Donkey Kong 64 Speedrun Techniques

Donkey Kong 64 famously holds a Guinness World Record for most collectibles in a video game with 3821. Critics often praised the game for its sheer amount of content, but criticized it for simply taking too long to beat. Despite that, and despite having one of the longest final boss fight of its time, this game can be beaten in a mere 26 minutes. How is it possible? This is the Donkey Kong 64 Tool-assisted speedrun explained. So, it turns out that the Guinness record is wrong, because there are not 3821 collectibles, but 4841. Beating the game requires a bare minimum of 1927 of them. Note that banana fairies simply unlock bonus features and rainbow coins aren’t needed, so visiting the Banana Fairy Isle to get the banana camera and the shockwave attack is entirely optional. Using glitches, though, it’s entirely possible to bypass most of the requirements. Here’s what’s actually required to get the fastest time. Only DK, only two keys, two moves, including the shockwave, six fairies, which don’t do anything in the adventure mode, and 5 colored bananas somehow? And using the Rambi crate in Jungle Japes? None of this makes sense, yet somehow it does. Get ready because this is gonna be a wild ride. Before we begin, if you don’t know what a tool-assisted speedrun is, please watch the video linked in the upper-right corner. First, the story skip option is turned on. This removes many long plot exposure cutscenes, so it’s an obvious choice for speedruns. Even with story skip on, there are still many cutscenes left, so this video will fast forward through them as much as possible. This brand new updated TAS by RingRush was created with this video in mind. And right off the bat, DK goes through a wall and out of the training grounds. This skips the training barrels: four minigames that not only teach the player how to use a few game mechanics, but actually enable them for the Kongs as well. So, by skipping them, the Kongs can’t dive underwater, use orange grenades, pick up barrels and boulders, or use any vines. DK went through the wall using a trick called phasewalking, and here’s how it works. The variable used to store a Kong’s facing angle can range from 0 to 65535, but the game represents one full rotation as 4096 units. So, theoretically, the facing angle can get well beyond 360 degrees. When angles exceed that value, there is a safeguard in place and the game substracts a full rotation. Because of this correction, most functions were not designed to deal with angles beyond 360 degrees, so if the facing angle is more than about 450 degrees, the collision detection and the camera incorrectly use the opposite angle for some of their calculations. As a result, walls which are normally only solid from the inside out, become only solid from the outside in. This zone where collision detection breaks is called the phase angle. One way to make a Kong enter the phase angle is to exit the first person view. Due to a bug in the camera function when leaving first person, the game adds one full rotation to the Kong’s facing angle if it is below 180 degrees. This results in a zone about 90º wide where wall collisions become broken. During most actions, the facing angle is updated on every frame. So, it should be impossible to maintain a phase angle for long enough to go through walls without the angle being updated and therefore corrected, but there are a few exceptions that make it possible. First, if a Kong is swimming or crouching, the facing angle is only updated if the joystick is held in any direction. As long as the stick is left in a neutral position, the angle will stay above 360 degrees. If a Kong is falling, the facing angle won’t be updated. And finally, the angle is not updated on the frame of a change in the movement action. So, on the frame a Kong starts walking, decelerating, or standing still, the angle will be preserved, and only on the second frame will it start changing and be corrected. This means that by alternating between a direction and the neutral position, DK alternates between walking and decelerating on every frame, and the facing angle will never be corrected. This allows DK to maintain the phase angle and walk through the wall, since the collision detection is incorrectly taking the opposite angle. Swimming underwater is faster than staying on the surface, but because the dive training barrel was never completed, DK can’t dive by pressing Z. But when jumping in the water, DK’s momentum briefly carries him below the surface. Because exiting first person view while underwater automatically starts the underwater swim animation, by going in and out of first person during that short dip below the surface, DK can start swimming underwater even without learning to dive. This is just another phasewalk to reach the loading zone normally only accessible by shrinking Tiny Kong. At this point, you might be thinking that DK can just walk through any wall at will. Well, yes, that’s kind of true, but remember that the phase angle only spans about 90 degrees, so phasewalking can only work within that angle range. DK needs the banana camera to take fairy pictures, which unlock features in the game’s Mystery Menu. Two of these features are part of the key elements that make this speedrun possible, and unlocking them requires six fairy pictures in total. The details of this will be made clear later. This is called a moonkick and the way it works is actually pretty simple. Gravity usually substracts 20 vertical speed per frame, but many moves, such as DK’s aerial attack, change that value. DK’s aerial attack sets the vertical acceleration to one eighth of its default value for 8 frames, or -2.5 per frame instead of -20. By interrupting the attack within these first 8 frames with a kick, the lower acceleration of the aerial attack is applied to the kick. Since kicks don’t update vertical acceleration, DK is subject to one eighth of the usual gravity for the entire duration of the kick. Moonkicks can only be done in a place where the aerial attack can be interrupted early. For DK to hit the ground shortly after rising from the aerial attack, there needs to be a steep slope, a higher ledge or a low ceiling. Finally, while cutscenes typically stop Kongs in their tracks, kicking is an exception. DK can kick into a cutscene trigger and although the player loses control, DK will keep his momentum for the duration of the kick. This is called a void warp. By clipping out of bounds and walking out, DK hits the void out trigger, a zone around the outside of the map that signals the player has somehow wandered out of bounds. As a failsafe, the game treats it like a death and respawns the player at the start of the level. In DK Isles, this warps DK back here, which saves time compared to exiting normally. Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. I know you’ve just witnessed invisible DK teleporting up to Frantic Factory’s lobby entrance, but first, we need to explain this trick. This is called Tag Barrel Storage. Here’s how tag barrels normally work. It seems like tag barrels send you to a dark map, but the effect is actually generated on the spot where a tag barrel is used. When a Kong enters the barrel, the game locks the camera in place, turns everything black and loads all 5 kongs and a spotlight. Meanwhile, the Kong that entered the barrel is still there, but invisible and frozen in place. When a Kong is tagged, the new Kong will replace the previous one, and then be unfrozen and made visible after a short delay. However, if the Kong changes state after the tag barrel is activated, this will override the frozen state, allowing control of the Kong with the tag barrel active. This can be done with any of these 24 actions, all of which can trigger at least 1 frame after controls are frozen. These include taking damage, uncrouching, entering orangstand, cancelling Hunky Chunky, landing in water, diving, starting the long fall animation, and many more. Here, DK performs a skid jump. This is done by quickly reversing the control stick direction, which causes DK to skid, and by jumping on the same frame he starts skidding. DK gains the height of the jump, but still acts like he’s skidding on the ground. From this state, he can jump again or crouch. Tag Barrel Storage is activated with the uncrouch action, and DK keeps moving while the tag barrel is active. During that time, DK moves towards Frantic Factory’s lobby. When Z is pressed and DK is tagged, he’s now far enough away from the tag barrel that it’s now unloaded, which interrupts the tagging sequence before its completion. So, DK stays invisible, and an attribute called his stored position is modified. But to define the stored position and explain why this change is useful, we first need to back up a bit and clear up a few things. An actor is a type of object that includes most of the interactive stuff in the game, like Kongs and every other character, enemies, barrels, boulders and so on. Actors have bones which are used to animate them more easily. A Kong’s stored position is the position of one of these bones, which typically follows their real position pretty closely. For example, DK stores his position in the same place where he stores his bananas. Right after a tag barrel is used, the Kong is unloaded and there are no bones to animate. So, the stored position is set to its default value, 0 in all coordinates, until the tagging process is complete and the new Kong needs to be animated again. By tagging outside of the barrel’s range, the tag process is interrupted by the barrel unloading, so DK stays invisible, and the stored position stays at zero, zero, zero. So, why does the stored position matter? A few movement mechanics, such as climbing trees or pulling up from ledges, rely on it for their calculations. When DK pulls himself up on a ledge, the difference between his current and his stored position is added to his vertical position. Under normal circumstances, the stored position is slightly higher than the current position, so this operation moves DK down by a few units. But when the current vertical position is 571 and the stored position is at 0, DK doubles his distance away from the seafloor, warping significantly upwards. In order for this to bring him all the way up to Frantic Factory’s lobby entrance, DK needs to grab this ledge, which he reaches with a moonkick using the edge of the island to interrupt the aerial attack. But how did he manage to clip past the closed door of the lobby? Well, simply because it’s not solid. The second level’s boss key does a few things. It raises this platform, which makes the whole middle area of Krem Isle accessible, it opens this door, and it opens the door to the fourth level, Gloomy Galleon. Before the key is turned in, the closed door of Frantic Factory’s lobby is supposed to be inaccessible, and the very confident developers at Rare didn’t bother to make it solid at all. Banana Locker wants you to collect 15 golden bananas before entering Frantic Factory, but the portal is right behind him and only needs to be touched to be activated. B. Locker has a pretty large hitbox to prevent you from entering the level without clearing him first. He still does a laughably bad job at it though, but the common ways to get past him don’t work in Frantic Factory’s lobby, because this pipe blocks the way to his exploitable right side. Luckily, the pipe on the left gives an alternative. Like I said earlier, most walls in this game are only solid from one side. This helps getting back to normal play in case a player somehow ends up out of bounds. By phasewalking into the pipe and then jumping backwards into B. Locker, the wall’s outer hitbox ends up pushing DK away, ejecting him into B. Locker’s hitbox, far enough that DK can simply pass through. The camera and the pipe make this hard to see, but there’s gonna be another instance of this trick later on. I mentioned earlier that cutscenes