Spelunky creator thought the new world record was 'impossible'

Spelunky creator Derek Yu used to believe scoring 3 million points was all but impossible, but that was before master Spelunky player Banasaurus Rex put that theory to rest last week.

We spoke to the Spelunky creator after Bananasaurus Rex ended a nearly 7.5-hour streaming session with a score that topped 3.1 million, crushing the previous world record.

"He achieved the impossible!" Yu said. "As in, we were so confident that an over 3 million score was impossible that pre-patch, the game actually thought you were cheating if you submitted a score that high. I'm going to have to watch the video to see how he did it."

Yu went on to explain why metrics like that are ineffective for the notoriously difficult procedurally generated platformer.

"When the game was first released we wanted to have some simple cheat-prevention built into the game," he said. "It's ultimately a futile battle, but it's nice to have cleanish leaderboards for at least the first few days, so we put in some checks for scores and times that seemed impossible and prevented those from going up on the boards. 3 million was the cap we set initially for score, because the [world record] on Xbox was something like 2 million … getting another million seemed pretty far-fetched at the time! I guess not!"

You can see the moment Bananasaurus Rex topped 3 million in the video above. He also performed a solo "eggplant run" last November. Be sure to read Die Gute Fabrik co-owner Douglas Wilson's analysis for an in-depth breakdown of that milestone, in which Bananasaurus Rex had to lug an obscure item with him throughout the game. For more on Spelunky, you can also read Polygon's review.