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Comment by skocznymroczny | Hacker News Reader

Recently I was playing through the PC version of the original Prince of Persia again. Last time I played was as a kid and the game was very hard for me, level 5 was about as far as I could get. I trained for two days until I got so good at the game and memorized everything, that I was able to complete the entire game in one go with zero deaths. Took about 25 minutes of ingame timer to complete all stages.

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That would make you 11th fastest player in the world.

The world record is 15:01.

https://www.speedrun.com/pop1

If the original poster had managed to somehow record their original childhood playthrough and get the recording through to the present day with sufficient quality to convince the speedrun.com moderators to accept it, they'd actually only be able to claim spot 12 on the leaderboard out of 14. You need to look at the in-game time column, not real time.

25 minutes is a decently skillful playthrough, don't get me wrong, but it's not surprising that someone on here would have completed it in that time when you think about how many people would've played it back in the day and how few are speedrunning it now.

If the 11th fastest is 25 minutes, and the fastest is 15 minutes, then probably either there aren't many players, or not many players who post speedrun times...

Note that that is a _glitched_ record. To get 15 minutes you need to not only be very good at the game, you also need to know ways in which the game isn't what it seems to be, e.g. IIRC Prince of Persia has glitches that let you avoid doing some puzzles through careful timing, and skip most fights if you know exactly how to do it.

This is a runner doing a glitched run, right at the start they don't even collect the sword!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USv8OQbg73M

Nick.

There's only one glitchless run on the leaderboard, in 21m 32s of in-game time by the person with the 8th fastest glitched run. It really doesn't seem like a very actively run game and glitchless is even less so. (Also, note that the glitched record is 14m 29s in-game time and this is what runs are ranked on. Completing it in 25 minutes on the in-game timer would make you 12th fastest out of 14.)

They are all recorded for verification too, so yeah, it takes some dedication.

11th fastest player in modern times... without backing up or denouncing op I believe there must have been, back in the day, several top players going completely unrecognised. Most players would only have their immediate circle of friends to compare to.

I may have been incorrect then. Perhaps my pace was 25 minutes remaining, that'd be 35 minutes of ingame time. While I didn't waste too much time and didn't die (dying is the biggest timewaster), I wasn't skipping any fights either along the way so definitely wasn't going anywhere near a world record pace.

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