typically stop Kongs in their tracks. Long jumping on the last possible frame before losing control can override this momentum stop, which lets DK move during this cutscene. Wait, somehow, DK is now out of bounds. What happened? When the camera switched to show Chunky, the game took a bit of extra time to load the next frame. Lag is common in DK64, sometimes a little too much. To make it less obvious that the game is lagging, the developers used a clever trick. The horizontal displacement of a Kong between each frame is determined not only by the Kong’s speed, but also by the time between each frame. So, the laggier it is, the more the Kong will move in between each frame, which keeps the real-time speed more or less consistent. When something happens that makes the game slow down considerably, such as loading another room or dealing with visual effects like smoke or large amounts of particles, the time between one frame and the next will be abnormally large. This causes DK to move so much between the two frames that he’s in front of the wall on this frame, and beyond it on the next. This is known as a lag clip. It’s usually done using orange grenade explosions to generate a big lag spike, but in this case, loading the storage room was sufficient. As DK is navigating out of bounds, now is a good time to bring up out of bounds ground properties. The height of the ground below the Kong is updated as they move around, but when out of bounds, there is no ground below. This means the height of the ground is never updated, so it stays at whatever height the last piece of ground under the Kong was. Effectively, the ground extends at this height infinitely, as long as no other ground is passed over. Because this ground is above him, DK can roll under it and remain out of bounds. Here’s the first of six fairies. Pausing and exiting the level right after taking the picture skips this cutscene, which saves about 8 seconds. The banana fairy normally refills ammo during the cutscene. Skipping it means no refill, but the fairy picture is still saved, which is all that matters here. DK climbs up using a combination of skid jumps and moonkicks, both of which we’ve already talked about. Because he jumps and skids at the same time, DK is in the air but acts like he’s skidding on the ground, so that’s why he can double jump. The wall here is poorly made, probably because it’s not really supposed to be accessed. The steep slope here helps get more height from the moonkick, which is just enough to reach all the way up to the mouth, where the Hideout Helm lobby entrance is. From there, DK uses more skid jumps to climb a little higher through the mouth to load the second fairy. We saw earlier how DK can crouch from a skid jump. He can use this to take out the camera in midair, then take the picture as he’s falling in the loading zone to skip the cutscene. Again, because in a skid jump, DK is considered to be on the ground, he can perform ground actions like a roll. He can pass through the wall because angled walls, even if only slightly, have much weaker collision detection. He narrowly avoids hitting the instant death lava with an aerial attack and reaches the back of the loading zone to enter Hideout Helm, the final level in the game. In Hideout Helm, a timer is ticking. You need to shut down the Blast-o-matic, K. Rool’s weapon to destroy DK Isles, within that time limit to open the door that leads to the door that leads to the door to the level’s key. But the key is always sitting at the back of the level, so there’s a faster way to get there. This slope is slippery. Normally, only Lanky’s orangstand move can climb it, but using skid jumps and precise movement, it’s possible to get up anyway. Usually, jumping from a slippery slope will send you backwards in such a way that climbing is impossible, but for a few frames, it’s possible to walk on it before sliding off. DK uses this, and the wall, to angle a skid jump as far up as he can. When landing on a slippery slope while gaining height from DK’s aerial attack, he enters a slipping state in mid air for a short time. It’s possible to jump out of this state without the backwards momentum slippery slopes usually give, and that is just enough to reach the top. The second slope is actually not slippery except the top corners. The slope is also steep enough that DK can land just after initiating the aerial attack, which allows him to moonkick. The wall here is similar to the lobby’s wall, since it’s slightly angled as well. From here, DK can simply navigate out of bounds directly to the key, but there’s an issue: he’s way too low. Here, there’s a small section of higher ground that’s accessible from out of bounds. By passing over it, the effective out of bounds ground is raised up to its height. The out of bounds ground is raised again, twice this time, which now gives enough height to be able to access the key. So, why come here? Well, the goal of the game is to free K. Lumsy by opening all 8 locks on his cage. To access a level, you usually need the key from the previous level, so if you get the final key, you should have every other key in the game. So, to spawn the final boss, instead of checking for every key, the game simply needs to check for Key 8, which one exception. Since the second level’s key unlocks both Frantic Factory and Gloomy Galleon, Frantic Factory’s key unlocks nothing. The developers did think about that one, so the game also checks for Key 3. But as long as you give Keys 3 and 8 to K. Lumsy, that’s enough to make the final fight appear. On top of that, two fairies are conveniently placed right here, bringing the total up to 4. Then, the game is saved and reset. This quickly returns to the main menu, which is useful for the next step. Here, RingRush goes into the Mystery Menu. The first option, which is unlocked with two fairies, is to rewatch the game’s plot progression moments. The Intro Story cutscene is activated. This 5-minute sequence that normally plays when starting a new file with story skip disabled goes through 7 different cutscenes in various maps. To keep track of when it’s time to change maps and continue the sequence in a new cutscene, the game has a timer ticking, along with a few key points in time where the game should fade out and load the next cutscene. However, because this is the Mystery Menu, the player can return to the menu at the press of a button. When an active Mystery Menu cutscene is cancelled, its corresponding fadeout timer is also stopped. But the timer starts 6 frames before the Intro Story is considered to be active, so if it’s canceled within this 6-frame window, the game goes back to the menu without interrupting the timer. This causes the music to stop functioning properly, often playing the wrong music or nothing at all. More importantly, it causes the game to attempt to fadeout into the next section of the intro story at these key moments. And most importantly, this is the basis of a game-breaking glitch that will unfold in the next five minutes of the run. From here, the goal is to get as much done as possible within that time, and within the new restrictions that the Intro Story timer poses. Keep an eye on this reference of the Intro Story to see when the key moments line up with the run as we go through it. Earlier, I said that swimming was one animation that preserved the phase angle as long as the joystick was left neutral. This is why DK can go straight through the wall after leaving first person. Similarly to out of bounds ground, the current water level is extended infinitely as long as DK doesn’t go into another body of water. This lets him swim in midair. This control room is used in a cutscene that plays upon opening the crown door near the end of Hideout Helm, where K. Rool panics and goes into his airship, preparing an escape. DK Isle is pretty hollow and this is a very small room, so the developers saved some time and space by simply hiding that small room right in the middle of the island. With how easy clipping through walls is in this game, though, it’s not that well hidden after all. After that, DK enters the Jungle Japes lobby from the back, thanks to walls only being solid from one side. But what is this all about? Well, it turns out that there was no reason to go into this room other than to kill some time. The Intro story timer is about to hit the first fadeout point. When that happens, if a cutscene is currently playing, the screen will fadeout and transition into the second part of the intro story, loading the necessary map and cutscene. If no cutscene is playing, the fadeout will be put on standby, and will trigger immediately whenever any cutscene plays. Going back to the intro story is bad because the player loses control and has to watch the rest of the intro. There’s a way around this. When a fadeout is initiated, two variables are set: the next map number and the cutscene number. At the end of the fadeout, the game looks at the next map number to find which map to load, and the cutscene number to find which cutscene to play in that map. If, during the fadeout, another transition occurs, the next map number is replaced by the new destination. So, the instruction by the intro story timer to initiate a fadeout is completed and the sequence carries on, waiting for the next key point. However, the fadeout is cancelled and instead of loading the next part of the intro story, it loads the new destination. As long as the new map index is written to the variable in the one-second window between the moment where it is set by the intro story fadeout, and the moment where it’s used to determine which map to load next, a fadeout cancel happens. Keep in mind, though: for a fadeout to be initiated in the first place, a cutscene needs to be currently playing. Most loading zones do not qualify as a cutscene, but thankfully, level portals and Troff & Scoff portals do play a cutscene when a Kong enters them, so they will initiate a fadeout. If no time had been killed and DK entered Jungle Japes before the Intro Story fadeout, this would’ve happened. The Jungle Japes introduction cutscene would have started playing, but it would’ve been promptly interrupted by the Intro Story fadeout. Therefore, entering the portal has to be done in a one-second window, right at this moment in the Intro Story. As you can see, one of the main goals for this section of the run is to prevent the game from returning to the Intro Story, which is done by canceling the fadeouts at these key moments with a well-timed transition. Finally, B. Locker was skipped here as well. Like I said earlier, level portals only need to be touched to be activated. DK’s hitbox and his center of rotation are offset by a small amount; his hitbox is slightly front-heavy. By pushing his back against an obstacle and then turning 180º, DK is able to position himself closer to that obstacle than by simply running at it. This is what’s done here. DK kicks into a precise spot while facing backwards, then turns to face the level portal while standing much closer than his hitbox normally allows him to be. Then, because this slap extends his hitbox way forward, his hand reaches into the portal, activating it. For most levels, this trick is pretty easy to pull off, but in Jungle Japes lobby, it’s almost impossible. We’re greeted with this weird cutscene at the start of the level. This is because although the next map number was overwritten by the new destination, the cutscene number wasn’t. So, instead of playing cutscene 1 in this Intro Story map, it played cutscene 1 in Jungle Japes, which happens to be this one. This trick is very similar to the pipe trick in Frantic Factory lobby. The bush is a solid object that pushes Kongs outwards. It pushes DK backwards far enough that he passes through the hitbox of the wall. Pay attention to the void out zone. This path allows DK to skip this entire section of Jungle Japes entirely, going straight into the main area from the