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Speedrunning had one of those weeks where the word “category” felt almost too small. A calculator was bullied into producing four different flavors of failure, a Zelda charity run turned a hot tub into a legitimate competitive objective, and a long-running battle for The Last of Us finished with a time that looks less like a record than a dare. The common thread was not simply going fast. It was finding the exact point where a game, a tool, or a community’s shared assumptions starts to wobble.
There was technical discovery everywhere, from a Battle for Bikini Bottom wrong warp that went from TAS-like science project to alarmingly approachable setup, to Minecraft racing decided by a margin measured in milliseconds. Meanwhile, the week’s quieter records made the same argument in a different key: decades-old games, forgotten movie tie-ins, and brutally specific categories remain fertile ground for runners willing to keep looking.
So this is a week about spectacle, persistence, and the strange dignity of making a Microsoft calculator say “Result Undefined” as quickly as humanly possible. Here are the biggest stories from the week.
When the Calculator Became the Final Boss
Some speedruns are about navigating a sprawling world. Others are about making a small piece of software regret ever being installed. Mastive_Hive_Gustive’s Microsoft Scientific Calculator run belongs firmly in the second camp, completing its all-errors route in 1.167 seconds. The sequence is beautifully, aggressively simple: overflow a power, divide by zero, feed the machine invalid input, then close on 0/0. Four distinct ways to make a calculator give up, arranged with the timing of a miniature comedy routine.
The route is funny because it is so legible. “Num4, G, G, G” is not a heroic-looking input string, but the resulting overflow is an instant reminder that speedrunning can turn the most boring interface into a movement game. The finish, Result Undefined, lands like a punchline: after spending all that effort on precision, the runner’s reward is a machine admitting that reality has become optional.
Reddit’s reaction understood the bit immediately. One commenter called the route “four different ways to make a calculator give up,” while another noted that ending on 0/0 felt less like a speedrun than making the calculator question its own existence. That is the appeal of these tiny, gloriously niche leaderboards. The run is not pretending to be grand. It knows exactly how silly it is, and executes the silliness with world-class discipline.
Linkus7 Turns a Charity Hot Tub into a Zelda Laboratory
Linkus7’s Wind Waker hottub% highlights for charity brought a different kind of chaos: the communal, live-event variety, where the route is only half the entertainment and the explanation threatens to become its own speedrun. The premise sounds like a gag until the tricks start arriving in rapid succession. Rope manipulation, a zombie hover, and a donation goal that somehow involved filling a hot tub with dudes made the whole run feel like The Wind Waker had wandered into a fever dream fundraiser.
The comments fixated on the rope. Several viewers admitted that Linkus7’s explanation sounded like an elaborate bit right up until it became clear that, no, this was an actual piece of Zelda technology. That gap between “surely this is a joke” and “wait, the game really works like that?” is one of Wind Waker’s most enduring gifts. Its systems are expressive enough to support genuine technical play, but strange enough that every breakthrough still sounds invented.
Then came the zombie hover, the sort of visual that makes an audience pop even when it understands nothing about the setup. Charity showcases are at their best when they translate expertise into shared surprise, and this one clearly did. The run was not merely a demonstration of a route; it was an invitation to watch a familiar game become a machine for increasingly improbable movement, with the fundraiser’s silliness giving the technical work room to breathe.
The Battle for Bikini Bottom Just Rewrote Its Map
The week’s most consequential discovery arrived from SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, where throwing more than 32 tikis out of bounds can overwrite critical game memory and begin rewriting warp tables. In plain English: the game can be persuaded to forget where it thinks its levels are. The first presentation sounded like classic TAS territory, demanding float-perfect setups and carrying a serious risk of crashing spectacularly.
Then the discoverer returned with the update every community loves to see. A setup using 32 out-of-bounds tikis, an ice store with a box warp, and a watermelon allowed the relevant values to be zeroed without the original precision nightmare. What looked like a fragile laboratory experiment suddenly had the outline of an RTA-viable wrong warp. The distance between “possible in theory” and “someone can practice this tonight” collapsed in a handful of comments.
The discussion also exposed a more modern speedrunning fault line: the discovery involved AI-assisted technical work, and some viewers responded by dismissing it as slop. Other commenters pushed back with a more useful distinction. Leveraging a tool to search a game’s behavior is not the same as pressing a button and replacing the creative process; the human work still lies in understanding the result, finding a stable setup, and turning it into a route a runner can actually perform. The warp is exciting because the community is already doing that translation in public.
Bubzia’s Impossible Run Gets Its Own Mythology
There is a particular kind of speedrun video built around a question that sounds ridiculous until you remember who is answering it. “The Speedrun That Only One Man Can Complete” points its spotlight at Bubzia, whose challenge run is so demanding that the community has begun treating it less like a category and more like a personal natural phenomenon. The joke in the comments is that even when Bubzia sets a world record, Anti-Bubzia can do it backwards and cancel it out.
That joke works because the underlying accomplishment is genuinely hard to make legible. A run can be technically legal, fully timed, and still feel inaccessible to almost everyone watching it. Blindfolded precision, low-hit or low-resource constraints, and the sheer volume of game knowledge required create a category where the leaderboard is not a crowd so much as a monument. Viewers arrived expecting a familiar Mario challenge and instead found the much rarer spectacle of a runner occupying an entire format.
There is warmth in the reaction, too. The comments did not reduce the run to a stunt; they celebrated the oddness of a category with almost no peers. Speedrunning usually sells competition through rivalry, but this is the other side of the hobby: sometimes a game’s most interesting frontier is so severe that one person becomes the proof of concept. Everyone else gets to study the route, laugh at the mythology, and wonder whether a second runner is even theoretically possible.
