The Gold Split - Week #50: RTA in the News

Week #50 (August 7): 🇯🇵 RTA in Japan; Gex 3; Ocarina of Time; Resident Evil 3: Nemesis; Event News; TAS Movies; New Records: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Happy Week #50!

Fifty feels like a huge number and I’m now very close to my goal of releasing 52 issues (a year’s worth) of The Gold Split before taking a moment to breathe, recalling the past, and talking about the future. I’m really looking forward to it.

This week, however, hasn’t been the best for the project. Due to some large-scale bot attacks, speedrun.com was forced to restrict public access to their most recent version (v2) of the API, which caused my scripts that collect recent game-specific news posted on the website, as well as This Week’s Top Times to stop functioning. This version of the API isn’t (well) documented and was never meant for the public. I was fully aware of the potential pitfalls and that it might only be a matter of time before something broke.

The old and official version of the API (v1) is still publicly available, but hasn’t been updated in eight years and doesn’t support many of the features that have been added to the website since. One such feature is game-specific news. Using them, leaderboard moderators can spread information to everybody, not just the game’s close community on a Discord server. It’s a great feature. But unfortunately, there’s now no way for me to automatically look for these recent news to report on. As a result, the Up to Speed section is going to be significantly shorter and include far less niche, yet interesting, content.

As for This Week’s Top Times, it will take me some time, but I’ll probably be able to shift away from v2 and revive the section. I’m also just a script kiddie in that regard, so I can’t give an estimate on when we’ll be back. Let’s just say, I’d be surprised if it happened before next week’s publishing.

Regardless, I do want to thank speedrun.com for everything they’re doing. The team is severely understaffed and aware that there plenty of issues with both versions of the API, but I do believe they should be given a higher priority.

Contents

1. Story of the Week ✨

2. Up to Speed ⚡️

3. Event News 📅

4. This Week’s Top Time 🏆

5. Frame by Frame (TAS Movies) 🔧

6. Social Choice 🔝

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! 📨

Story of the Week ✨

In an official piece of communication, the team behind 🇯🇵 RTA in Japan Summer 2025, Japan’s largest speedrunning event, outlines why no showcases of games developed and/or published by Nintendo can be found on the schedule for this summer’s event.

RTA in Japan regularly raises more than $60,000 for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and has viewers tune in from all around the world, despite broadcasting exclusively in Japanese. It offers a unique window into the Japanese speedrunning scene and the talent there.

Just last year, during RTA in Japan Summer 2024, Pokémon speedrunner Zunow made headlines after completing the Pokédex in Pokémon Green without the use of glitches in under six hours. To achieve that, they had to play Pokémon Red at the same time and trade various Pokémon between the two versions. Take a look:

I’m getting sidetracked, but I also didn’t originally plan on writing more than a brief paragraph about the matter after the initial post got published. However, it did blow up recently, first in the English-speaking speedrunning community and then in the wider, general games media. And while the occasional reasonable take exists, outrage farming and rage-bait is widespread, with headlines such as “Nintendo Attacks a Charity!” or “Nintendo just banned their games from a charity gaming event!”.

We have a saying in German: nothing gets eaten as hot as it is cooked, meaning that things often seem more extreme than they actually are.

The truth is that RTA in Japan was not suddenly forced to remove showcases from their schedule. When it was released to the public on July 2nd, they had already made the conscious decision to not feature Nintendo games. They were aware of the requirements at the time and simply uncertain that the paperwork to acquire the necessary licenses could be completed in time for the event. The team expects that for future events, permission by Nintendo to showcase speedruns of their games will be granted. Unfortunately this isn’t uncommon in Japan, where copyright laws and consumer rights are more biased towards rights-holders than in the EU or the US.

Nothing gets eaten as hot as it is cooked might apply in this case, but Nintendo’s shit is still hot enough to burn our mouths and it’s insane to me that jumping through these hoops is even necessary.

The company already has a bad reputation when it comes to keeping their community on a very tight leash and needs to do better, worldwide. Throughout the years, Nintendo has repeatedly shut down and significantly hindered community events and projects such as romhacks, mods, emulators, and more. Their all-engulfing guidelines might have the simple goal of protecting their intellectual property (that assessment might be too charitable), but they also harm their own fans, more often than not targeting projects that generate no profit and actually promote their games.

The silver lining here is that RTA in Japan has just received a lot of free advertisement, and I really hope that many people tune in when the event starts on August 9th. Hopefully this will also result in more donations for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

Despite being broadcast exclusively in Japanese, an official English-language restream will also cover the event and offer commentary in a more familiar language.

Please go watch and support their efforts! RTA in Japan Summer 2025 runs from August 9th to August 15th and you’ll find more information below.

