 months earlier, although the manic gunner would end up tying the world record of 149 ones months later 149 and honey come on it's a world record time, however thanks to a race with a huge Monte Luna that saves time due to very few random encounters, sorry I got fired in August 2016 with an incredible 148, We will still be here a couple.
Weeks after the XR eons ran, a significant change was made to all Pokémon speedruns. Historically, all games in the franchise had their races timed with the in-game timer at the end of the game on August 18; However, the community decided that all future Pokémon runs. It would be timed with a traditional timer in real time from start to finish. There were a few reasons for this decision. The first was that the only reason Pokémon ever had a timer in the game to begin with was because of old website rules. speed demo file where racers used to submit most of their speed runs for everyone to see, the rule was that if a game had an in-game timer, all runs had to be submitted with that speed demo file reasoning of in-game time 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 gaming communities, like Super Metroid for example , they eventually abandoned this practice, also with the in-game stopwatch it was possible. that our race could be almost a minute faster than another race and still be tied with the 149 that X Ariane and Gunnar maniac scored, for example, it's possible that maniacs could have been a 149 29 both times would have been rounded to 149, so although the eons XR is almost 58 seconds faster the world record would have been tied.
The eons Now the new time to beat was 150 31 instead of 148 and the key to beating that time lay in a trick that had been theoretically possible for a long time. but he was about to have the door opened wide for him, this trick was RNG manipulation for anyone who doesn't 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 to manipulate luck in the game to get exactly the stats or items you need. The quickest and easiest way to explain RNG manipulation is that the way the game determines what RNG it will give you is from the instant you start the Game Boy, the game tracks your inputs and Depending on which buttons you press, it will change the RNG. that you get over the course of a full run, your inputs will vary drastically, so controlling the RNG in this way seemed impossible, but if you saved and exited the game just before a point where you wanted something, whether it be stats or a element, you could turn off the Game Boy to get rid of the inputs we've already tracked, then turn it on and make 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 pretty simple things like holding down the game for a moment, but the difficulty that kept people from using it for so many years was that you needed a perfect frame. press to clear the save info box, the box after you press continue, you have a one-sixtieth of a second time window to do this, so doing it repeatedly every time you want to manipulate RNG wasn't going to be too feasible, but then in August, people took notice. the video called pokemon blue in 69 a press where someone beat the game while only pressing the a buttons 69 times and interestingly this person was able to simply hold the a button until clearing the save info box, this oversight meant that it wasn't necessary to make a perfect frame, since you could simply hold down the a button.
Initially, players found three locations where RNG manipulation could definitely be useful, while more locations have been discovered since, these three remain of crucial importance before Nitto Bush. You can save and exit to get Nitto running at a good level and good DV in Mounts Moon. You can save and exit to skip all the random encounters until the rocket and finally out of the waves. Jim. You can save and exit to manipulate which trash can the two are. the switches were under the studentshave to waste time guessing with these three new tricks, now a lot of RNG and randomness has been removed by using RNG manipulation to your advantage.
Diggs Ariane was able to get a streak of 149 48 in September 2016 and then early. The 2017 weapon remained performing once again VTX Ariane with a 149 41. Interestingly, the standalone game wobble was a 147 on this friend compared to a 146 on the ex re ons run, but time in the game no longer mattered, the record remained gunners' maniac. It brings us to the most recent world record 14850 from Poke Guy 84 in June 2017. The huge time savings over the previous record came mainly from a different route at the end of the game that involves fighting Giovanni first and suffering an earthquake afterwards, to so you don't have to fight an optional trainer.
But lately, Poke Guy has been trying to take the record even further using a trick known as extended tampering. Extended rigging is essentially an extended version of RNG rigging. Normally you will want to manipulate a Pidgey outside of Mount Moon in order to capture it. saving and exiting and making the correct entries to get back into the game and make him appear, but you also want to manipulate Paris into a mash right after you get to Mountain Moon so you can capture him as well, this would mean you would have to. do to save and exit almost consecutively to perform two separate RNG manipulations, it turns out that it is possible to play the game from the encounter with Pidgey until you need to do the encounter with Paris with inputs close enough for Paris to still appear. without needing to save and exit a second time, but the amount of precise inputs you have to chain is really difficult, in addition to the degree of manipulation, a new route has also been routed at the beginning of the game in which route 3 was skipped, Center and fight the route to the last and collect mega punch and ride moon, these strategies were much riskier, however, since you have less HP when you fight less, no one has been able to complete a run with an extension of a minute or, therefore, new early routes, starting today, Pope. boy 84 is 14850 is where the world record is located Pokémon Red and Blue have certainly had one of the craziest speed trips of any game out there, the no-glitch category may not have had the most ridiculous game bugs like Super did Mario 64. or the incredible optimization of a category like Super Mario Bros, but a combination of controversy over rule changes and the frequent discovery of new routes and strategies, and this is just the beginning of the world record progression of this game, the new extended manipulation and early game route I talked about. about before will be used in the future to further reduce game time.
There has also been talk of fixing the instant text bug and merging the Japanese and American leaderboards, so be sure to keep an eye out for any of the racers listed in this video or possibly even a new racer to continue writing the history of this game in the future thanks for watching so this is the part of the video where normally I just have a black screen with links to other videos but since I can't link it here too I just wanted to mention that sometimes I do speedruns on my twitch twitch page .tv slash invoking salt so feel free to follow me there if you want to watch me play or just talk about speedruns or give me your opinion or whatever you want.do thanks

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