We post the occasional speedrun from time to time, but this Portal speedrun, performed by a gamer called DemonStrate, only takes 9:25.567 to get from waking up in the bed at the beginning to dropping the last personality core into the incinerator at the end. Moderately adept gamers already know Portal is a fairly short game, taking maybe a little over an hour if played at a casual pace, but under ten minutes? Well, it turns out DemonStrate used a bunch of glitches in the game to complete the speedrun so quickly, including, funnily enough, shooting portals through clipping glitches.
Ironically, DemonStrate’s speedrun actually took him two years to complete and he used segmenting in order to string the speedrun together:
I segmented the speedrun per map. This means when the game says, “Loading…”, it is loading a new map, and I save the game and load from there.
I don’t believe anyone else in there [sic] right mind would try to do what I have done in this video. I completed the first segment on September 13, 2008, 06:12 AM and the last segment on July 03, 2010, 08:32 PM. Almost 2 years of working on this.
Using glitches in speedruns actually brings up a fun little discussion on what methods make a speedrun legitimate or not–there are a few worthwhile comments regarding the topic over on reddit.
