Sonic speedrunners gotta go fast… world record fast, back-to-back
Leave it to the Blue Blur to set two world records in as many hours.
As we all know, Sonic’s gotta go fast. But just how fast may surprise even some of his biggest fans.
This week, as the folks at Awesome Games Done Quick set out to raise more money for charity, their Sonic block of games kicked off with some unexpectedly good results.
First was Flying Fox, who, true to her name, took on the challenges of Taxman & Stealth’s mobile version of the original Sonic the Hedgehog with the aerial abilities of Miles “Tails” Prower.
The goal was to beat the game within 25 minutes, and she pulled it off in 20:03.4. However, that was real-world time; those in the competitive scene subtract the time taken for loading, score tallying, etc. to determine an “in-game” time, which reduced her run all the way to 13:19 — a new world record.
If that wasn’t enough, her accomplishment was soon followed by Zaxon96‘s run of “Sonic 3 A.I.R.” (Angel Island Revisited), a remaster/hack of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles for Steam which adds all sorts of features, from widescreen to Sonic moves from other titles to custom soundtracks (so if you start having flashbacks to watching Phineas and Ferb during the boss battles here, know that it’s not just you. Doo-bee-doo-bee-do-bah… ♪).
Zaxon96’s goal was to clear the game in 42 minutes, but by exploiting some glitches — including a tricky one discovered very recently which allows you to replay a zone’s first act in place of the second, three times in a row — he was able to shave that time down to 34:24, beating the 37:12 world record he himself had set previously.
This is an amazing pair of accomplishments (trio, if you count the first-ever back-to-back part), and brings a little bit of pride to the SEGA community as the spotlight shines bright upon this moment.
It was also probably a tough act to follow for the remaining two Sonic block participants, who had yet to run Sonic Mania and Shadow’s story in 2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog!
You can find both of these runs, and so, so many more in our recently-updated “SEGA Games Done Quick” YouTube playlist:
