World Record Progression: Donkey Kong 64

[00:02] they knew they were going to have some big shoes to fill in the future. It's regarded as one of the greatest trilogies of games ever made, and following it up on Nintendo's next console, the Nintendo 64, was not going

[00:15] console, the Nintendo 64, was not going to be easy. The result was this. the length of the game with most saying that it took at least 30 hours to get

[00:30] through all of it. When speedrunners today look back at that 30-hour today look back at that 30-hour estimate, we laugh.

[00:48] Over the past decade, speedrunners have played Donkey Kong 64 with the goal of beating it as quickly as possible. Rare designed a game with many seemingly foolproof ways of making sure you weren't abusing the mechanics to make

[01:01] everything the way they wanted you to. As it turns out, they didn't do too great of a job of that. Let's take a look at the world record progression of Donkey Kong 64. [Music]

[01:23] We're going to start by going back to 2006. Meet Tom Vaiva. He's a speedrunning legend known mainly for original NES titles. One of his most famous scores was on the NES port of the original arcade Donkey Kong where he

[01:36] scored 3.1 million points over an incredible 6 and 1/2 hour gaming session. But on this particular day in 2006, November 15th to be exact, he decided to play through Donkey Kong's Nintendo 64 counterpart, he beat the

[01:50] game in 4 hours 26 minutes. Let's see how he did it. So, here's the deal with Donkey Kong 64. The 30-hour estimate that many reviewers gave was actually fairly reasonable at the time. If you want to beat the game,

[02:04] do. It's broken down into seven main levels. Jungle Japes, Angry Aztec, Frantic Factory, Gloomy Gallion, Fungy Forest, Crystal Caves, and Creepy Castle. You start out in an overworld,

[02:19] DK Isles, where you can access each of them. But before you can enter a level other than the first level, Jungle Japes, you need to first unlock that level's lobby with a key. You get this key from the boss of the previous level.

[02:32] Then once you enter the lobby, you're presented with a bee locker. You can't enter the level until you get past him either. And how do you do that? By collecting golden bananas, which you can get from either puzzles or mini games.

[02:45] You can collect a total of 25 of them in each level. Five for each character you play with. Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Linky Kong, Tiny Kong, and Chunky Kong. Donkey Kong at the start, you unlock the others as you play through the game.

[03:00] Each be locker requires an increasing number of golden bananas. You need just one to start playing jungle japes, but by the time you get to the end of the game, you're going to need at least 100 of them. And once you're in the level,

[03:12] there's loads of collectibles that you need for various purposes, such as crowns and Nintendo coins, but by far the most common one is the colored banana. Colored bananas are scattered all over in the levels in the overworld,

[03:25] balloons of 10. You need to collect hundreds of these to enter the boss of each level, which as explained before, it's necessary to unlock the next level with the key you collect from it. So yeah, Vaiva had a lot of work to do in

[03:39] those 4 and 1/2 hours. This was essentially most of Vaiva's run. He ran from level to level collecting banana after banana to progress farther into the game. Once he got to 100 of the golden bananas, he entered the game's

[03:51] final stage, Hideout Helm, where he had to unlock three doors to progress onto collecting various unlockables and executing a fairly long sequence of activities. And all that was left was the boss fight with King K Rule. And Tom

[04:06] Vonova 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 video recorded speedrun. Unfortunately, all those components took

[04:19] a very long time. Having to play mini games to collect the golden bananas was timeconuming. Collecting the hundreds of colored bananas you needed took forever. And each boss fight you did to get the key took a few minutes as well. Getting

[04:32] unlockables that were needed took an best he could with the strategies that he had. 4 and 1/2 hours was miles ahead of a 30-hour estimate. So people looked at his run with awe. Viva himself

[04:47] perfection as he was willing to go. So neither he nor anybody else was up to the challenge of trying to beat it. Now there had technically been a few runs there had technically been a few runs before Viva's run. A guy named Joe Weell

[05:01] did a segmented run that clocked in at just over 5 hours and Tom Vodiva himself had spent a few months gradually taking his time down. But once he got the his time down. But once he got the 4-hour 26-minute run, it stood and stood

[05:13] 4-hour 26-minute run, it stood and stood and stood,

[05:35] important events from 2009, what pops into your head? Obama was sworn in. Windows 7 was released. The Yankees won the World Series. Well, how about the Donkey Kong 64 Revolution? In June 2009, the stars aligned on a

[05:52] long-forgotten thread hidden in a dark corner of a largely dead internet forum. runners came together and used all the knowledge they had gained over the past three years to completely change the way people ran Donkey Kong 64 in just a few

[06:05] people ran Donkey Kong 64 in just a few short days.

