The last Metroid has been kidnapped. The galaxy has reached an agreement… However, one speedrunner is causing a stir.
The deathless speedrun of the original SNES Metroid has sparked a surge in interest. After three years on top, CScottyW beat an anonymous speedrunner’s time of 11 minutes and 16 seconds, shaving 11 seconds off the time. It has now been reduced by 13 seconds as of today.
CHX42, a Chicago-based streamer and speedrunner, beat the first Metroid in ten minutes and 52 seconds without dying, bringing the score closer and closer to the sub-ten mark. They are also the world champions in the games Any Bosses Classic, Any Percent Classic, and All Bosses Deathless (Kraid first). Aside from that, they’re second in 100 percent Deathless, All Bosses (Kraid first), and Any percent, for a total of eight gold and silver medals.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t a glitch-free run; as you can see in the video below, there are a lot of little tricks used to speed things up. CHX42 can be seen jumping up through the left wall, disappearing into the level itself; they then manipulate the screen to skip the entire area, arriving at the boss fight early. However, as fast as these tricks make things, the stream itself is around three hours and forty minutes long, so CHX42 had to wait a while to set the world record. This is frequently the case, but deathless runs, in particular, can be time-consuming.
Metroid’s Any percent Deathless run is currently being whittled down and perfected; there haven’t been any groundbreaking new advancements that have made breaking the previous record possible. It’s unclear whether it can go another 52 seconds, reducing the time to a single digit of only nine minutes. That would bring it up to par with the standard Any percent record.
However, the speedrunning community never ceases to amaze us, so perhaps someone will discover a new trick to beat Metroid even faster after all these years. After all, these are people who are eager to learn more about a game that was released in 1994 – even in the wake of Dread’s release, the SNES classic is still going strong.
