Name: Signakong's DK64 any% WR x Summoning Salt's DK64 speedrun history video
Uploaded: 2019-05-28T08:50:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Signakong's DK64 any% WR x Summoning Salt's DK64 speedrun history video' from Norm and Other Stuff on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-05-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Signakong's DK64 any% WR x Summoning Salt's DK64 speedrun history video' from Norm and Other Stuff on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-05-28. Transcript available.

Signakong's DK64 any% WR x Summoning Salt's DK64 speedrun history video

After Rare made the famous Donkey Kong Country Trilogy on the Super Nintendo,
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 to be easy.
The result was this: Donkey Kong 64.
Reviews came in, and one thing that most critics commented on was the length of
the game, with
most saying that it took at least 30 hours to get through all of it.
When speedrunners today look back at that 30 hour estimate, we laugh.
Over the past decade, speedrunners have played Donkey Kong 64 with the goal of
beating it as
quickly as possible.
We were to sign a game with many, seemingly foolproof ways of making sure you
weren't
abusing the mechanics.
To make sure you were actually getting food everything the way they wanted you
to.
As it turns out, they didn't do too great of a job of that.
So let's take a look at the world record progression of Donkey Kong 64.
We're going to start by going back to 2006.
Meet Tom Vaudeva.
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 scored 3.1 million points over an incredible 6 and a half 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 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 actually fairly reasonable at
the time.
If you want to beat the game, there's a number of things you have to do.
It's broken down into seven main levels: Jungle Japes, Angry Aztec, Frantic
Factory, Gloomy
Galleon, Fungi Forest, Crystal Caves, and Creepy Castle.
You start out in an overworld, 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.
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 minigames.
You can collect a total of 25 of them in each level, 5 for each character you
play with:
Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Linky Kong, Tiny Kong, and Chunky Kong.
Although you can only initially play as Donkey Kong at the start, you unlock
the others as
you play through the game.
Each bee-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, 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,
sometimes in bunches
of 5 or in balloons of 10.
You need to collect hundreds of these to enter the boss of each level, which as
explained
before, is necessary to unlock the next level with the key you collect from it.
So yeah, Vadova had a lot of work to do in those 4 and a half hours.
This was essentially most of Vadova'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 final stage,
Hideout
Helm, where he had to unlock 3 doors to progress onto the final boss 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 Vadova 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 a very long time.
Having to play mini-games to collect the golden bananas was time-consuming,
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 all of those steps, plus the other unlockables that were needed, took
an incredibly
long time.
But Vadova did the best he could with the strategies that he had.
Four and a half hours was miles ahead of a 30 hour estimate, so people looked
at his run
with awe.
Vadova himself claimed that the run was as close to 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 before Vadova's run.
A guy named Joe Wiewel did a segmented run that clocked in at just over 5 hours,
and Tom
Vadova himself had spent a few months gradually taking his time down.
But once he got the 4 hour, 26 minute run, it stood, and stood, and stood.
At least until 2009.
When you think of 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 long forgotten thread hidden in a dark corner of a largely dead internet
forum, runners
came together and used all of the knowledge they had gained over the past 3
years to completely
change the way people ran Donkey Kong 64 in just a few short days.
The first revolution revolved around 3 major tricks that began to be utilized
at the same
time.
As explained before, much of what made Tom Vadova's run so long was having to
collect
keys to get to the lobbies, golden bananas to get past the bee lockers, and
colored bananas
to get to the bosses.
Players were about to find a way around all three of these things.
Trick 1: Skipping the Keys.
Since players needed to use a key to get into the lobby of each stage, it was
necessary to
fight the boss of the 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 having
to collect their keys.
Well great, you were in the lobby now, but you still had to pass to the bee
locker before
you could enter the stage by giving them a bunch of golden bananas.
Jungle Japes required just one golden banana, while Angry Aztec required 5, Frantic
Factory
required 15, Gloomy Galleon required 30, Fungi Forest required 50, Crystal Caves
required
65, Creepy Castle required 80, and Hideout Helm required 100, so there wasn't
much of a point
of clipping into the lobby if you still needed golden bananas to get past the
bee lockers.
This is where trick 2 comes in: bee locker skipping.
By playing as lanky Kong, and stretching his arms out, you can just barely
touch the portal
behind the bee locker and you 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 Helm, where you needed 100.
Meaning that even if you skipped all previous doors using this lanky Kong trick,
you were
still going to need 100 by the time you got to Hideout Helm.
So you still needed to spend the time picking all of them up in the other
stages.
Therefore, this trick wasn't all that useful.
But on June 9th, 2009, Man-O-Cheese uploaded a YouTube video, Hideout Helm
Early.
He was standing right in front of the entrance to Hideout Helm, where there was
a bee locker
that required 100 golden bananas 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 C-up press on the controller, while avoiding depth to the lava
by using its
ability frames gotten by hitting himself with his own orange.
And after very carefully maneuvering forward, while attempting to deal with the
uncooperative
camera controls, he jumped out and was in Hideout Helm, with less than a fifth
of the amount
of golden bananas that he would've 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 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 3: 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.
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 bananas, and colored bananas.
So all of a sudden, a game that Tom Vadova seemed to have completely optimized
was suddenly
blown wide open.
On June 9th, the world record was modded as a 4 and a half hour run.
On June 10th, runner PMIT posted on speed demos archive that he beat the game
in 3 hours flat.
June 12th, Maino Cheese decided to chop an hour off of that, finishing in 2
hours and 8 minutes.
And June 13th, Maino 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 than it was half a week before.
Sadly, no videos exist of any of these runs, because the mentality of speedrunning
was a
little different back then than it was today.
People didn't just stream a run to Twitch and highlight it like they do today.
PB!
Maybe.
They weren't going to bother showing their 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 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, Maino Cheese continued his 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 got beaten by Maino Cheese once again.
There was also a Japanese runner, Cass, who did a run timed with real time that
clocked in at 1 hour and 12 minutes and 52 seconds,
but most today don't recognize it as a legitimate world record.
He played on the Japanese version, which was slower overall,
and he used cheats that allowed for infinite anti-mission, oranges, among other
things.
But as for Maino Cheese, we don't know too many details about his runs,
and it's possible that he got other records in between the ones that they
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 8th, 2010.
Finally though, in August of 2010,
runners got to see video footage of Maino Cheese playing for the first time
ever.
Remember how I said before that runners weren't going to show a run unless they
submitted it somewhere?
Well, he 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,
colored banana skips,
and key skips throughout, combined with 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 said that he thought nobody would ever b