Speedrunner breaks world record ‘Portal without going through portals’

Speedrunner icy completed Portal in less than an hour without moving through a portal. To achieve this, several glitches in the game are used.

The record of just under 50 minutes was set in part because icy managed to perform a trick at the start of the game in five minutes. The speedrunner describes in an interview with Vice that he was very lucky in the second room of the game, where he managed to get a door-launch on a windowsill quite quickly. He had expected that the route in this section could have taken up to 45 minutes.

The speedrunner says he has been working on completing the game as quickly as possible since 2014. Icy has about 1300 hours of playing time in the game. According to him, this resulted in two mice with broken scroll wheels, and a visit to the doctor because of wrist complaints.

The speedrun falls into the non-TAS category, which means that no external tools have been used to speed up the game. Only bugs in the game itself are exploited to progress through the levels and finish the game without using the portals for which they are actually intended.