Now you’re thinking with … wait, where’d she go?
In a ridiculous feat, a team has set a new world record for a Portal speedrun. With only 8 minutes and 31.93 seconds standing between Chell’s awakening and GLaDOS’ destruction, the new time shaves almost a minute off the previous record set in 2010.
The record attempt was a joint effort between Nick “Z1mb0bw4y” Roth, Josh “Inexistence” Peaker, Nick “Gocnak” Kerns, and Sebastian “Xebaz” Dressler from the SourceRuns team. Work began on the run back in April, after which the team took a couple of months’ rest before completing the game in late June. To be compliant with the Speed Demos Archive’s rules, the team did not use any hacks, scripts or cheats at any point during the run, though they did extensively use a host of newly-discovered glitches and sequence breaks. The end result is a video in which the levels themselves almost hardly feature, and most of the time is spent either staring at the padded walls of Aperture Laboratories’ many inter-chamber elevators, or gazing upon the infinite darkness which lies outside the game’s usual boundaries.
Simply tearing the game apart wasn’t enough for this team, though. With all the personality cores destroyed in quick succession and GLaDOS in her death throes, the speedrunners trespass into the hidden cake chamber, allowing them to put their own little twist on the game’s ending cutscene.
The team has documented the entirety of the run in excruciating detail in a Google Document. Finally, for the purists among you, team member Josh “Inexistence” Peaker has also completed a record-breaking run in a single sitting, without the use of any out-of-bounds glitches.
Source: Eurogamer