start. In a few seconds, this run’s 5th fairy picture will be taken. Taking a fairy picture triggers an ammo refill cutscene, which could initiate an unwanted fadeout to the Intro Story. So, the picture to be taken at a point where there’s no fadeout on standby, as there would be no way to cancel one during the ammo refill. But as you can see, a fadeout is coming up, so, DK makes a quick detour to the Troff & Scoff portal to cancel it. This plant is solid and has a slightly slanted surface, so it acts as both a higher ledge and a slope to initiate a moonkick. Notice how the vines leading to the Troff & Scoff portal are not there. That’s because the training barrel for vine swinging was never completed. Again, a weird cutscene plays because this is cutscene 1 in the Intro Story version of Hideout Helm. Nothing is needed in this room right now, but coming here both cancelled the Intro Story fadeout, and cleared the first visit cutscene. Like I said before, Key 3 is also required to beat the game, so DK will visit Troff & Scoff later in the run. There isn’t much to say about this clip other than it’s one more example of a poorly made wall hitbox. Here, DK does a skid jump to take out the camera in mid air, while positioning himself above the water. While taking a fairy picture, Kongs enter a state where they can’t be controlled until the end of the refill cutscene. By taking the fairy picture while falling into the water, DK splashes down after losing control. This changes his state from taking a picture to swimming, where he can be controlled, saving about 8 seconds over waiting out the refill. During that time, DK initiates another phasewalk to go back out of bounds. This is to take a better line to this Rambi box and to skip this gate. He also performs the same trick behind Tag Barrel Storage on the Rambi box by changing animations right as he enters the box, allowing him to move a bit earlier. The gate is only solid on one side, as is the case for all of the bamboo gates across the game. If you pay attention to the Intro Story timer, you can see that a new fadeout is approaching. Some time needs to be killed to line things up perfectly, so this showcase of absurd-looking movement is used to fill that gap. This is typical for tool-assisted speedruns: whenever there is any amount of waiting that needs to be done, TASers try to make it as entertaining as possible. Incredibly enough, using Rambi here is actually required for this speedrun route to work out, which adds yet another normally optional element of the game to the list of requirements to beat it in the fastest way possible. The reason why will be made clear soon. This is also why 5 colored bananas are required in this run: this bunch is automatically collected when entering the Rambi box. Another bunch was collected here, but that one can easily be avoided with no time loss. Visiting Cranky here has two purposes. First, because talking with Cranky is a cutscene that can lead into a transition, it’s used as the last of the three Intro Story fadeout cancels in this run. Second, because the first visit to Cranky, which normally happens in the training grounds, is the trigger to spawn the training barrels. It turns out that one of the four moves the training barrels teach is required to beat the game: barrel throwing, used in Lanky’s phase of the final fight. Therefore, spawning the barrels is mandatory, and doing it here is the most convenient. One last weird cutscene plays, this time cutscene 3, and there’s nothing more to do in Jungle Japes. At this point, there is one more fairy required for the main glitch behind this run, and that one training barrel to complete. Wait, so why go into the training grounds, only to get right back out? Does this have to do with the Intro Story timer? No! In fact, this is because talking with Cranky sets a flag that indicates that the training barrels are spawned, but only a temporary flag. A temporary flag is not preserved after leaving the game file and returning to it, which, spoiler alert, is something that’s gonna come up soon. By angling the camera towards the training barrels, the game loads them, even though they’re behind the cave wall. When the training barrels are loaded, the temporary flag is replaced with a permanent flag. From this point on, the fact that the four training barrels are spawned is saved in the file, so it will be preserved even after leaving the game and returning later. The most observant viewers may have noticed that the gate is gone and this switch is pressed, even though we never pressed it. The reason is a fascinating example of developers going out of their way to be consistent even when it doesn’t actually matter, which, considering just about everything else in this game, is a bit shocking. There are two ways to free a Kong in this game. The first is by opening their cage, which is the intended way, and the second is by entering a tag barrel while controlling them, which can be done using King Kut Out or the final battle. When a Kong is unlocked through the second method, their cage will automatically be opened. It turns out that this is true for all five Kongs, including DK. At the start of the game, all five Kongs are caged - DK simply happens to be trapped inside of his own home. By opening this gate, DK frees himself. If the gate is skipped instead, DK will go out into the world while the game still considers him as being locked up. Using glitches, it is possible to switch to another Kong without ever entering a tag barrel or opening the training grounds gate. When entering a tag barrel as another Kong, DK will be gone and replaced with a yellow question mark. When the other Kong goes into the training grounds and pounds the switch, which, despite having DK’s face on it, can be pressed by any Kong, DK will then be freed at once. So, long story short, a tag barrel was entered way back at the start of the run to perform Tag Barrel Storage, so that’s when DK was freed and why this gate is already open. This is the last fairy picture of the run. Instead of a reset, this time, Quit game is used to preserve the state of the Intro Story. With six fairies now, the second option of the Mystery Menu is unlocked. Also, the Intro Story is about to end. This is when the magic happens. Alright, somehow, DK is back in his house. What just happened? As you can see by the comparison, this is the end of the Intro Story. The final fadeout was not cancelled, and it was initiated using one of the main menu’s background cutscenes, which play after spending about 12 seconds on this screen. The reason why the game doesn’t return to the Mystery Menu here is the same as why the timer wasn’t stopped a few minutes ago. It’s because the Intro Story mode is not active, since the cutscene was cancelled before that flag was set. Donkey Kong 64 has 15 different game modes, including the Adventure mode, a few sequences, Snide’s and Mystery Menu minigames, a couple of unused ones, and the Main Menu mode. The game normally switches between these states as you select options in the menu. However, by going directly from the main menu to the adventure without going through file select, the process of changing game modes is skipped. Since main menu mode is designed for the main menu and not for normal play, many functions are disabled, such as saving, pausing and even taking damage. If you want to know how the game knew to select the correct file even though there was no file selection, you can pause now for a quick explanation. But here, the real question is why. Why do all this? Why this 5-minute masquerade of unfitting music, fadeout cancels, fairy pictures, rambi crates and mystery menu shenanigans? The answer is moves. Beating King K. Rool requires these special moves: Peanut Popguns, Trombone Tremor, Simian Slam, Hunky Chunky and Primate Punch. To unlock these moves, you need to talk to Cranky, Candy or Funky as the appropriate Kong and pay some coins, but unlocking Kongs and buying moves takes a long time. This is where the Mystery Menu comes in handy. Each of the Mystery Menu minigames defines a number of upgrades that the player has access to at that time. This is mostly used for the bossfights, because they are recreated to simulate what a casual player would have access to at the end of each level. Usually, this means having every move and upgrade up to the level whose boss you’re currently fighting. So, if you decide to fight the Fungi Forest boss in the Mystery Menu, the game temporarily gives you all of these moves, as if you had been playing the game normally up to this point. For some reason, the same applies for all four minigames, including Rambi Arena, even though it doesn’t actually impact anything. Of all the Mystery Menu minigames, Rambi Arena is the fastest to unlock, because it requires only six fairies and entering one Rambi box. Rambi Arena happens to enable all of these moves, which include everything needed to win the final fight, except for Diddy’s gun. Thankfully, the demo was there to save the day. The demo cycles through five sequences, one for each Kong in order, every time it’s loaded. Additionally, like the Mystery Menu, it also temporarily grants whichever moves are appropriate for each sequence. After the reset at the end of Hideout Helm, DK’s demo played. Then, because the game was exited through the menu and not by resetting, Diddy’s demo played, which gives Diddy his gun. Rambi Arena doesn’t update any of the flags pertaining to guns, so Diddy’s gun stays unlocked. To avoid having those free upgrades leak into the main game, when any adventure file is viewed, all the flags related to upgrades are changed to match that file’s save data. In this case, though, this crucial step is skipped by the Intro Story fadeout. So, all the moves temporarily unlocked for demos and minigames make their way into the main game. And this is why the banana camera, the shockwave, 6 fairies, the Rambi box and its banana bunch are all necessary parts of this run. Training barrel moves are not included in Rambi Arena. This one is required for Lanky’s phase, so it has to be completed. This is a void warp, except this time, it happens as the game sets the flag for having completed the training barrel. To get the warp to work, DK has to hit the void out zone during the transition out of the barrel, which disables all input. It can still be done by kicking or rolling before the transition begins, and letting DK’s momentum carry him into the void out zone. In most circumstances, this warp brings you back to DK’s treehouse and saves about 4 seconds, but here, because the DK Isles first time cutscene was already watched, the new spawn point is outside of the training grounds, which saves an additional 10 seconds. DK needs to go back to Frantic Factory to get Key 3. This couldn’t be done in the first visit because the fight requires Simian Slam, which DK didn’t have before using Rambi Arena to unlock more moves. Here, DK cancels fall damage by landing on a slippery slope. The sliding state takes priority over splatting from fall damage, which saves a couple of seconds. DK also somehow activates the warp pad even though it’s way down there. This happens because a Kong leaving a platform doesn’t enter a falling state until the next frame. So, for one frame, the Kong is still considered to be on the ground, except the ground is now whatever surface is below them. If that happens to be a bananaport warp, it will be activated. Even though the door isn’t open, the loading zone that leads to the boss is always behind it. Because it extends under the door by quite a large amount, it’s possible to enter the boss fight from way down there. A phasewalk is used to clip out of bounds because it’s the fastest method, but there are many other ways to skip colored bananas. The intro cutscene of this boss is lengthy, so it’s faster to exit the fight and reenter it. When entering for the second time, a much shorter cutscene is