The original SNES Metroid has seen a spike in activity for its deathless speedrun. After three years on top, an anonymous speedrunner's time of 11 minutes and 16 seconds was beaten by CScottyW, shaving the number down by 11 seconds. Now, as of today, it has been brought down by 13 seconds.
CHX42, a Chicago-based streamer and speedrunner, managed to beat the first Metroid without dying in only ten minutes and 52 seconds, edging the score closer and closer toward sub-ten. They also hold the world record in Any Bosses Classic, Any% Classic, and All Bosses Deathless (Kraid first). Aside from that, they're second in 100% Deathless, All Bosses (Kraid first), and Any% - that's an impressive amount of golds and silver medals.
It should be noted that it isn't a glitchless run - as seen below, there are plenty of little tricks used to speed things up. One sees CHX42 jumping up through the left wall, going out of sight and into the level itself - they then manoeuvre the screen to skip the whole area, reaching the boss fight early. However, as quick as these tricks make things, the stream itself is around three hours and 40 minutes, so it took a little while for CHX42 to grab the world record. That's often the case, but deathless runs, in particular, can be intensive.
Right now, Metroid's Any% Deathless run is being whittled down and perfected - there haven't been any groundbreaking new advancements that made beating the prior record possible. Whether it can go a further 52 seconds is up in the air, reducing it to a single digit of only nine minutes. That would put it on par with the normal Any% record.
But the speedrunning scene is constantly surprising us, so perhaps someone will find a new trick all these years later to get Metroid beaten even faster. After all, these are people pushing to learn more and more about a game that came out in 1994 - even in the face of Dread's launch, the SNES classic is alive and well.