Minecraft Finds 58 Milliseconds Between Two Dragons
In ranked Minecraft 1.16, the race format is brutally clean. Two players receive the same random seed at the same moment, and the first dragon kill wins. That structure turns every good seed into a pressure cooker, and the match between v_strid and silverrruns was the kind of race that makes a nine-minute video feel like an entire tournament. The lead changed hands three times before the stronghold, with every detour carrying the possibility of becoming the decisive one.
The finish was absurdly close: the two Ender Dragons died just 58 milliseconds apart. The side-by-side presentation, complete with synchronized Twitch perspectives and a split timer reading from the ranked API, turns that number into something you can feel. One player is not merely “ahead” or “behind”; both are moving through the same seed, making separate decisions under the same clock, and arriving at the final hit almost simultaneously.
That is the special drama of a race category. A solo world record asks how close one person can get to perfection. A race asks what happens when two imperfect routes collide. The comments reached for comparisons to legendary Super Metroid races decided by fractions of a second, which feels right. Minecraft’s spectacle is not just the dragon death itself; it is watching two players preserve a competitive heartbeat through gathering, navigation, combat, and the accumulated bad luck of a randomly generated world.
The Old Games Refuse to Stay Finished
While the headline discoveries were busy breaking memory and clocks, a cluster of quieter records made a convincing case for the long tail of speedrunning. Snowboard Kids reached a new minute barrier at 58:43, a small-looking number that represents the same stubborn labor as any major record. The first 58 is not merely a cleaner screenshot on the leaderboard; it is evidence that a game with a devoted audience still has time hiding inside its turns, jumps, and routes.
Yoranto’s The Last of Us NG+ any% world record, meanwhile, stopped the timer at 2:11:58 after eleven years of running the game. The category has changed dramatically across 2023, 2024, and 2026, with backwards launches, a newer Capitol setup, and Coal Mine 1 skip raising the skill ceiling far beyond what the original route suggested. The run still contained time loss, but that almost makes the achievement more revealing: a record can feel final not because it is flawless, but because the remaining improvements have become brutally expensive.
Elsewhere, Disney’s Atlantis on PlayStation 1 produced a two-record day. The All Levels category returned to the spotlight at 50:19, more than two minutes faster than the game’s old any% benchmark from when the runner began, despite including two additional—and longest—levels. The 100% run followed at 1:14:32, trading flashy skips for collectible routing and a final-level RNG fight. Together, they are a lovely reminder that “the game nobody remembers” can still contain an entire ecosystem of categories, strategies, and personal history.
Sub-17 KOTOR and the Joy of Speedrunning the Bugs
R4NG3’s KOTOR 1 unrestricted any% world record finally broke the 17-minute barrier at 16:59. Six years of running the game led to the number, which is a tidy headline for a route that is anything but tidy. Unrestricted KOTOR is a sprint through the cracks in BioWare’s RPG: skips, exploits, and sequence breaks reduce a famously expansive adventure to a tightly rehearsed argument with its own code.
The runner also pointed newcomers toward an explanation of the tricks, which matters for a category that can otherwise look like a blur of cutscenes being refused and plot flags being rearranged. One commenter captured the charm perfectly: after enough glitch hunting, runners know KOTOR’s code better than the Jedi Council knows the Force. That is not just a joke about the category; it is a description of the intimate, forensic relationship that long-term runners develop with a game.
The rest of the week reinforced that same affection for specificity. A three-film Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy run pushed under 3:20, Mortal Kombat II’s all-characters route used the high punch trick where enemy patterns allowed it, and even Angry Neighbor’s 1:53.086 record came with two newly discovered skips and guides for future runners. These are not interchangeable leaderboard entries. Each one is a small community deciding that a particular game deserves to be understood all the way down.
A Race With No Textures, and Plenty of Commitment
Finally, the Ocarina of Time community prepared to revisit one of its most gloriously hostile formats: the Blue Cylinder Challenge. The rules are simple to describe and difficult to emotionally process—a full glitchless run on a practice ROM with all textures removed, leaving only actor hitboxes as visual information. A dozen runners signed up for the anniversary event, expecting an all-day contest after the previous edition’s winning time came in just shy of ten hours.
It is the kind of event that makes speedrunning look less like a race and more like an expedition undertaken by people who have collectively decided that normal eyesight is an unnecessary convenience. Yet the format is a perfect expression of the community’s creativity. Remove the scenery and the familiar game is still there in collision boxes, audio cues, memory, and practiced movement. The challenge does not erase knowledge; it reveals how much knowledge was hiding underneath the graphics.
That spirit connects the Blue Cylinder race to everything else this week. Whether a runner is staring at hitboxes, a calculator’s error states, or a memory table being overwritten by tikis, the game is never only what the original developers intended players to see. Speedrunners keep finding the underlying machine, then building a sport out of its oddest edges.
This week offered both ends of the speedrunning spectrum: enormous, long-term projects like The Last of Us and KOTOR, and tiny experiments that fit inside a second on a calculator. There were polished charity showcases, races decided by a blink, and discoveries that may reshape established routes. The most exciting part is that none of these stories feels isolated. The same culture that celebrates a new minute barrier also has room for a bizarre challenge ROM and a calculator leaderboard.
That is why the week’s theme feels less like “records were broken” and more like “possibility kept expanding.” A forgotten game can become a serious competitive discipline. A joke category can demand perfect execution. A technical tool can spark an argument and then, if the community does the work, become a practical route. Speedrunning remains at its best when the impossible is treated as a draft rather than a verdict.
Keep an eye on the new Bikini Bottom warp, the next Minecraft ranked photo finish, and whichever runner decides that another old favorite has one more second to give. Until then, keep your splits clean, your tikis inside the level, and your calculator away from 0/0. See you next week.
Source: reddit.com