The Gold Split Newsletter - Week #24

The Gold Split offers a free, weekly digest of news from the world of speedrunning and beyond.

This Story of the Week is all about all about arbitrary awards to wrap up the year of speedrunning and was featured in this week's issue. The full post includes more news, briefly, as well as this week's top times and recent TAS movie publications. Check it out HERE.

Story of the Week ✨

After realising that anybody can give out any award for any reason, I thought: why not give it a shot? The Gold Split Speed Awards (working title) are guaranteed to be subjective and arbitrary.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of people, runs or other entities that do deserve to be mentioned here. I hope the list successfully showcases some of the high points of 2024 and makes it harder to forget them.

I consider myself to be immersed in the scene, but I definitely missed someone or something that should be featured here. Let me know in the comments below!

Next year I’ll plan further ahead and we’ll have a proper ceremony with trophies and booze. Definitely. But without further ado, let’s get into the categories!

Speedrunner of the Year 🏆

There was never any doubt that this awards wouldn’t go to @Suigi . The entire speedrunning community has been tripping over each other while coming up with new superlatives to describe his most recent achievement, something that has never been done before: holding all five records in all five main categories for Super Mario 64. I, too, consider it to be among the greatest achievements in speedrunning history, ever. Nobody else came close this year. 🐐

Check out the main story in Week #21 of The Gold Split, where I use fancy graphs and many more words to explain the when, how and why.

Speedrun of the Year 🏆

@Summoningsalt is primarily known for their video essays on world record histories. But they’re also the best at Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, holding impressive records in five of the game’s categories. This year, they achieved a huge improvement in the isolated final fight against Mike Tyson himself. It is by far the hardest one in the game and a good time does not only depend on dodging, ducking, and hitting frame-perfect punches, but also on randomness.

In June, @Summoningsalt defeated Mike Tyson in 2:00.00. This run improved the previous record by eight frames. This might not sound like much, but according to them, the luck necessary to get this time has a 1/6,000 chance of occurring. And even then, it’s still necessary to hit all 21 frame-perfect punches (each 1/60 of a second) and lose as few frames as possible while dodging and ducking.

It is as much about execution as it is about luck, and the persistence to put in tens of thousands of attempts over many years to achieve it deserves a special place here.

Glitch Discovery of the Year 🏆

I admit that there many other glitches this year that were potentially more impactful, saved more time, trivialised complicated sections, or changed speedruns entirely, but the award goes to the Disc 1 Skip in Final Fantasy VII.

While it did also have huge implications for the speedrun, prompting major route changes and saving a good chunk of time, you may argue that it had an even bigger effect on the game’s story. By skipping from the end of Midgar straight to Disc 2 the cutscene in which Aerith is killed by Sepiroth still plays, but she remains in the party and can be used throughout the rest of the run. I dare say that Aerith’s death is one of the most iconic ones in video game history. And the fact that this glitch saves Aerith and is actually useful in the speedrun at the same time makes it the winner in this category.

Video Essay of the Year 🏆

In 2024, @Summoningsalt alone put out five high-quality long-form video essays, and it’s awesome to see the amount of content creators who put in so much effort to explain glitches, strategies, or the history of world records in any given game.

The award this year goes to the crazy scientist that brought you Super Mario 64’s parallel universes: pannenkoek2012

Their lecture about invisible walls in Super Mario 64 not only captivates casual players and viewers, but it’s something even the most seasoned veterans of Super Mario 64 speedrunning can still learn from. Outstanding.

Speedrunning Game of the Year 🏆

For me, Chained Together is the best game for speedrunning released in 2024. It has everything you might look for in a tense run and more. Tough execution, high stakes, no downtime, and a good Any% runtime all contribute. In addition, the game’s coop feature is hilarious and it’s been a while since I’ve seen good coop speedruns from a new game.

Non-Video-Game Speedrun of the Year 🏆

In May 2024, Baking was invented. More specifically, baking twelve chocolate chip cookies. As fast as possible. Popularised by streamer @QTCinderella, it quickly gained some traction on its leaderboards, but it took a few months for the ruleset to be well defined. Too many corners were cut to get ahead of the competition. By now, the recipe no longer containes quantities, just a set of mandatory ingredients, and each cookie must be measured and tested for quality control.

Nevertheless, applying the speedrunning formula to real-life tasks is hilarious to me and something every speedrunner can probably relate to. What do you mean by you’ve never tried to speedrun your shopping?

(New) Speedrunning Event of the Year 🏆

This was a tough category and I considered not including it. In order to avoid AGDQ or SGDQ taking the top spot on metrics every single time, I felt like I had to restrict it to events that newly arrived to the scene in 2024.

Amongst those, Fast50 stands out to me. It broke with a lot of conventions, but in doing so it did an undeniably great job at bringing speedrunning to an almost entirely new audience. It successfully combined live speedruns with reaction content from popular streamers and raised $250,000+ for a good cause on top of being incredibly entertaining.

Non-Speedrun Achievement of the Year 🏆

Many feats of gaming excellence qualify for this category, but I can’t think of a better one than beating the (potentially) final milestone in a 35 year old classic: @dogplayingtetris** achieving Rebirth in NES Tetris**.

Rebirth is considered the true end of Tetris happens when the player finishes level 255. The level counter rolls over and resets the speed and score multiplier. There are many challenges on the way there though. Starting at level 29, pieces come in at the maximum speed, and it is a long and tough battle to get all the way to 255. This is further aggravated by level 235, where the player needs to clear 810 lines to advance instead of 10 like on any other level. Additionally, after level 138, pieces start to no longer appear within the standard colour palette and are sometimes barely visible against the background. The entire run took @dogplayingtetris more than 80 minutes, clearing more than 3,300 lines, most of them at ridiculous speed.

The video below does a good job at putting this insane achievement into context and expanding on some of the intricacies that led to it:

Top Dog of the Year 🏆

Shiba Inu Peanut Butter and his human @JSR_ entered the big speedrunning stage with a remote speedrun of Gyromite at AGDQ 2024.

At SGDQ 2024, it was then time for the literal stage. Peanut Butter showcased the speedrun for Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB, putting all that training and practice to the test, demonstrating nerves of steel and absolutely knocking it out of the park. What a good dog.

Personal Quest to Perfection Award 🏆

This award solely exists because @Bubzia showed up every other week whenever I did research for The Gold Split, continuously pushing for more optimisation and better times in his blindfolded Super Mario 64 speedruns.

Many thought the pinnacle was reached two years ago when he collected all 120 power stars blindfolded in 11 hours, 22 minutes and 43 seconds. But he was just getting started with optimising strategies and categories and has not stopped throughout the whole year. This would already be impressive, but is topped off by his showcase of Super Mario 64 Randomizer at SGDQ 2024, where @Bubzia was able to show off not only execution, but also the learning and memorisation elements of his blindfolded speedruns.

Thank you for reading! If you're curious about more of this week's news or would even consider subscribing to the newsletter, you'll find the full post over HERE.

Finding new stories to cover can be challenging. 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 be taking a look at, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