Between Resident Evil, GTA, Half-Life, Doom, and all the other games ripe for speedrunning, when it comes to new records, they often involve the discovery of a hidden glitch, or a super-complex exploit, that transforms the entire route. But this time we have something very different. More than 25 years since it was first set, the oldest speedrunning record for id Software’s epochal FPS game Quake has just been beaten, cementing a new best time that until now was believed impossible. And the secret? There is no secret. Quake’s hardest record has been defeated using sheer skill and determination.
Released in 1996, the first level of the second episode in Quake is ‘The Installation,’ a deceptively simple run-and-gun arena that players soon discovered could be skipped entirely thanks to a sequence break right by the starting zone. The Installation forms a kind of circle, but if you time your jump correctly, at the beginning of the level you can surmount the a gap that otherwise divides one side from the other, and reach the exit in a matter of seconds – or, to be more precise, seven seconds.
First set and submitted by speedrunner Markus Taipale back in March 1999, the record time for beating The Installation on easy mode has stood at seven seconds for the last 25 years. Subsequent players of the FPS game have managed to save small increments and hundredths of seconds, but it was Taipale who first broke the seven second barrier, and nobody since then has been able to breach six, until now.
As explained via a typically excellent video from YouTuber and speedrunner Karl Jobst, on Thursday August 15, the Quake player ‘EIM64’ finally beat the game’s oldest standing record with a time of 6.99 seconds on The Installation. And they did it through pure ability. EIM64 didn’t find a new glitch, exploit, or level skip – they simply repeated The Installation time and time again until they discovered ways to shave off that precious one hundredth of a second.
For example, if you want to achieve maximum movement speed in Quake, you need to repeatedly jump or ‘bunny hop.’ The problem is that if you spam jump at the start of The Installation, by the time you reach the railing that you need to springboard from to make the all-important leap across the gap, you’re still stuck in mid jump, so the timing is off and you won’t hit your mark.
Traditionally, players counter this by running a couple of steps at the level’s very beginning, so that the bunny hop sequence is perfectly timed. What EIM64 realized is that if you turn Ranger ever so slightly more before you execute the first jump, you can effectively bypass the need to walk and still hit the railing at the right frame later on. After that, it comes down to extremely fine tweaks to the movement. When you run forward in Quake, you’re slower to turn – rather than hold the forward key down, EIM64 strategically taps it so their sideways movement is less affected.
Through repetition, analysis, raw skill, and serious patience, EIM64 has managed to crack Quake’s oldest record. It’s an impressive achievement, and marks the second time that a longstanding FPS record has been beaten this year – a Doom 2 record that was thought to be impossible to best was recently felled after almost three decades.
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