[06:18] three major tricks that began to be utilized at the same time. As explained before, much of what made Tom Viva's run so long was having to collect keys to get to the lobbies, golden bananas to get past the bee lockers, and colored

[06:31] bananas to get to the bosses. Players were about to find a way around all three of these things. Trick one, skipping the keys. Since players needed to use a key to get into the lobby of each stage, it was

[06:44] previous stage to get it. But they found a way around that. You could clip into the lobbies of certain stages, bypassing the requirement to collect the key. This means you could skip several of the boss fights and save multiple minutes not

[06:58] having to collect their keys. Well, great. You were in the lobby now, but before you could enter the stage by giving them a bunch of golden bananas. Jungle jeeps required just one golden banana, while Angry Aztec required five.

[07:11] Frantic Factory required 15. Gloomy Gallion required 30. Fungy Forest required 50. Crystal caves required 65. Creepy castle required 80. And hideout home required 100. So there wasn't much of a point of clipping into the lobby if

[07:26] you still needed golden bananas to get past the bee lockers. This is where trick two comes in. Be locker skipping. By playing as Linky Kong and stretching his arms out, you can just barely touch the portal behind the beocker and you

[07:40] enter the level. Just a slight oversight on the game devs. Unfortunately though, this trick worked on every stage except for Frantic Factory where you need 15 golden bananas and hideout home where you needed 100. Meaning that even if you

[07:55] skipped all previous doors using this Lanky Kong trick, you were still going to need 100 by the time you got to hideout home. So, you still needed to spend the time picking all of them up in the other stages. Therefore, this trick

[08:07] wasn't all that useful. But on June 9th, 2009, Mano Cheese uploaded a YouTube video, Hideout Home early. He was standing right in front of the entrance to Hideout Home, where there was a bee locker that required 100 golden bananas

[08:21] to pass through. He only had 17 golden bananas, so it looked like he couldn't gain access to the stage. He then did a trick known as ledge clipping, where he clipped into a tiny gap in the ground using a precise Cup press on the

[08:34] controller while avoiding death to the lava by using invincibility frames. gotten by hitting himself with his own orange. And after very carefully maneuvering forward while attempting to deal with the uncooperative camera

[08:46] controls, he jumped out and was in hideout home with less than a fifth of would have needed to collect to get there. So now all the players needed was to collect the 15 golden bananas needed for Frantic Factory and they were home

[09:00] free in terms of golden bananas. But then once you were actually in the stage, you still needed to unlock the few bosses that you still needed to fight with colored bananas, which took a long time to collect. Welcome to trick

[09:13] three, skipping the colored bananas. Using the ledge clip once again, the player can clip into the ground and skip any boss door in the game. No more running around to collect hundreds of colored bananas anymore.

[09:26] Yet, perhaps the craziest part of all these tricks is the rapid rate at which they were discovered. Every trick that I just described was discovered from June 9th through June 12th, 2009. Skipping keys, golden

[09:39] bananas, and colored bananas. So, all of a sudden, a game that Tom Vodiva seemed to have completely optimized was suddenly blown wide open. On June 9th, the world record was VA's 4 and 1/2 hour run. On June 10th, runner PMIT posted on

[09:55] Speed Demos Archive that he beat the game in 3 hours flat. June 12th, Mayo Cheese decided to chop an hour off of that, finishing in 2 an hour off of that, finishing in 2 hours and 8 minutes. And June 13th, Mayo

[10:08] Cheese dropped it down to 1 hour and 39 minutes. Over the course of 4 days, the record went down 3 hours. It was just a third of the length that it was half a third of the length that it was half a week before. Sadly, no videos exist of

[10:21] of speedrunning was a little different back then than it was today. People didn't just stream around to Twitch and highlight it like they do today. TB maybe

[10:37] they weren't going to bother showing the run to anybody unless they were really happy with it. And these guys weren't at that point yet. But those few days in June 2009 have gone down in speedrunning history as one of the craziest route

[10:50] progressions ever. Donkey Kong 64 was changing and they were only at the start of it. The first revolution was over, but there was still so much more to come. In the following months, Mayo Cheese

[11:03] continued a streak of dominance over the game. Every few months, he would make a post announcing that he lowered the record down a few more minutes. Another guy, Lefty's Heroes, apparently held the record for a few days and then quickly

[11:16] got beaten by Mano Cheese once again. There was also a Japanese runner, Cass, who did a run timed with real time that clocked in at 1 hour 12 minutes and 52 seconds, but most today don't recognize it as a legitimate world record. He

[11:30] played on the Japanese version, which was slower overall, and he used cheats that allowed for infinite animation, oranges, among other things. But as for Mano Cheese, we don't know too many details about his runs, and it's