used, saving around 40 seconds. However, because Main Menu mode prevents pausing, DK has to void out and travel all the way back to the boss door. As you can see, this is still barely faster than watching the cutscene. This fight is normally done with Tiny and her Pony Tail Twirl ability. But DK can still do it using kicks, jumps and moonkicks. One thing to note is that the switches that appear at the end of each phase are random, but not completely random. When Mad Jack starts his final jump before coming out of the box, the game determines which pillar is a valid place where the switch can spawn. It rules out the pillar Mad Jack is jumping to, the pillar the Kong is closest to, as well as all four adjacent pillars. Since the correct switch has to be on the same color as Mad Jack, this leaves anywhere between 3 and 7 possible pillars for the switch to be on. The rest is up to the game’s random function, so DK’s movement was carefully planned to manipulate this randomness and minimize the travel distance to the correct switch in every phase. There’s another detail that makes Mad Jack very hard to optimize. This boss always tries to go towards whichever pillar is the closest to the Kong. In phases 1 through 3, he usually never goes back on the previous or the current pillar, but in phases 4 and 5, he does. On top of that, if the pillar Mad Jack is about to jump to is also the closest pillar to the Kong, or, in other words, if Mad Jack is one tile away, he will do a slow jump, and if the Kong is far away, he will do a fast jump. The number of jumps is fixed, so to speed up the fight, Mad Jack needs to do a fast jump as many times as possible. In this TAS, there is one slow jump: the very first one, because that’s unavoidable. Every other jump is a fast jump, which makes Mad Jack’s movement optimal. Mad Jack’s flipping sound is actually the exact same as DK’s slapping sound. If you don’t believe me, listen carefully here. With the right timing, a moonkick can be cancelled with a jump, in which case the jump will have the same reduced gravity. Here, RingRush abuses Mad Jack’s behaviour to get him to jump back and forth. When choosing which tile to go next, he doesn’t optimize his direct distance to DK. Instead, he always moves along this axis until he’s aligned, and then moves along the other axis. By going back and forth along this axis while staying far away, DK forces Mad Jack to do the same. What was that weird sound? That was the sound of the weirdest glitch ever discovered in this game. The sound itself is used when shooting homing ammo. For some absurd reason, pressing all four directions at once on the D-pad while in a level lobby can sometimes make the homing ammo sound. Nobody knows why. It’s utterly confusing, completely useless, and it was included in this TAS only to make my task a little bit harder. Now, the only thing left to do before the final battle is to visit K. Lumsy and turn in keys. Normally, the final boss appears after turning in all 8 keys and freeing K. Lumsy. A cutscene follows where he knocks K. Rool’s airship out of the air. But as I explained earlier, a check is only made for keys 3 and 8 to spawn the crashed ship. So, keys 3 and 8 are turned in and K. Lumsy stays trapped, and the ship magically appears outside. The boxing match against King K. Rool involves a lot of waiting out his attacks, so not much can be done to save time besides reducing lag to a minimum. RingRush uses this opportunity to showcase glitches, like clipping out of the ring and into the stands. DK shoots out of each barrel at the earliest possible time to register a hit. This is called a crash climb. When Diddy runs into a wall with his Chimpy Charge move, he recoils back. If he’s skidding to a stop and if A is pressed one frame before he runs into the wall, he will get vertical speed from his jump, but the recoil animation will take priority. He then starts another Chimpy Charge, during which his vertical speed is preserved, allowing him to climb way up. Again, this is just for style and doesn’t save any time. K. Rool swings his glove like a boomerang twice before Diddy’s rocketbarrel appears. By positioning Diddy very close to K. Rool, RingRush minimizes the time it takes for the glove to come back to him. Diddy has to shoot both targets on the lamp to make it fall on K. Rool. The targets could have been shot way faster, but he didn’t because he was waiting for a specific frame. K. Rool cycles through different animations as he throws and catches his glove. He has an animation timer that ticks down and tells him to go to the next animation when it reaches 0. When the lamp falls on his head, he also has a few different animations that play in a sequence. If the lamp falls as the animation timer from the glove throwing hits 0, the first animation of the lamp falling on his head will be immediately skipped. So, by shooting the targets with the correct timing, part of his animation is skipped, saving more time than is spent waiting for the right moment. The game has a failsafe if the player somehow ends up outside of the ring. It warps the Kong instantly back to the middle. It helps save a little bit of time here, to position the banana next to K. Rool without having to travel a long distance with the barrel. Otherwise, this phase is pretty straightforward. Tiny’s round is pretty much entirely on rails. So, RingRush spends most of the time playing around. Here, he demonstrates how the facing angle doesn’t change on the first frame of a new walking animation by walking backwards. The only things that can be optimized are entering the Mini Monkey barrel, traveling to the shoe, and the last hit on every toe. Each toe takes one more hit than the previous one, but there’s always a fixed amount of time between the attacks, so only the last hit on each toe matters. While we watch this phase, let’s learn a few fun facts. If you go far enough out of bounds to unload K. Rool, the fight is paused, including the timer, until he’s loaded again. The out of bounds failsafe is used a lot in this phase to reach the Mini Monkey barrel without having to deal with increased lag from K. Rool’s shockwaves. Tiny automatically pulls out her gun even though she doesn’t actually have it. If she put it away, she would be unable to pull it back out. That would softlock the game, as there would be no way to damage the toes without a gun or oranges, and no way to exit the fight - Main Menu Mode prevents both pausing and taking damage, and the round timer is paused inside of the shoe. It is possible to reach the press box where the kremlings are, but doing it causes extra lag, so it wasn’t shown. Also, although Rambi Arena does give Mini Monkey, it’s possible to skip buying the move. When any Cranky barrel spawns, it’s actually usable by default, and it is only disabled a few frames later. So, with good timing, both Rocketbarrel Boost and Mini Monkey can be used in this fight without buying them. Here, RingRush shows how generous the window for hitting a toe is by hitting it on the last possible frame. Some of the toe attacks are based on which toe Tiny is currently in front of. By standing all the way to the left of the shoe, she can be in front of no toes, in which case no attack takes place. Unfortunately, this doesn’t save any time. As you can see, the crowd is a simple textured surface and not actual models or even sprites. Also, the game treats K. Rool as the boss of Hideout Helm. If you void out at any point during the battle, you will be placed at the entrance of Hideout Helm, just like you would for any other level’s boss. Using first person view helps reduce lag during many portions of the fight, but especially inside K. Rool’s shoe. However, the lag in Tiny’s phase is poorly emulated. On the Nintendo 64, reducing lag would be crucial, but here, it doesn’t really matter. So, RingRush opted to spend half of the time demonstrating extreme lag reduction methods, and the other half goofing around without wasting any time to lag. If you listen closely here, you will hear the sound of going into first person. There’s a tiny window where you have control, just long enough to go into first person, allowing for a phasewalk immediately after the cutscene. Here, Chunky uses the out of bounds failsafe to his advantage to hit the middle switch faster. And from there, the rest of the fight is simple. With this, Donkey Kong 64 is beaten in 26 minutes and 46 seconds from powering on the game for the first time. Some of you may know that the real-time world record is 24:51 by SigNa. There are 3 reasons why this TAS has a longer runtime. First, the real-time record was done on the Wii U Virtual Console, which has virtually no lag, saving in the ballpark of a minute and a half over the Nintendo 64. Lag is sometimes inaccurately emulated for DK64, so this emulator run likely loses only about a minute to the Wii U version, but it’s impossible to measure exactly. Second, the methods of timing are a bit different. Real-time runs start on the A press in the menu to begin a new file, and end on the first frame where the black bars are visible at the start of the cutscene where K. Rool gets knocked out. TAS timing starts on powering on the console, and ends on the final input required to beat the game. By real-time standards, this TAS would be a 26:13 instead of a 26:46. Last but not least, there is a major rule difference. The amount of fairies collected is saved on the cartridge’s static random-access memory permanently. This means that after collecting the fairies once on any given DK64 cartridge, the mystery menu features will be irreversibly unlocked forever. As a result, the DK64 community decided that using these features was fair game in real time any% speedruns. The TAS community prefers different rules. They recommend runs start from a completely clean state, including static random-access memory. So, the TAS has to collect the banana camera, 6 fairies and enter the Rambi crate in Jungle Japes to unlock Rambi Arena, while the real-time run has access to it from the start. Again, this is very hard to measure exactly, but the estimated time difference is about 4 and a half minutes. All things considered, these three factors add up to about 6 minutes, so this run is comparable to a 20-minute run on Wii U by real-time rules and timing. And this concludes this Tool-assisted speedrun explained. Thanks to RingRush and theballaam96 for their help, and thank you for watching!

Donkey Kong 64 famously holds a Guinness 
World Record for most collectibles in a   video game with 3821. Critics often praised 
the game for its sheer amount of content,   but criticized it for simply taking 
too long to beat. Despite that,   and despite having one of the longest final boss 
fight of its time, this game can be beaten in a   mere 26 minutes. How is it possible? This is the 
Donkey Kong 64 Tool-assisted speedrun explained. So, it turns out that the Guinness record is 
wrong, because there are not 3821 collectibles,   but 4841. Beating the game requires a bare 
minimum of 1927 of them. Note that banana   fairies simply unlock bonus features and 
rainbow coins aren’t needed, so visiting   the Banana Fairy Isle to get the banana camera 
and the shockwave attack is entirely optional. Using glitches, though, it’s entirely possible 
to bypass most of the requirements. Here’s   what’s actually required to get the fastest 
time. Only DK, only two keys, two moves,   including the shockwave, six fairies, which 
don’t do anything in the adventure mode,   and 5 colored bananas somehow? And using 
the Rambi crate in Jungle Japes? None of   this makes sense, yet somehow it does. Get 
ready because this is gonna be a wild ride. Before we begin, if you don’t know 
what a tool-assisted speedrun is,   please watch the video 
linked in the upper-right corner.  First, the story skip option is turned on. 
This removes many long plot exposure cutscenes,   so it’s an obvious choice for speedruns. 
