Prepare to experience the entire original Half-Life, from start to finish, in less than 21 minutes.
Half-Life is a pretty beefy game as I recall, and while there’s a tendency to remember it as a flawless classic, it drags at times, too. Yet Quadrazid’s Half-Life speedrun just blows by: Ol’ Gordo goes from the test chamber to the Nihilanth in just 20:41 – yes, that’s twenty minutes and forty-one seconds.
It’s an astonishing figure that absolutely demolishes the previous record of 29:41, but as you might guess there’s more going on here than just a really good game of Half-Life. It’s a “segmented” speedrun made up of 317 separate segments played by seven gamers, and is “heavily scripted” through the in-game console, with scripts including jump spam, duck spam and 180-degree turn. Various glitches were also “caused and abused” in the quest to get this thing done.
That’s not meant to diminish the accomplishment in any way – speedruns are all about speed, after all – or to suggest that it was anything less than a massive undertaking. In fact, according to the YouTube post, planning on this speedrun began back in the summer of 2010.
“After almost four years of painstaking planning, theorycrafting and execution, we have arrived at our final time, smashing all of our wildest expectations,” the team wrote. “A lot of the improvement from the first estimation and the previous world record (29 minutes, 41 seconds) comes from the very hard work and countless hours put into perfecting each and every segment, no matter how short or trivial. This run has truly been an endurance test for everyone involved, and we’re extremely happy to finally be able to share it with you.”
The whole of Half-Life – including the hot mess on Xen – in 20 minutes and change. Never say never, but I have a feeling we won’t see that mark be broken.
