Player breaks 20-year-old speedrunning record of first level Doom

A player has broken a speedrunning record that has stood for more than 20 years. It’s about E1M1 of Doom, or the very first level. In 1998 a player managed to do that in nine seconds and that record has now been broken by a margin of a single second.

The Doom speedrunning community uses the game’s own stopwatch to determine how long a run has lasted. A peculiarity of Doom’s stopwatch, however, is that a time is always rounded down. The 1998 record was actually 9.91 seconds, which meant that a competitor had to be about ten percent faster to get to eight seconds.

The record breaker, 4ShockBlast, eventually set a faster time after more than 50,000 attempts over more than a year. He managed to do that thanks to a combination of luck in the spawn locations of the enemies, a little help from the same enemies and downright perfect navigation. His actual time was 8.97 seconds. If it had taken him a single frame longer, he would have finished at nine seconds.

Although Doom E1M1’s new fastest run only yields about nine seconds of footage, YouTuber Karl Jobst has made a sort of mini-documentary about it, delving deeper into the history, rules, mechanisms and techniques involved in Doom E1M1 speedruns.