Even with story skip on, there are still   many cutscenes left, so this video will fast 
forward through them as much as possible. This brand new updated TAS 
by RingRush was created with this video in mind. And right off the bat, DK goes through a wall 
and out of the training grounds. This skips the   training barrels: four minigames that not only 
teach the player how to use a few game mechanics,   but actually enable them for the Kongs as 
well. So, by skipping them, the Kongs can’t   dive underwater, use orange grenades, pick 
up barrels and boulders, or use any vines. DK went through the wall using a trick 
called phasewalking, and here’s how it   works. The variable used to store a Kong’s 
facing angle can range from 0 to 65535,   but the game represents one full rotation as 4096 
units. So, theoretically, the facing angle can   get well beyond 360 degrees. When angles exceed 
that value, there is a safeguard in place and   the game substracts a full rotation. Because of 
this correction, most functions were not designed   to deal with angles beyond 360 degrees, so if the 
facing angle is more than about 450 degrees, the   collision detection and the camera incorrectly use 
the opposite angle for some of their calculations.   As a result, walls which are normally only 
solid from the inside out, become only solid   from the outside in. This zone where collision 
detection breaks is called the phase angle. One way to make a Kong enter the 
phase angle is to exit the first   person view. Due to a bug in the camera 
function when leaving first person,   the game adds one full rotation to the 
Kong’s facing angle if it is below 180   degrees. This results in a zone about 90º 
wide where wall collisions become broken. During most actions, the facing angle is updated 
on every frame. So, it should be impossible to   maintain a phase angle for long enough to 
go through walls without the angle being   updated and therefore corrected, but there are 
a few exceptions that make it possible. First,   if a Kong is swimming or crouching, the facing 
angle is only updated if the joystick is held   in any direction. As long as the stick is left in 
a neutral position, the angle will stay above 360   degrees. If a Kong is falling, the facing angle 
won’t be updated. And finally, the angle is not   updated on the frame of a change in the movement 
action. So, on the frame a Kong starts walking,   decelerating, or standing still, the angle 
will be preserved, and only on the second frame   will it start changing and be corrected. 
This means that by alternating between a   direction and the neutral position, DK alternates 
between walking and decelerating on every frame,   and the facing angle will never be corrected. This 
allows DK to maintain the phase angle and walk   through the wall, since the collision detection 
is incorrectly taking the opposite angle. Swimming underwater is faster than staying on the 
surface, but because the dive training barrel was   never completed, DK can’t dive by pressing Z. But 
when jumping in the water, DK’s momentum briefly   carries him below the surface. Because exiting 
first person view while underwater automatically   starts the underwater swim animation, by going 
in and out of first person during that short   dip below the surface, DK can start swimming 
underwater even without learning to dive. This is just another phasewalk to reach the 
loading zone normally only accessible by   shrinking Tiny Kong. At this point, you 
might be thinking that DK can just walk   through any wall at will. Well, yes, that’s kind 
of true, but remember that the phase angle only   spans about 90 degrees, so phasewalking 
can only work within that angle range. DK needs the banana camera to take fairy pictures, 
which unlock features in the game’s Mystery Menu.   Two of these features are part of the key elements 
that make this speedrun possible, and unlocking   them requires six fairy pictures in total. 
The details of this will be made clear later. This is called a moonkick and the way it 
works is actually pretty simple. Gravity   usually substracts 20 vertical speed per frame, 
but many moves, such as DK’s aerial attack,   change that value. DK’s aerial attack sets 
the vertical acceleration to one eighth of   its default value for 8 frames, or -2.5 per 
frame instead of -20. By interrupting the   attack within these first 8 frames with 
a kick, the lower acceleration of the   aerial attack is applied to the kick. Since 
kicks don’t update vertical acceleration,   DK is subject to one eighth of the usual 
gravity for the entire duration of the kick. Moonkicks can only be done in a place where the 
aerial attack can be interrupted early. For DK   to hit the ground shortly after rising from the 
aerial attack, there needs to be a steep slope,   a higher ledge or a low ceiling. Finally, while 
cutscenes typically stop Kongs in their tracks,   kicking is an exception. DK can kick 
into a cutscene trigger and although the   player loses control, DK will keep his 
momentum for the duration of the kick. This is called a void warp. By clipping out 
of bounds and walking out, DK hits the void   out trigger, a zone around the outside of the map 
that signals the player has somehow wandered out   of bounds. As a failsafe, the game treats it like 
a death and respawns the player at the start of   the level. In DK Isles, this warps DK back here, 
which saves time compared to exiting normally. Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. I 
know you’ve just witnessed invisible DK   teleporting up to Frantic Factory’s lobby 
entrance, but first, we need to explain   this trick. This is called Tag Barrel Storage. 
Here’s how tag barrels normally work. It seems   like tag barrels send you to a dark map, but 
the effect is actually generated on the spot   where a tag barrel is used. When a Kong enters 
the barrel, the game locks the camera in place,   turns everything black and loads all 5 kongs and 
a spotlight. Meanwhile, the Kong that entered   the barrel is still there, but invisible and 
frozen in place. When a Kong is tagged, the   new Kong will replace the previous one, and then 
be unfrozen and made visible after a short delay. However, if the Kong changes state 
after the tag barrel is activated,   this will override the frozen state, allowing 
control of the Kong with the tag barrel active.   This can be done with any of these 24 actions, 
all of which can trigger at least 1 frame after   controls are frozen. These include taking 
damage, uncrouching, entering orangstand,   cancelling Hunky Chunky, landing in water, diving, 
starting the long fall animation, and many more. Here, DK performs a skid jump. This is done by 
quickly reversing the control stick direction,   which causes DK to skid, and by jumping on 
the same frame he starts skidding. DK gains   the height of the jump, but still acts like 
he’s skidding on the ground. From this state,   he can jump again or crouch. 
Tag Barrel Storage is activated   with the uncrouch action, and DK keeps 
moving while the tag barrel is active. During that time, DK moves towards Frantic 
Factory’s lobby. When Z is pressed and DK   is tagged, he’s now far enough away from 
the tag barrel that it’s now unloaded,   which interrupts the tagging sequence before 
its completion. So, DK stays invisible,   and an attribute called his stored position 
is modified. But to define the stored position   and explain why this change is useful, we first 
need to back up a bit and clear up a few things. An actor is a type of object that includes 
most of the interactive stuff in the game,   like Kongs and every other character, enemies, 
barrels, boulders and so on. Actors have bones   which are used to animate them more easily. A 
Kong’s stored position is the position of one of   these bones, which typically follows their real 
position pretty closely. For example, DK stores   his position in the same place where he stores 
his bananas. Right after a tag barrel is used,   the Kong is unloaded and there are no bones to 
animate. So, the stored position is set to its   default value, 0 in all coordinates, until the 
tagging process is complete and the new Kong   needs to be animated again. By tagging outside of 
the barrel’s range, the tag process is interrupted   by the barrel unloading, so DK stays invisible, 
and the stored position stays at zero, zero, zero. So, why does the stored position 
matter? A few movement mechanics,   such as climbing trees or pulling up from ledges,   rely on it for their calculations. When DK pulls 
himself up on a ledge, the difference between his   current and his stored position is added to his 
vertical position. Under normal circumstances,   the stored position is slightly higher than the 
current position, so this operation moves DK down   by a few units. But when the current vertical 
position is 571 and the stored position is at 0,   DK doubles his distance away from the 
seafloor, warping significantly upwards. In order for this to bring him all the way 
up to Frantic Factory’s lobby entrance,   DK needs to grab this ledge, which 
he reaches with a moonkick using the   edge of the island to interrupt the aerial attack. But how did he manage to clip past the closed door 
of the lobby? Well, simply because it’s not solid.   The second level’s boss key does a few things. It 
raises this platform, which makes the whole middle   area of Krem Isle accessible, it opens this door, 
and it opens the door to the fourth level, Gloomy   Galleon. Before the key is turned in, the closed 
door of Frantic Factory’s lobby is supposed to be   inaccessible, and the very confident developers 
at Rare didn’t bother to make it solid at all. Banana Locker wants you to collect 15 golden 
bananas before entering Frantic Factory,   but the portal is right behind him and only 
needs to be touched to be activated. B. Locker   has a pretty large hitbox to prevent you from 
entering the level without clearing him first.   He still does a laughably bad job at it though, 
but the common ways to get past him don’t work in   Frantic Factory’s lobby, because this pipe blocks 
the way to his exploitable right side. Luckily,   the pipe on the left gives an alternative. Like 
I said earlier, most walls in this game are   only solid from one side. This helps getting 
back to normal play in case a player somehow   ends up out of bounds. By phasewalking into the 
pipe and then jumping backwards into B. Locker,   the wall’s outer hitbox ends up pushing DK 
away, ejecting him into B. Locker’s hitbox,   far enough that DK can simply pass through. 
The camera and the pipe make this hard to see,   but there’s gonna be another 
instance of this trick later on. I mentioned earlier that cutscenes typically 
stop Kongs in their tracks. Long jumping   on the last possible frame before losing 
control can override this momentum stop,   which lets DK move during this cutscene. Wait, somehow, DK is now out 
of bounds. What happened? When the camera switched to show Chunky, 
the game took a bit of extra time to load   the next frame. Lag is common in DK64, 
sometimes a little too much. To make   it less obvious that the game is lagging, the 
developers used a clever trick. The horizontal   displacement of a Kong between each frame 
is determined not only by the Kong’s speed,   but also by the time between each 
frame. So, the laggier it is,   the more the Kong will move in between each 
frame, which keeps the real-time speed more   or less consistent. When something happens 
that makes the game slow down considerably,   such as loading another room or dealing with 
visual effects like smoke or large amounts of   particles, the time between one frame and the 
next will be abnormally large. This causes DK   to move so much between the two frames that he’s 
in front of the wall on this frame, and beyond it   on the next. This is known as a lag clip. It’s 
usually done using orange grenade explosions to   generate a big lag spike, but in this case, 
loading the storage room was sufficient. As DK is navigating out of bounds, now is a good 
time to bring up out of bounds ground properties.   The height of the ground below the Kong is updated 
as they move around, but when out of bounds,   there is no ground below. This means the 
height of the ground is never updated,   so it stays at whatever height the last piece 
of ground under the Kong was. Effectively,   the ground extends at this height infinitely, 
as long as no other ground is passed over.   Because this ground is above him, DK can 
roll under it and remain out of bounds. Here’s the first of six fairies. Pausing 
and exiting the level right after taking   the picture skips this cutscene, 
which saves about 8 seconds. The   banana fairy normally refills ammo during 
the cutscene. Skipping it means no refill,   but the fairy picture is still saved, 
which is all that matters here. DK climbs up using a combination 
of skid jumps and moonkicks,   both of which we’ve already talked about. 
