Doom Eternal’s new speedrun record is less than 19 minutes

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Doom Eternal has a new speedrun world record, proving that the entire game can be beaten in less than 19 minutes – and that we are nowhere near as good at shooters as we thought we were.

Therealpaisano, a Doom Eternal player who has been questing after a sub-19 minute run for the past week, finally achieved an astonishing 18 minute, 56 second run in the any% category, topping the previous official record – as listed on Speedrun – by almost a full minute. Any& is Doom Eternal’s fastest classification, since it allows for a series of sequence and game-breaking glitches, and encourages players to avoid combat in favour of running, jumping, and boosting through missions. Therealpaisano’s previous personal best, a heartbreaking 19 minutes and one eighth of a second, was posted on June 24 – with their latest run, they become the first player to officially finish Eternal in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Friends.

Destroying – or should we say, slaying – Doom Eternal like this involves mastering a few major glitches. In some of the forced combat sections, if you stand in certain sections of the arena, monsters that would normally spawn in are blocked by your character model, and their AI freaks out, and they just die on the spot – watch how this cacodemon just gives up on life, falls off the roof where it was supposed to spawn, and sadly rolls along the ground like a big, fleshy tumbleweed.

Another trick is to collect upgrades and attachments, then quit and reload your save. This will take you back to your previous level checkpoint, but you retain the equipment that you’ve collected, meaning that although you’re now physically further back in the game, you can use things like sticky bombs to bug out the level geometry and make an overall time save.

The main strategy, however, is “stuck boosting”, where you deliberately wedge the Doomslayer between inescapable ledges or corners, go into the weapon wheel to slow down time, and essentially spam the jump button so that when you exit the weapon selector, all your jump inputs trigger at once, launching you through the level boundaries, and allowing you to skip entire sections. Therealpaisano pulls this off several times – perfect stuck boosts are one of the keys to this world record. But you can see a good example right near the start, when they lodge themselves in one of the walls in Hell on Earth, and use it to propel themselves straight into the Fortress of Doom.