[11:43] possible that he got other records in between the ones that he posted about, but we do know that he gradually lowered it down from an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and 10 minutes before finally breaching the sub hour barrier on June

[11:55] 8th, 2010. Finally though, in August of 2010, runners got to see video footage of Mano Cheese playing for the first time ever. weren't going to show a run unless they submitted it somewhere? Well, he

[12:10] submitted a 54-minute speedrun to Speed Demos Archive, and once it was verified, it was public for the world to see. There were golden banana skips, [Music] colored banana skips,

[12:28] perfect gameplay elsewhere. In his submission notes, he said that he was done with the game. And who could blame him? He had brought the record down from 3 hours to under an hour through sheer optimization and domination. He also

[12:41] said that he thought nobody would ever be able to get a 53minute run unless new tricks were discovered. But 2 years later, one guy was finally up to the task. Ring Rush. However, he decided to do things a

[12:55] little bit differently for Mano Cheese. The first thing was he decided to switch to timing the run in real time with a timer from start to finish instead of using the in-game timer at the end of the run. This allowed him to reset the

[13:07] game at various points in order to speed things up and he could keep his real time runner running while he reset. So where did he reset the game? The first wanted to skip turning off the blast domatic which normally requires a long

[13:23] and complicated checklist of things that you have to do. Typically, pausing and exiting in stages allows you to go back to the lobby, but in Hideout Helm, it counts as a game over, which isn't allowed for a single segment speedrun.

[13:35] So, Ring Rush used a more brute force method, just resetting his game. But the real revelation that Ring Rush used was a trick known as Aztec early. Remember how I said there were some lobbies you could access early by clipping into

[13:49] them? It turns out it was possible for the angry Aztec lobby as well. But the problem was it was ridiculously hard. movements and timed actions in midair with an uncooperative camera. And if you

[14:04] minute to get back to the position where you could try it again. It was a game-de-f. But if you got it to work, you'd save 3 minutes. Armed with these tricks, Ring Rush set out to beat the record. Over the course of a few months

[14:19] in mid 2012, he streamed his attempts to beat Mano Cheese's record of 54 in-game minutes, or 52 minutes and 17 seconds of real time, the way Ring Rush would be But the problem that he and so many other runners from back then had was

[14:34] that he didn't save any of his runs. He probably figured that Twitch's past broadcast system, which automatically archived all streams, would save it. But Twitch ended up deleting most of these a few years back. We know his runs are out

[14:47] there. They existed at some point and people watched them live on Twitch. From May through July of 2012, he beat the world record nine times, bringing it all the way down to 47 minutes and 18 seconds. Sadly though, the only one that

[15:02] seconds. Sadly though, the only one that we can watch today is part of the 4718 speedrunning podcast, The Sunday Sequence Break. Right. And here I cut, right?

[15:14] Yeah. There's a long cut scene where Diddy says like, "Hey, free me." And Ring Rush would later go on to discover an incredibly important trick that broke the game even more than it already was. Lag clipping. The game tries to account

[15:28] for laggy areas by speeding you up to preserve constant motion. This means you can artificially create lag by shooting a bunch of oranges on screen if you want to go faster than normal. Sometimes fast enough that you're able to clip right

[15:40] through walls. Hey, look. There's the entrance to Angry Aztec where you're supposed to do the really hard angry Aztec early trick. I wonder if you could Aztec early trick. I wonder if you could do it against that wall to clip in.

[15:58] So, now that Aztec Early was way easier, there were a couple of runners that wanted to battle it out for the record. Ring Rush, who had been crushing the record over and over for months, and Cox 7, a Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time

[16:12] Runner. But somebody else ended up getting the world record first. You guys might know him today from his legendary Super Mario Bros. speedruns.

[16:29] Is that Tide Record? I don't. His name is Cosmic D12, but years before he did any of his Super Mario Bros. stuff, he was actually a top level Donkey Kong 64 speedrunner as well. And he was the first guy to get

[16:41] the new Donkey Kong 64 record on November 18th, 2012.

[16:57] Se Fox beat it by 3 seconds about a week later, but just like so many others, he didn't bother highlighting it. But our boy Cosmic D12 sure did with his next boy Cosmic D12 sure did with his next record one week later.