Links

• Streams: 🇯🇵 Main Stream • 🌐 English Restream

• Schedule: 🇯🇵 Japanese (rendered in your local timezone) • 🌐 English (UTC)

Up to Speed ⚡️

🦎 The Incredible Innovations of Gex 3 Speedrunning (115-minute video)

Speedrunner osukarui breaks down everything there is to know about Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko speedrunning with incredible visual fidelity. Not only do they explain any glitch and route change from 2013 until today in great detail, but the video also includes a full world record history. Annotated maps, high-resolution overlays and a very engaging and easy-to-follow narrative make this one a real highlight. Check it out!

🔥 Ocarina of Time’s Fire Temple Has Changed Forever (11-minute video)

The The Legend of Zelda series are the games that keep on giving. 27 years after its release, speedrunners discovered yet another way of breaking Ocarina of Time. This one is dubbed Zombie Jump and results in a much more speedy pickup of the Megaton Hammer in the Fire Temple, particularly useful for the MST category. It combines three different tricks into one and grants the player full mid-air control of Link while launching them high into the air. The entire maneuver saves roughly two minutes and has already been implemented in recent record runs. In this video, dannyb does a great job at explaining the technique and also the developments that led up to its discovery.

🏆 Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - Basement Cup 2025 (3-minute read)

The fourth edition of the Basement Cup invites all Resident Evil 3: Nemesis speedrunners to its biggest tournament to date. The competition starts on August 10th with a submission phase, during which participants will submit their best Any% times to a special leaderboard. Afterwards, the best 32 runners are separated into two divisions and will go head-to-head in best-of-3 matchups. Money is on the line and more information as well as a link to the official Discord server are available in the news post.

Briefly 🆕

• 📊 What it Costs to Run the Best Speedrun Marathon Manager (2-minute read)
  Duncan, maintainer of Oengus, breaks down the cost structure for hosting the application and its several domains, and hints at a new feature arriving (hopefully) soon.

• ❓ Speedrun.com Oddities (18-minute video)

Event News 📅

🏁 Finished

• Really Really Civil Rights raised $2,000 for ACLU

• Gamers Against Suicide 2025 raised $1,700 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

• Running 4 Reels 2025 raised $809 for the Reel Hope Project

🔜 Upcoming

• Starts August 8th: magFAST at MAGWest 2025 (Schedule), benefiting Child’s Play

• Starts August 9th: BSG Annual 2025 (Schedule), benefiting MIND

• Starts August 9th: RTA in Japan Summer 2025 (Schedule), benefiting Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders)

  • English Restream by English Speedrun Restreams (English Schedule)

• Starts August 9th: Pokémon Platinum Any% Glitchless Barrier Blitz (More Information)

This Week’s Top Time 🏆

As outlined in the (lengthy) intro, I’m unable to feature any top times this week. But don’t worry, there’s at least one new record that I can present to you:

🥇 Banana Peeling (Any%) in 00:01.750 by Bluekirby_12 🥇

Frame by Frame 🔧

• 🦔 Sonic 3 & Knuckles (Genesis) in 20:19.14 by Takz15x & BenInSweden

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: Beat the Game (Knuckles)

• 🤖 Mega Man X (SNES) in 33:31.65 by EZGames69, warmCabin & FractalFusion

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: X-Buster Only

• 🚀 Blaster Master (Europe, NES) in 04:15.22 by McBobX

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: Beat the Game

• 👨‍🔬 Mega Man: The Wily Wars (Genesis) in 1:37:19.85 by NemoRuby & Darkman425

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: Zipless

• 🔫 Mighty Gunvolt (3DS) in 06:46.39 by McBobX

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: Beat the Game (Beck)

• 🧽 SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (GBA) in 50:57.34 by Zader

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: Beat the Game

• 🌟 Rayman (GBC) in 19:16.10 by SuperSqank

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: Beat the Game

• 🦆 Darkwing Duck (GB) in 13:39.63 by ninespaces

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: Beat the Game

• 🐉 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin (INTV) in 06:47.81 by Winslinator

  • Video • Author Notes • Goal: All 256 Levels

Social Choice 🔝

The r/speedrun choice of the week is… this thread, an enquiry about why leaderboards might allow emulators for the majority of speedruns, but disallow them for the best runs.

If you want the tl;dr version, the top comment by fedorafighter69 sums it up perfectly:

Because anything slower than the top 10% is basically irrelevant for competition, and letting people submit emulated runs keeps the community more alive. When you are competing at the top level then only original hardware runs are recognized and respected.

👋🏻 And that’s it for this week! See you next Thursday, August 14th 2025. 👋🏻

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