Because he jumps and skids at the same time,   DK is in the air but acts like 
he’s skidding on the ground,   so that’s why he can double jump. The wall here 
is poorly made, probably because it’s not really   supposed to be accessed. The steep slope here 
helps get more height from the moonkick, which   is just enough to reach all the way up to the 
mouth, where the Hideout Helm lobby entrance is. From there, DK uses more skid jumps to climb 
a little higher through the mouth to load the   second fairy. We saw earlier how DK can crouch 
from a skid jump. He can use this to take out the   camera in midair, then take the picture as he’s 
falling in the loading zone to skip the cutscene. Again, because in a skid jump, DK is considered 
to be on the ground, he can perform ground actions   like a roll. He can pass through the wall because 
angled walls, even if only slightly, have much   weaker collision detection. He narrowly avoids 
hitting the instant death lava with an aerial   attack and reaches the back of the loading zone to 
enter Hideout Helm, the final level in the game. In Hideout Helm, a timer is ticking. 
You need to shut down the Blast-o-matic,   K. Rool’s weapon to destroy DK Isles, 
within that time limit to open the door   that leads to the door that leads to the 
door to the level’s key. But the key is   always sitting at the back of the level, 
so there’s a faster way to get there. This slope is slippery. Normally, only 
Lanky’s orangstand move can climb it,   but using skid jumps and precise movement, it’s 
possible to get up anyway. Usually, jumping from   a slippery slope will send you backwards 
in such a way that climbing is impossible,   but for a few frames, it’s possible to walk on it 
before sliding off. DK uses this, and the wall,   to angle a skid jump as far up as he can. When 
landing on a slippery slope while gaining height   from DK’s aerial attack, he enters a slipping 
state in mid air for a short time. It’s possible   to jump out of this state without the backwards 
momentum slippery slopes usually give, and that   is just enough to reach the top. The second slope 
is actually not slippery except the top corners. The slope is also steep enough that DK can 
land just after initiating the aerial attack,   which allows him to moonkick. The wall 
here is similar to the lobby’s wall,   since it’s slightly angled as well. From here,   DK can simply navigate out of bounds directly to 
the key, but there’s an issue: he’s way too low. Here, there’s a small section of higher 
ground that’s accessible from out of   bounds. By passing over it, the effective out 
of bounds ground is raised up to its height. The out of bounds ground is 
raised again, twice this time,   which now gives enough height 
to be able to access the key. So, why come here? Well, the goal of the game 
is to free K. Lumsy by opening all 8 locks on   his cage. To access a level, you usually need 
the key from the previous level, so if you   get the final key, you should have every other 
key in the game. So, to spawn the final boss,   instead of checking for every key, the game simply 
needs to check for Key 8, which one exception.   Since the second level’s key unlocks both Frantic 
Factory and Gloomy Galleon, Frantic Factory’s key   unlocks nothing. The developers did think about 
that one, so the game also checks for Key 3. But   as long as you give Keys 3 and 8 to K. Lumsy, 
that’s enough to make the final fight appear. On top of that, two fairies are 
conveniently placed right here,   bringing the total up to 4. Then, 
the game is saved and reset. This   quickly returns to the main menu, 
which is useful for the next step. Here, RingRush goes into the Mystery Menu. The 
first option, which is unlocked with two fairies,   is to rewatch the game’s plot progression 
moments. The Intro Story cutscene is   activated. This 5-minute sequence that normally 
plays when starting a new file with story skip   disabled goes through 7 different cutscenes in 
various maps. To keep track of when it’s time   to change maps and continue the sequence in 
a new cutscene, the game has a timer ticking,   along with a few key points in time where the 
game should fade out and load the next cutscene. However, because this is the Mystery Menu, the 
player can return to the menu at the press of   a button. When an active Mystery Menu cutscene is 
cancelled, its corresponding fadeout timer is also   stopped. But the timer starts 6 frames before 
the Intro Story is considered to be active,   so if it’s canceled within this 6-frame 
window, the game goes back to the menu   without interrupting the timer. This causes 
the music to stop functioning properly,   often playing the wrong music or nothing at all. 
More importantly, it causes the game to attempt   to fadeout into the next section of the intro 
story at these key moments. And most importantly,   this is the basis of a game-breaking glitch 
that will unfold in the next five minutes   of the run. From here, the goal is to get 
as much done as possible within that time,   and within the new restrictions that the 
Intro Story timer poses. Keep an eye on this   reference of the Intro Story to see when the key 
moments line up with the run as we go through it. Earlier, I said that swimming was one animation 
that preserved the phase angle as long as the   joystick was left neutral. This is why DK can 
go straight through the wall after leaving first   person. Similarly to out of bounds ground, the 
current water level is extended infinitely as   long as DK doesn’t go into another body 
of water. This lets him swim in midair. This control room is used in a cutscene that 
plays upon opening the crown door near the   end of Hideout Helm, where K. Rool panics and 
goes into his airship, preparing an escape.   DK Isle is pretty hollow and this is a very small 
room, so the developers saved some time and space   by simply hiding that small room right in the 
middle of the island. With how easy clipping   through walls is in this game, though, it’s 
not that well hidden after all. After that,   DK enters the Jungle Japes lobby from the back, 
thanks to walls only being solid from one side. But what is this all about? Well, it turns 
out that there was no reason to go into   this room other than to kill some time. The 
Intro story timer is about to hit the first   fadeout point. When that happens, 
if a cutscene is currently playing,   the screen will fadeout and transition 
into the second part of the intro story,   loading the necessary map and cutscene. If 
no cutscene is playing, the fadeout will be   put on standby, and will trigger immediately 
whenever any cutscene plays. Going back to   the intro story is bad because the player loses 
control and has to watch the rest of the intro. There’s a way around this. When a fadeout is 
initiated, two variables are set: the next map   number and the cutscene number. At the end of the 
fadeout, the game looks at the next map number to   find which map to load, and the cutscene number 
to find which cutscene to play in that map. If,   during the fadeout, another transition 
occurs, the next map number is replaced   by the new destination. So, the instruction by 
the intro story timer to initiate a fadeout is   completed and the sequence carries on, 
waiting for the next key point. However,   the fadeout is cancelled and instead of 
loading the next part of the intro story,   it loads the new destination. As long as 
the new map index is written to the variable   in the one-second window between the moment 
where it is set by the intro story fadeout,   and the moment where it’s used to determine 
which map to load next, a fadeout cancel happens. Keep in mind, though: for a fadeout to be 
initiated in the first place, a cutscene   needs to be currently playing. Most loading zones 
do not qualify as a cutscene, but thankfully,   level portals and Troff &amp; Scoff portals do 
play a cutscene when a Kong enters them,   so they will initiate a fadeout. If no time had 
been killed and DK entered Jungle Japes before   the Intro Story fadeout, this would’ve 
happened. The Jungle Japes introduction   cutscene would have started playing, but it 
would’ve been promptly interrupted by the   Intro Story fadeout. Therefore, entering the 
portal has to be done in a one-second window,   right at this moment in the Intro Story. 
As you can see, one of the main goals for   this section of the run is to prevent the 
game from returning to the Intro Story,   which is done by canceling the fadeouts at 
these key moments with a well-timed transition. Finally, B. Locker was skipped here as well. 
Like I said earlier, level portals only need   to be touched to be activated. DK’s hitbox and his 
center of rotation are offset by a small amount;   his hitbox is slightly front-heavy. By pushing his 
back against an obstacle and then turning 180º,   DK is able to position himself closer to that 
obstacle than by simply running at it. This is   what’s done here. DK kicks into a precise spot 
while facing backwards, then turns to face the   level portal while standing much closer than his 
hitbox normally allows him to be. Then, because   this slap extends his hitbox way forward, his hand 
reaches into the portal, activating it. For most   levels, this trick is pretty easy to pull off, 
but in Jungle Japes lobby, it’s almost impossible. We’re greeted with this weird cutscene at 
the start of the level. This is because   although the next map number was 
overwritten by the new destination,   the cutscene number wasn’t. So, instead of 
playing cutscene 1 in this Intro Story map,   it played cutscene 1 in Jungle 
Japes, which happens to be this one. This trick is very similar to the pipe trick 
in Frantic Factory lobby. The bush is a solid   object that pushes Kongs outwards. It pushes 
DK backwards far enough that he passes through   the hitbox of the wall. Pay attention to 
the void out zone. This path allows DK to   skip this entire section of Jungle Japes entirely, 
going straight into the main area from the start. In a few seconds, this run’s 5th fairy picture 
will be taken. Taking a fairy picture triggers   an ammo refill cutscene, which could initiate 
an unwanted fadeout to the Intro Story. So,   the picture to be taken at a point 
where there’s no fadeout on standby,   as there would be no way to cancel one 
during the ammo refill. But as you can see,   a fadeout is coming up, so, DK makes a quick 
detour to the Troff &amp; Scoff portal to cancel it. This plant is solid and has a slightly slanted 
surface, so it acts as both a higher ledge and   a slope to initiate a moonkick. Notice how 
the vines leading to the Troff &amp; Scoff portal   are not there. That’s because the training 
barrel for vine swinging was never completed. Again, a weird cutscene plays because this 
is cutscene 1 in the Intro Story version of   Hideout Helm. Nothing is needed in this room 
right now, but coming here both cancelled the   Intro Story fadeout, and cleared the first 
visit cutscene. Like I said before, Key 3   is also required to beat the game, so DK 
will visit Troff &amp; Scoff later in the run. There isn’t much to say about this clip other than   it’s one more example of 
a poorly made wall hitbox. Here, DK does a skid jump to take out the camera 
in mid air, while positioning himself above the   water. While taking a fairy picture, Kongs 
enter a state where they can’t be controlled   until the end of the refill cutscene. By taking 
the fairy picture while falling into the water,   DK splashes down after losing control. This 
changes his state from taking a picture to   swimming, where he can be controlled, saving 
about 8 seconds over waiting out the refill. During that time, DK initiates another 
phasewalk to go back out of bounds. This   is to take a better line to this Rambi box and to 
skip this gate. He also performs the same trick   behind Tag Barrel Storage on the Rambi box by 
changing animations right as he enters the box,   allowing him to move a bit earlier. 