[17:16] I don't know. I'm trying to like I don't think I can beat this. think I can beat this. [Music]

[17:31] [Music] By the end of 2013, Ring Rush had taken the record down to 42 minutes and 18 seconds. But by early 2014, yet another trick was discovered that would greatly change the category once again. Main

[17:45] menu mode. Donkey Kong 64 has this cut scene at the start of the game that you can just skip over if you want. So that's what people were doing for many years until it was figured out that you could press A right when it's fading in

[17:57] background while you're playing the game. And it creates some strange side effects. The most important one being that you can enter a place where the game temporarily gives you every move in the game, then trigger the cut scene to

[18:10] pull you out and boom, you can play through the game with every move. You used to have to get these moves by unlocking each character, which you did by going into the first few levels and doing various tasks. So now you could

[18:23] skip doing that since you had all of the moves to begin with. The issue was by far the easiest known way of clipping into Hideout Home early was by using Tiny Kong, who you had to unlock. It turns out that it was technically

[18:37] possible to do it with Donkey Kong 2, but it was just way harder. Ring Rush ended up lowering the record 8 minutes very quickly with these new strategies. So, all of that being said, what was there left in the game to do?

[18:52] There was no need to collect golden bananas or colored bananas, no need to collect most of the keys, no need to unlock any other characters, no need to collect most other collectibles, and no need to even enter most stages in the

[19:05] game. The route now consisted of simply collecting key 8 and key3, turning them in, and then fighting the final boss. But don't be fooled. That didn't mean the run was any easier than before. It was actually just the opposite. Doing

[19:19] like clipping into the lobbies and skipping so many collectibles, is skipping so many collectibles, is ridiculously difficult to do. Anyway, in ridiculously difficult to do. Anyway, in 2014, a Japanese runner, Sigma, and Ring

[19:32] further down. They brought it down to the 30 minute mark, but on August 7th, 2014, a different runner was trying to beat the record, Zernicus. And he had a run that was on pace going into the final boss fight.

[19:47] final boss fight. [Music]

[19:59] had ever been beaten in under half an hour. 29 minutes. Zernicus had an amazing run, but how long would it stand as the world record? A few hours. Ring Rush got it back later that same day. That would ultimately be the last time

[20:14] that Ring Rush ever held the DK64 world record. Later on in 2015, three players took their turn lowering the record down a bit more. Isotcharge, a bit more. Isotcharge, [Music]

[20:29] Sigma, and Tiffany Fruit. And then any% went dormant for a few months. Nobody ran it. And the world record was 2656 by Tiffany And the world record was 2656 by Tiffany Fruit. Why was that? Well, here's the

[20:44] Fruit. Why was that? Well, here's the thing. In April 2015, DK64 was released on the Wii U Virtual Console, and this version of the game had nearly no lag in that meant the game wouldn't slow down if there were too many objects on the

[20:58] screen like it did sometimes on the N64 version. So, maybe it would be faster for speedruns, and it would save around 2 minutes overall. But remember the lag clipping that I mentioned earlier? Yeah, that wasn't going to work on the Wii U

[21:11] Virtual Console version. throwing the oranges simply wasn't going to create enough lag to build up the speed that you would need. And the place where that mattered the most was for Frantic Factory early. That lag created by the

[21:24] oranges that you see now couldn't be created on Wii U Virtual Console. There was an alternate method that you could do on Wii U Virtual Console. But that method alone made the entire run so hard that nobody even bothered trying. So,

[21:37] that nobody even bothered trying. So, Tiffany Fruit's 2656 on the Nintendo 64 was as good as anybody was willing to get, at least until October 2016. On October 29th, Kiwi Killer 67 was able to pull off Frantic Factory early on Wii U

[21:52] Virtual Console in a run and closed out a run 40 seconds ahead of the world a run 40 seconds ahead of the world record.

[22:10] And here's the best part about this run. Nobody even wanted to try to beat it. Getting a run that fast on the Nintendo 64 was essentially impossible. And Frantic Factory early was so hard that nobody else wanted to mess with it. So 9

[22:24] months later, Kiwi Killer 67's run remained the world record. But as they always were, new strategies were found. In mid 2017, players discovered that if you went to the Frantic Factory entrance, did a moon kick to a rafter on

[22:39] the ceiling, and then did a ledge clip out of bounds, you could enter Frantic Factory, bypassing the need to do the ridiculously hard version of Frantic Factory early on the Wii U Virtual Console. With this new discovery, there

[22:52] were new world records, and a lot of them.

[23:06] GG. [Music] We [ __ ] did it, boys. Let's go.

[23:19] Let's go. First main category world record on First main category world record on stream.

[23:42] 2459 by Falcon X Falcon is where the world record stands today. record, I think it's safe to say that Donkey Kong 64 has had one of the most

[23:55] drastic progressions of its any% record ever. Tom Viva's 2006 run was little intended while still going as fast as you possibly could. It was a very skillful run, but look at what we have today. Clipping into walls, skipping

[24:11] collectibles, and abusing nearly every mechanic that the game gives us. Who would have thought that all this was possible 10 years ago? I'm sure Tom thought if it didn't. And who knows what craziness we're going to be doing 10

[24:23] years from now. Thanks for watching everyone.