Elden Ring is a game that could normally take well over a hundred hours if you want to experience everything it has to offer, and that doesn’t even consider the possibility of New Game Plus. But speedrunners have taken a truly massive game and condensed it into less than six minutes.
It took some time for us to get to the sub-six-minute point. Distortion2 led the charge in Elden Ring speedrunning, first getting under an hour, then 30 minutes, then 20, and then 10. For a while, he even held the record for the first Elden Ring speedrun under seven minutes. But then a new sheriff rolled into town and beat Distortion2’s speedrun, shaving off a full 13 seconds off his best time.
Now, seekerTV is back with yet another world record run, this time the first to break the six-minute barrier. You can watch this whole run in less time it takes to microwave a frozen dinner.
The key to this incredibly short time is the zip glitch, a trick that allows vast distances of Elden Ring to be traversed in the blink of an eye. As seekerTV explains in the video’s comments, "It's a frame-perfect trick requiring to move forward at a specific timing while blocking and walking. To make it harder, you have to press forward for a specific amount of frames, depending on when you started moving forward, the goal being to release forward after the block animation reached exactly 139 frames."
Some speedrunners use a metronome to get the timing perfect. In seekerTV’s case, they use a 107.5 BPM timer so that their zip attempt happens on the fifth beat.
As you can see in seekerTV’s run above, it largely works, but there are some zips that don’t work on the first try. Getting to Maliketh took longer than ideal because the zip glitch requires more precision than a human can deliver. That said, there’s not much more time that a perfect set of zips could save. It’s possible that getting Elden Ring under five minutes might require a totally new glitch.
Or maybe not. Speedrunners have a way of surprising us.