The gate is only solid on one side,   as is the case for all of the 
bamboo gates across the game. If you pay attention to the Intro Story timer, 
you can see that a new fadeout is approaching.   Some time needs to be killed to line things up 
perfectly, so this showcase of absurd-looking   movement is used to fill that gap. This is typical 
for tool-assisted speedruns: whenever there is any   amount of waiting that needs to be done, TASers 
try to make it as entertaining as possible. Incredibly enough, using Rambi here is actually 
required for this speedrun route to work out,   which adds yet another normally optional element 
of the game to the list of requirements to beat it   in the fastest way possible. The reason why will 
be made clear soon. This is also why 5 colored   bananas are required in this run: this bunch 
is automatically collected when entering the   Rambi box. Another bunch was collected here, but 
that one can easily be avoided with no time loss. Visiting Cranky here has two purposes. First, 
because talking with Cranky is a cutscene that   can lead into a transition, it’s used as the 
last of the three Intro Story fadeout cancels   in this run. Second, because the first 
visit to Cranky, which normally happens   in the training grounds, is the trigger 
to spawn the training barrels. It turns   out that one of the four moves the training 
barrels teach is required to beat the game:   barrel throwing, used in Lanky’s 
phase of the final fight. Therefore,   spawning the barrels is mandatory, and 
doing it here is the most convenient. One last weird cutscene plays, this time 
cutscene 3, and there’s nothing more to   do in Jungle Japes. At this point, 
there is one more fairy required for   the main glitch behind this run, and 
that one training barrel to complete. Wait, so why go into the training grounds, only to 
get right back out? Does this have to do with the   Intro Story timer? No! In fact, this is because 
talking with Cranky sets a flag that indicates   that the training barrels are spawned, but only a 
temporary flag. A temporary flag is not preserved   after leaving the game file and returning to it, 
which, spoiler alert, is something that’s gonna   come up soon. By angling the camera towards the 
training barrels, the game loads them, even though   they’re behind the cave wall. When the training 
barrels are loaded, the temporary flag is replaced   with a permanent flag. From this point on, the 
fact that the four training barrels are spawned   is saved in the file, so it will be preserved 
even after leaving the game and returning later. The most observant viewers may have noticed that 
the gate is gone and this switch is pressed,   even though we never pressed it. The reason 
is a fascinating example of developers going   out of their way to be consistent even 
when it doesn’t actually matter, which,   considering just about everything 
else in this game, is a bit shocking. There are two ways to free a Kong in this 
game. The first is by opening their cage,   which is the intended way, and the second is by 
entering a tag barrel while controlling them,   which can be done using King Kut Out or the final 
battle. When a Kong is unlocked through the second   method, their cage will automatically be opened. 
It turns out that this is true for all five Kongs,   including DK. At the start of the game, all five 
Kongs are caged - DK simply happens to be trapped   inside of his own home. By opening this gate, DK 
frees himself. If the gate is skipped instead,   DK will go out into the world while the 
game still considers him as being locked up. Using glitches, it is possible to switch to 
another Kong without ever entering a tag barrel   or opening the training grounds gate. When 
entering a tag barrel as another Kong,   DK will be gone and replaced with 
a yellow question mark. When the   other Kong goes into the training 
grounds and pounds the switch, which,   despite having DK’s face on it, can be pressed 
by any Kong, DK will then be freed at once. So, long story short, a tag barrel was entered 
way back at the start of the run to perform   Tag Barrel Storage, so that’s when DK was 
freed and why this gate is already open. This is the last fairy picture of the run. 
Instead of a reset, this time, Quit game is   used to preserve the state of the Intro Story. 
With six fairies now, the second option of the   Mystery Menu is unlocked. Also, the Intro Story 
is about to end. This is when the magic happens. Alright, somehow, DK is back in 
his house. What just happened? As you can see by the comparison, this is the 
end of the Intro Story. The final fadeout was   not cancelled, and it was initiated using 
one of the main menu’s background cutscenes,   which play after spending about 12 seconds on this 
screen. The reason why the game doesn’t return to   the Mystery Menu here is the same as why the timer 
wasn’t stopped a few minutes ago. It’s because   the Intro Story mode is not active, since the 
cutscene was cancelled before that flag was set. Donkey Kong 64 has 15 different game modes, 
including the Adventure mode, a few sequences,   Snide’s and Mystery Menu minigames, a couple 
of unused ones, and the Main Menu mode. The   game normally switches between these states 
as you select options in the menu. However,   by going directly from the main menu to the 
adventure without going through file select, the   process of changing game modes is skipped. Since 
main menu mode is designed for the main menu and   not for normal play, many functions are disabled, 
such as saving, pausing and even taking damage. If you want to know how the game knew 
to select the correct file even though   there was no file selection, you can 
pause now for a quick explanation. But here, the real question is why. Why do 
all this? Why this 5-minute masquerade of   unfitting music, fadeout cancels, fairy 
pictures, rambi crates and mystery menu   shenanigans? The answer is moves. Beating King K. 
Rool requires these special moves: Peanut Popguns,   Trombone Tremor, Simian Slam, Hunky Chunky 
and Primate Punch. To unlock these moves,   you need to talk to Cranky, Candy or Funky 
as the appropriate Kong and pay some coins,   but unlocking Kongs and buying 
moves takes a long time. This is where the Mystery Menu comes in 
handy. Each of the Mystery Menu minigames   defines a number of upgrades that the 
player has access to at that time.   This is mostly used for the bossfights, 
because they are recreated to simulate   what a casual player would have access 
to at the end of each level. Usually,   this means having every move and upgrade up to the 
level whose boss you’re currently fighting. So,   if you decide to fight the Fungi Forest boss 
in the Mystery Menu, the game temporarily gives   you all of these moves, as if you had been 
playing the game normally up to this point. For some reason, the same applies for all 
four minigames, including Rambi Arena,   even though it doesn’t actually impact 
anything. Of all the Mystery Menu minigames,   Rambi Arena is the fastest to unlock, because 
it requires only six fairies and entering one   Rambi box. Rambi Arena happens to enable all 
of these moves, which include everything needed   to win the final fight, except for Diddy’s gun. 
Thankfully, the demo was there to save the day. The demo cycles through five sequences, 
one for each Kong in order, every time   it’s loaded. Additionally, like the Mystery 
Menu, it also temporarily grants whichever   moves are appropriate for each sequence. 
After the reset at the end of Hideout Helm,   DK’s demo played. Then, because the game was 
exited through the menu and not by resetting,   Diddy’s demo played, which gives 
Diddy his gun. Rambi Arena doesn’t   update any of the flags pertaining to 
guns, so Diddy’s gun stays unlocked. To avoid having those free upgrades leak into 
the main game, when any adventure file is viewed,   all the flags related to upgrades are changed to 
match that file’s save data. In this case, though,   this crucial step is skipped by the Intro Story 
fadeout. So, all the moves temporarily unlocked   for demos and minigames make their way into the 
main game. And this is why the banana camera,   the shockwave, 6 fairies, the Rambi box and its 
banana bunch are all necessary parts of this run. Training barrel moves are not included 
in Rambi Arena. This one is required   for Lanky’s phase, so it has to be completed. This is a void warp, except this time, it 
happens as the game sets the flag for having   completed the training barrel. To get the warp to 
work, DK has to hit the void out zone during the   transition out of the barrel, which disables 
all input. It can still be done by kicking or   rolling before the transition begins, and letting 
DK’s momentum carry him into the void out zone. In most circumstances, this warp brings you back 
to DK’s treehouse and saves about 4 seconds,   but here, because the DK Isles first 
time cutscene was already watched,   the new spawn point is outside of the training 
grounds, which saves an additional 10 seconds. DK needs to go back to Frantic Factory 
to get Key 3. This couldn’t be done in   the first visit because the 
fight requires Simian Slam,   which DK didn’t have before using 
Rambi Arena to unlock more moves. Here, DK cancels fall damage by landing 
on a slippery slope. The sliding state   takes priority over splatting from fall 
damage, which saves a couple of seconds. DK also somehow activates the warp pad 
even though it’s way down there. This   happens because a Kong leaving a platform doesn’t 
enter a falling state until the next frame. So,   for one frame, the Kong is still considered 
to be on the ground, except the ground is now   whatever surface is below them. If that happens 
to be a bananaport warp, it will be activated. Even though the door isn’t open, the loading 
zone that leads to the boss is always behind   it. Because it extends under the door by 
quite a large amount, it’s possible to   enter the boss fight from way down there. 
