When speedrunning gets the spotlight, it’s often for games such as Super Mario 64, Minecraft, or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. These are among the titles with the most active runners (according to speedrun.com). However, with 42 active players, there’s been a long and brutal race for a record in the game that graced many childhoods: Simpsons: Hit and Run.
The long sought after record involves beating all main story missions in less than one hour 20. The only rule was that you can’t skip any of these missions, but outside of that, runners have free range to find faster routes and strats.
After eight months of runs almost every day of the week, Twitch streamer LiquidWiFi managed to smash the record with a ridiculously short time of one hour, 19 minutes, and 53 seconds.
Not only does this mean nailing every mission (no matter how notoriously frustrating), Liquid also had to pull off tricks like skipping cutscenes, and even destroyed a car by spawning a truck on top of it. He also had to contend with having enough coins land in his path so he can afford the various purchases needed in the run, like vehicles and costumes.
Watching his streams, often it isn’t even the missions themselves that are the main obstacle. One of the most common things to kill a run is bad RNG, resulting in not getting enough coins, not getting a fast enough car, or enemy A.I. bugging out and being suboptimal (such as taking longer to drop a required item).
This run puts Liquid just over a minute ahead of the second fastest runner, Baconman12, who still holds the All Story Missions record on the console version of Simpsons: Hit and Run, on top of other records in the game such as ASM New Game Plus, where runners can play from a completed save and therefore do missions in any order, and have access to all the required items. Liquid himself also holds the top spot in the 100% category, in which players have to also do all the side content like races and collecting all items.
Simpsons: Hit & Run was released in 2003 for GameCube, PS2, Xbox, and PC. A petition for a sequel reached over 25,000 signatures last year, showing there’s still a bit of interest in this childhood classic.
Source: Speedrun.com