Last night saw a significant milestone reached in Super Metroid, a speedrunning staple, but it did not happen at Awesome Games Done Quick.
Apparently, Zoast ran Super Metroid Any% on his stream after ShinyZeni wrapped up AGDQ with a reverse boss order run of the same game. Zoast’s 41:22 RTA — real-time attack, in other words, start the clock when you begin and stop it when you finish — is not a world record. But the 27 minute IGT — in-game time, as kept by the game itself — is.
And that in-game figure is a whole-minute total, rounded down. It’s the first 27-minute Super Metroid run, in other words, out of 4,605 runs on Speedrun.com, the ninth most of any game there. Super Metroid returned to AGDQ after a layoff last January (it was run at Summer Games Done Quick 2018, however); it had been a part of every AGDQ (and all but the 2011 SGDQ) before.
Zoast is a former world record holder — holding it most recently from Feb 4 until losing it to incumbent Behemoth87 on Sept. 2, 2018. As redditor CanadianOwl_srl explains it, Zoast’s decision to pick up an extra missile pack added time to his RTA (because of the fanfare) but saved him enough on the in-game time to get him down to 27 minutes.
As CanadianOwl explained, the last time an in-game time barrier was broken was in August 2014. Since then, a new route through the game was discovered.
To be clear, the world record is determined by real-time, and that remains Behemoth87’s 41:18. CanadianOwl noted that Zoast beat the Phantoon in 10:44, a remarkably fast time split, but leaked time afterward. If Zoast can run a 41:16 without picking up that extra missile pack, holding both marks seems like it is within reach.
