Like the BioShock/Skyrim troll, this one takes some explaining — but it is impressive, and it involves Home Alone for the NES.
It’s in the practice room of Awesome Games Done Quick 2020, which wraps up today, so it’s not an official event. There’s the use of a glitch that also is a major qualifier to all this. But here’s the juice: 11 players all finish the game in the same amount of time, which is itself a world record that’ll never be beaten.
That’s because of Home Alone’s structure. It’s beaten after the player evades the Wet Bandits for 20 minutes without being caught, so, it can’t be done any faster. (The record is actually 19:58 of real time because of the game’s clock.)
Ordinarily, beating the game without pausing is a stout feat, but there’s a glitch out there that screws up the two bandits and makes it easy to just run out the clock. Here’s what that looks like:
Glitched runs are a fact of everyday life in speedrunning, so what these 11 did is entirely OK. How they did it is impressive. They all synchronized their starts, and everyone reset if one of them was unable to set up the glitch. Once they all did, they simply waited around 19:58 to collect their free world record all at the same time.
What I’d be interested in knowing is, OK, how long did this take overall? By that I mean all the failed runs that took place before the successful one. Then, my friends, you could have a world record that could be challenged and beaten — most number of runners, fewest resets, combined time overall, whatever. But as trick shots go, it’s a nice little extra from AGDQ 2020.
