The Gold Split - Week #43
Week #43 (May 30): DOOM; Competition Results; EarthBound; This Is The Only Level; Leaderboard Updates; Event News; New Records: Refunct, Super Mario Galaxy, Resident Evil 4, Clustertruck
Happy Week #43!
The busy weeks continue and next week I’ll be hiking in the mountains. The Gold Split will be back the following week: Thursday, June 12th. I’m looking forward to the release of the Switch 2 and to seeing what the speedruns of Donkey Kong Bananza will look like. Writing about it just one week after the release will probably be too soon, even for an early look, but it’s planned!
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 ⚡️
👹 Leaderboards for DOOM: The Dark Ages are now open (2-minute read)
The 2-week embargo following the game’s release, designed to let leaderboard moderators come up with a comprehensive ruleset, has lifted. For the full game as well as each of the unique chapters, Any% is the only category so far. Different difficulty settings and game speed settings are supported as subcategories. The main rules include a set FPS cap at 200 frames per second and a mandatory FPS counter. At the time of writing, the fastest person to beat the game is Rampancy with 48:49.
🏆 Speedrun.com Shoot For The Stars Competition (Results)
The results are in and the times have been officially verified. Congratulations to the winners!
🥇 Softi 🇩🇪 | $250.00 | Time: 05:32
🥈 Lockness06 🇫🇷 | $150.00 | Time: 05:47
🥉 Galacticafro 🇩🇪 | $100.00 | Time: 06:10
🕹️ How Speedrunners broke EarthBound (24-minute video)
In this next instalment of DoctorSwellman’s series about the speedrunning histories of RPG games and the people behind it, they take a closer look at EarthBound. This look is comprehensive, but also engaging despite going through almost 20 years of the game’s history and discoveries. In addition to the video, many of the sources are included in the video description.
🐘 Maximum reaches the human limit in This Is The Only Level (5-minute video)
The flash game This Is The Only Level surprisingly consists of 30 levels, or variants of the same one. The reason the human limit of 2:24.425 is achievable is because of a gate in level 25 that opens every 10 seconds. Similarly to frame rules in Super Mario Bros., perfect and machine-like gameplay isn’t required until that point. Getting to the gate before it opens at the 2-minute mark is relatively easy for the best players, but only playing through the next five levels absolutely flawlessly allows one to reach the limit.
🏎️ Gran Turismo 6 Leaderboards re-designed (2-minute read)
The leaderboard moderators for Gran Turismo 6 have implemented a wide variety of changes to the boards, making sets of rules easier to understand while also phasing out some categories and adding new ones in both full game and individual level categories. Furthermore, all existing runs now comply with the new rulesets.
Briefly
🇦🇺 Australian Speedrun Marathon 2025 announces schedule (Good-looking schedule page)
🍪 PlateUp! community votes on allowing cookie duplication (2-minute read)
🃏 Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket adds latest expansion to the leaderboard
🔊 Hitman World of Assassination runs now require game audio (1-minute read)
👵 Granny leaderboards add Glitchless categories for older versions of the game (1-minute read)
🔁 Super Mario Bros. romhack Petscop !! swaps categories (1-minute read)
Event News 📅
You know the drill: no Gold Split next week means you’re getting all dates for events happening during the coming two weeks. However, you might also notice that we’re entering a small drought period. This weekend marks one of the very few of the year without any English speaking speedrunning events (that I’m aware of). Touch some grass and spend some time playing your favourite games or discovering new ones!
🏁 Finished
RPG Limit Break 2025 raised $105,862 for National Alliance on Mental Illness
UKSG Green 2025 raised £8,008 for CRISIS
Momentum 2025 at MomoCon raised $2,520 for the Johnson STEM Activity Center
gorlsgoFAST 2025 raised $1,151 for I Support the Girls
🔜 Upcoming
Starts June 5th: Prevent-A-Thon 5 (Schedule), benefiting Little Warriors
Starts June 6th: SEGATHON VII (Schedule)
Starts June 6th: Persona Relay 2025 (Schedule)
This Week’s Top Times 🏆
We’re wrapping up the fun facts in this section this week! Here’s a few neat bits of information about this week’s top times:
Refunct is one of the games with the largest amount of individual players on speedrun.com. Over 1600 runners have completed a run of the main category and the record hadn’t been improved since July 2024. This one by smythe is a big deal!
This is now the third time in the last three months amarishiro has improved the time for Super Mario Galaxy (Any%: Mario, 1P). Until they took the record in March, it hadn’t been beaten in almost four years!
Calco2 did it! After more than four years, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island has a new Warpless record.
JokerUY is tearing it up in Resident Evil 4 on Steam. They improved the record for the fourth time in the last four months!
EmilySailor has had a tight grip on the Clustertruck record for almost five years now and improved it many times since. In her latest feat, she changed the meta of the run and made use of the Truck Boost movement ability to set a new best time.
🥇 First Place
Refunct (Any%: Normal) in 00:02:40.840 by smythe (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario Galaxy (Any%: Mario, 1P) in 02:25:52.000 by amarishiro
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (Warpless: SNES) in 01:40:38.000 by Calco2
Video • TwitchResident Evil 4 (Steam) (New Game: Professional, Single Segment, 60 FPS) in 01:21:52.082 by JokerUY
Video • Twitch • YouTubeClustertruck (Any%) in 00:10:40.067 by EmilySailor (She/Her)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Immortal Severance: PC, Glitchless) in 00:38:57.000 by Yeruka
Video • Twitch • YouTubeApe Escape 3 (Any%) in 01:00:10.000 by EDO
Video • Twitch • YouTubeMega Man 2 (Zipless: Normal) in 00:28:39.000 by Aurel509 (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥈 Second Place
Celeste (Any%) in 00:25:15.346 by P3RL (Any/All)
Video • TwitchSpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (Any%) in 00:42:57.000 by rubbertoe64
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario Galaxy (Any%: Mario, 1P) in 02:27:07.000 by HardcoreGaming (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario 64 (0 Star: N64) in 00:06:23.139 by Parsee02
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥉 Third Place
Super Mario 64 (120 Star: N64) in 01:36:00.000 by Karin
Video • TwitchTitanfall 2 (Any%: Standard) in 01:13:58.000 by Darkwin
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSpyro the Dragon (Vortex) in 00:20:08.000 by Anne_Chovy (She/Her)
Video • TwitchSuper Mario Galaxy 2 (Green Stars: 1P) in 03:04:55.000 by JadeCrona (She/Her, They/Them)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
👋🏻 And that’s it for this week! See you the week after next Thursday, June 12th 2025. 👋🏻
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