The Gold Split - Week #23: Holiday Blues
Week #23 (Dec 05): Holiday Plans; Poll Results; AGDQ Schedule; Donkey Kong History; Event News; New World Records: Portal, Cuphead, Elden Ring, Shrek 2, Bomberman 64
Happy Week #23!
I can physically feel the holidays getting closer. The signs are everywhere. This is a good time to share my plans for The Gold Split during that time. I intend to take a break for two weeks. That means next week would be the last publication before the end of the year. But… maybe it won’t be. On one hand I’m looking forward to completely shutting down. On the other hand, things like event news or the weekly top times are low-effort enough that I could publish them anyway, alongside some brief headline-only news. Long story short: the plan is to take a break, but the plan might change. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The results from last week’s community poll are in! More than two-thirds of the people who voted are at least experienced speedrunners. 43% are even speedrunning dinosaurs, or… velociraptors (my wife coined the term, and I’m stealing it). I suppose that means that I can put my plans for a "WTF is speedrunning” story back in the drawer for now…
Contents
I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should cover, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨
Up to Speed ⚡️
📅 AGDQ 2025 schedule finalised with new additions (Tweet)
Following their second submission phase focussing on more recently released games, the Games Done Quick team have updated the schedule for AGDQ 2025. The event is going to run from January 5th through January 12th and will once again raise funds for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Among others, the new additions include the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and UFO 50! A link to the full schedule is available through the Tweet, but if you prefer to not visit Twitter, I got you covered: SCHEDULE
🐵 The History of Donkey Kong 64's 101% World Records (56-minute video)
Speedrun explainer Bismuth dives deep into one of Nintendo’s most notorious collectathons, which frustrated players across the globe after its release in 1999. 201 Golden Bananas, 40 Banana Medals, 20 Banana Fairies, 10 Battle Crowns, 8 Keys, the Nintendo Coin, and the Rareware Coin are necessary to fully complete Donkey Kong 64. The video documents the history of this category from the beginning through mid-2016.
⚡ New Quake segmented run announced (1-minute teaser)
“Quake done Quickest”, a 14-year-old segmented run of the original Quake on Nightmare difficulty by the game’s speedrunning community, is about to become obsolete. The community announced a much faster “Quake done Quickest 2”, set to release at the end of the year. It’ll be published on December 29th and will showcase the fastest possible ways for humans to complete the game. In a segmented speedrun, the game is divided into many parts. Players optimise each one individually before moving on to the next. This project has been more than two years in the making.
Event News 📅
As a famous saying goes: after Souls Charity Marathon is still during Really Really Long a Thon. Or something like that. The longest of the marathon events will be running at least until December 24th. RRLT and No Holidays Allowed make up your variety choices for the end of the week.
Tomorrow two events with very specific themes are starting: Bingothon Winter and Coin-op Classic. The latter focusses on arcade games, while Bingothon (as the name might suggest) showcases bingos. Instead of completing a game as fast as possible, players need to complete rows or diagonal lines of (sometimes arbitrary) goals on a bingo sheet. They need to know every aspect of the game, and it’s really impressive. If you’re looking for something different and want to see more of a game than just the Any% route, be sure to stop by!
🏁 Finished
Souls Charity Marathon 2024 raised $9,075+ for Save The Children
⏱️ Running
Until December 9th: No Holidays Allowed 2024 (Schedule), benefitting the Go Rescue Pet Adoption Center
Until December 24th (at least): Really Really Long a Thon 8 (Schedule), benefitting The Open Medicine Foundation
🔜 Upcoming
Starts December 6th: Bingothon Winter 2024 (Schedule), benefitting the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Starts December 6th: Coin-op Classic 2024 (Schedule)
This Week’s Top Times 🏆
In Super Mario 64, Weegee might be gearing up to dethrone Suigi, improving his personal best times in the 1 Star and 70 Star categories.
In Portal, SiDiouS beats a record that has stood since April 2024 after playing for just eleven days (allegedly).
In Cuphead, Grondious is on a rampage, breaking the record three times in the last ten days.
In Elden Ring, Iridium_ore beats the previous record set in May 2024 by a massive 44 seconds.
🥇 First Place
Portal (Out of Bounds: PC) in 00:05:48.944 by SiDiouS (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeCuphead (Version 1.1+: Any%, Regular) in 00:27:24.779 by Grondious (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario Bros. Wonder (Any% No Major Glitches) in 02:05:48.000 by Shaaf
Video • Twitch • YouTubeElden Ring (Any%: Glitchless) in 00:53:56.000 by Iridium_ore
VideoShrek 2 (Any%) in 00:17:35.000 by Weengell (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeQuake III Arena (I can win) in 00:21:41.000 by fearZZz
Video • Twitch • YouTubeBomberman 64 (Any% (Normal): N64) in 00:23:37.000 by Mysticore
Video • Twitch • YouTubeThe Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Any%: Unrestricted) in 00:34:20.000 by Ruben_ls3
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥈 Second Place
Super Mario 64 (1 Star: N64) in 00:07:03.319 by Weegee (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeMega Man X (100%) in 00:34:56.000 by Geo_X3 (He/Him)
Video • TwitchGrand Theft Auto III (Any%) in 00:59:24.000 by Chivu
Video • Twitch • YouTubePokémon Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee (Diploma) in 04:39:13.000 by Alberona (She/Her)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥉 Third Place
Super Mario 64 (70 Star: N64) in 00:46:35.000 by Weegee (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario Galaxy 2 (Any%) in 02:54:52.000 by HardcoreGaming (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
Fun Stat of the Week 📈
For 23 weeks now, I have collected data from speedrun.com about records being set and broken each week. Doing this across all leaderboards for every game on the entire website would take a very long time and is neither feasible nor necessary for reporting on the weekly top times.
Therefore, I have to arbitrarily filter the games and leaderboards I’m looking at. For example, I only check games with at least 20 players. If a game has more than that, but through an abundance of subcategories ends up with thousands of leaderboards, I will either only check a few major categories or block the game from being processed completely. Running the scripts for a week’s report still takes between four and six hours to complete, but at least I don’t have to run anything overnight.
Within this filtered subset of games and leaderboards, the following pie chart shows the nine games that showed up most often. It’s interesting, but I don’t think there’s anything to take away from that. For example, if a record is broken three times during the seven days between reports, that leaderboard is still only counted once: the most recent occurrence.
Reddit Choice 🔝
The r/speedrun choice of the week is… this thread about games, or rather developers, that betrayed speedrunners by patching out glitches and skips. There are a lot of examples of that being the case (Back 4 Blood, Metroid Prime, DOOM Eternal, …), but it also contains a few positive examples as well as a healthy discussion about implementations of fixes that leave both sides happy.
The video that the original post is referring to:
👋🏻 And that’s it for this week! See you next Thursday, December 12th 2024. 👋🏻
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Thanks for reading.