A phasewalk is used to clip out of bounds   because it’s the fastest method, but there 
are many other ways to skip colored bananas. The intro cutscene of this boss is lengthy, so 
it’s faster to exit the fight and reenter it.   When entering for the second time, a much 
shorter cutscene is used, saving around 40   seconds. However, because Main Menu mode prevents 
pausing, DK has to void out and travel all the way   back to the boss door. As you can see, this is 
still barely faster than watching the cutscene. This fight is normally done with Tiny and her 
Pony Tail Twirl ability. But DK can still do   it using kicks, jumps and moonkicks. One thing to 
note is that the switches that appear at the end   of each phase are random, but not completely 
random. When Mad Jack starts his final jump   before coming out of the box, the game determines 
which pillar is a valid place where the switch   can spawn. It rules out the pillar Mad Jack is 
jumping to, the pillar the Kong is closest to,   as well as all four adjacent pillars. Since the 
correct switch has to be on the same color as   Mad Jack, this leaves anywhere between 3 and 7 
possible pillars for the switch to be on. The   rest is up to the game’s random function, 
so DK’s movement was carefully planned to   manipulate this randomness and minimize the travel 
distance to the correct switch in every phase. There’s another detail that makes Mad Jack very 
hard to optimize. This boss always tries to go   towards whichever pillar is the closest to the 
Kong. In phases 1 through 3, he usually never goes   back on the previous or the current pillar, but 
in phases 4 and 5, he does. On top of that, if the   pillar Mad Jack is about to jump to is also the 
closest pillar to the Kong, or, in other words,   if Mad Jack is one tile away, he will do a slow 
jump, and if the Kong is far away, he will do a   fast jump. The number of jumps is fixed, so to 
speed up the fight, Mad Jack needs to do a fast   jump as many times as possible. In this TAS, there 
is one slow jump: the very first one, because   that’s unavoidable. Every other jump is a fast 
jump, which makes Mad Jack’s movement optimal. Mad Jack’s flipping sound is actually 
the exact same as DK’s slapping sound.   If you don’t believe me, listen carefully here. With the right timing, a moonkick 
can be cancelled with a jump,   in which case the jump will 
have the same reduced gravity. Here, RingRush abuses Mad Jack’s behaviour to 
get him to jump back and forth. When choosing   which tile to go next, he doesn’t optimize his 
direct distance to DK. Instead, he always moves   along this axis until he’s aligned, and 
then moves along the other axis. By going   back and forth along this axis while staying 
far away, DK forces Mad Jack to do the same. What was that weird sound? That was the 
sound of the weirdest glitch ever discovered   in this game. The sound itself is used when 
shooting homing ammo. For some absurd reason,   pressing all four directions at once on the 
D-pad while in a level lobby can sometimes   make the homing ammo sound. Nobody knows why. 
It’s utterly confusing, completely useless,   and it was included in this TAS only 
to make my task a little bit harder. Now, the only thing left to do before the final 
battle is to visit K. Lumsy and turn in keys. Normally, the final boss appears after turning 
in all 8 keys and freeing K. Lumsy. A cutscene   follows where he knocks K. Rool’s airship 
out of the air. But as I explained earlier,   a check is only made for keys 3 and 
8 to spawn the crashed ship. So,   keys 3 and 8 are turned in and K. Lumsy stays 
trapped, and the ship magically appears outside. The boxing match against King K. Rool 
involves a lot of waiting out his attacks,   so not much can be done to save time besides 
reducing lag to a minimum. RingRush uses   this opportunity to showcase glitches, like 
clipping out of the ring and into the stands.   DK shoots out of each barrel at the 
earliest possible time to register a hit. This is called a crash climb. When Diddy 
runs into a wall with his Chimpy Charge move,   he recoils back. If he’s skidding to a stop 
and if A is pressed one frame before he runs   into the wall, he will get vertical speed from 
his jump, but the recoil animation will take   priority. He then starts another Chimpy Charge, 
during which his vertical speed is preserved,   allowing him to climb way up. Again, this 
is just for style and doesn’t save any time. K. Rool swings his glove like a boomerang twice   before Diddy’s rocketbarrel appears. By 
positioning Diddy very close to K. Rool,   RingRush minimizes the time it takes 
for the glove to come back to him. Diddy has to shoot both targets on the lamp to 
make it fall on K. Rool. The targets could have   been shot way faster, but he didn’t because he 
was waiting for a specific frame. K. Rool cycles   through different animations as he throws 
and catches his glove. He has an animation   timer that ticks down and tells him 
to go to the next animation when it   reaches 0. When the lamp falls on his head, 
he also has a few different animations that   play in a sequence. If the lamp falls as the 
animation timer from the glove throwing hits 0,   the first animation of the lamp falling on 
his head will be immediately skipped. So,   by shooting the targets with the correct 
timing, part of his animation is skipped,   saving more time than is spent 
waiting for the right moment. The game has a failsafe if the player 
somehow ends up outside of the ring.   It warps the Kong instantly back to the 
middle. It helps save a little bit of   time here, to position the banana next to 
K. Rool without having to travel a long   distance with the barrel. Otherwise, 
this phase is pretty straightforward. Tiny’s round is pretty much entirely on rails. So,   RingRush spends most of the time playing 
around. Here, he demonstrates how the facing   angle doesn’t change on the first frame of a 
new walking animation by walking backwards.   The only things that can be optimized are entering 
the Mini Monkey barrel, traveling to the shoe,   and the last hit on every toe. Each toe takes one 
more hit than the previous one, but there’s always   a fixed amount of time between the attacks, 
so only the last hit on each toe matters. While we watch this phase, let’s learn 
a few fun facts. If you go far enough   out of bounds to unload K. Rool, the 
fight is paused, including the timer,   until he’s loaded again. The out of bounds 
failsafe is used a lot in this phase to reach   the Mini Monkey barrel without having to deal 
with increased lag from K. Rool’s shockwaves.   Tiny automatically pulls out her gun even though 
she doesn’t actually have it. If she put it away,   she would be unable to pull it back out. That 
would softlock the game, as there would be no   way to damage the toes without a gun or oranges, 
and no way to exit the fight - Main Menu Mode   prevents both pausing and taking damage, and 
the round timer is paused inside of the shoe. It is possible to reach the press box where the 
kremlings are, but doing it causes extra lag,   so it wasn’t shown. Also, although 
Rambi Arena does give Mini Monkey,   it’s possible to skip buying the 
move. When any Cranky barrel spawns,   it’s actually usable by default, and it is only 
disabled a few frames later. So, with good timing,   both Rocketbarrel Boost and Mini Monkey can 
be used in this fight without buying them. Here, RingRush shows how generous the window   for hitting a toe is by hitting 
it on the last possible frame. Some of the toe attacks are based on 
which toe Tiny is currently in front   of. By standing all the way to the left of 
the shoe, she can be in front of no toes,   in which case no attack takes place. 
Unfortunately, this doesn’t save any time. As you can see, the crowd is a simple 
textured surface and not actual models   or even sprites. Also, the game treats K. Rool 
as the boss of Hideout Helm. If you void out   at any point during the battle, you will 
be placed at the entrance of Hideout Helm,   just like you would for any other level’s boss. Using first person view helps reduce lag during 
many portions of the fight, but especially inside   K. Rool’s shoe. However, the lag in Tiny’s 
phase is poorly emulated. On the Nintendo 64,   reducing lag would be crucial, but 
here, it doesn’t really matter. So,   RingRush opted to spend half of the time 
demonstrating extreme lag reduction methods,   and the other half goofing around 
without wasting any time to lag. If you listen closely here, you will 
hear the sound of going into first   person. There’s a tiny window where 
you have control, just long enough   to go into first person, allowing for a 
phasewalk immediately after the cutscene. Here, Chunky uses the out of bounds 
failsafe to his advantage to hit the   middle switch faster. And from there, 
the rest of the fight is simple. With this, Donkey Kong 64 is beaten in 26 minutes 
and 46 seconds from powering on the game for the   first time. Some of you may know that the 
real-time world record is 24:51 by SigNa.   There are 3 reasons why this TAS has a longer 
runtime. First, the real-time record was done on   the Wii U Virtual Console, which has virtually 
no lag, saving in the ballpark of a minute and   a half over the Nintendo 64. Lag is sometimes 
inaccurately emulated for DK64, so this emulator   run likely loses only about a minute to the Wii U 
version, but it’s impossible to measure exactly. Second, the methods of timing are a bit 
different. Real-time runs start on the A   press in the menu to begin a new file, and 
end on the first frame where the black bars   are visible at the start of the cutscene 
where K. Rool gets knocked out. TAS timing   starts on powering on the console, and 
ends on the final input required to beat   the game. By real-time standards, this 
TAS would be a 26:13 instead of a 26:46. Last but not least, there is a major rule 
difference. The amount of fairies collected   is saved on the cartridge’s static random-access 
memory permanently. This means that after   collecting the fairies once on any given DK64 
cartridge, the mystery menu features will be   irreversibly unlocked forever. As a result, the 
DK64 community decided that using these features   was fair game in real time any% speedruns. 
The TAS community prefers different rules.   They recommend runs start from a completely clean 
state, including static random-access memory. So,   the TAS has to collect the banana camera, 6 
fairies and enter the Rambi crate in Jungle   Japes to unlock Rambi Arena, while the real-time 
run has access to it from the start. Again, this   is very hard to measure exactly, but the estimated 
time difference is about 4 and a half minutes. All things considered, these three 
factors add up to about 6 minutes,   so this run is comparable to a 
20-minute run on Wii U by real-time   rules and timing. And this concludes 
this Tool-assisted speedrun explained.   Thanks to RingRush and theballaam96 for 
their help, and thank you for watching!

Transcript for:Donkey Kong 64 Speedrun Techniques

Transcript for:
Donkey Kong 64 Speedrun Techniques