Half Life 2 isn’t the longest game in the world, but that doesn’t make SourceRuns team’s recent video where they blitz through the game in 40 minutes any less incredible.
Now, this is far from your average speedrun. Glitches are exploited, physics get wacky, and the game was actually completed by a group of different players, with the below video being stitched together later, compiling all the best bits.
The team also make use of a version of the game from 2006, as it’s got different physics and movement values to the 2016 latest update. Every little helps when you’re a speedrunner, after all.
The team explain in the video description:
Old engine has significant movement differences, as well as a long list tricks and glitches now patched. The most notable are bunnyhopping and prop-flying. The tricks that allowed us to save the most time were triggerdelaying (also present in Half-Life 1) and our version of save-buffering. Both of these tricks are exclusive to this engine, and were discovered fairly recently (in 2014).
The result is insanely fast. It feels like the Benny Hill theme should be playing in the background, as the moody FPS is suddenly transformed into some sort of psychedelic Mirror’s Edge clone.
Check it out below, but mind your eyeballs don’t melt from your skull.
If you wanna get balls deep into the nitty gritty tech stuff, there’s currently a spreadsheet that breaks down the run on Google Docs, while the SourceRunners have also posted a separate video explaining how clipping works on YouTube.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.