The player known as Riverrun recently threw the Spelunky speedrunning community into complete chaos by revealing a way to open the door to Hell without using a Book of the Dead. Speedrunners often spend hundreds of hours looking for such secrets, but Riverrun seems to have come across the discovery at random. The news broke when the player uploaded a short gameplay video to a popular speedrunning server on Discord back in September.
The process involves manipulating the main boss, Olmec. This giant statue comes crashing down whenever the player character stands directly underneath, destroying some of the blocks below. Riverrun noticed how the door to Hell was in fact open upon entering the relevant level, albeit nearly impossible to access. The trick turned out to be stacking a series of indestructible blocks just above the lava pit at the bottom of the level and then using Olmec to slowly push them downwards.
The discovery made by Riverrun has thrown the Spelunky community into such a state of shock that popular YouTuber Karl Jobst was compelled to put together a short video to shed some light on the matter. “The Spelunky community is in complete shock,” Jobst begins. “A huge discovery has just been made and it’s one that had been seemingly hidden in plain sight for 10 years.”
“Now, more often than not when big discoveries are made, it’s by established experts of the game that have been theory crafting and investigating for hundreds or thousands of hours,” Jobst explains. “But sometimes, big discoveries can come out of nowhere by people who aren’t even in the general community at all.”
The overall feeling within the Spelunky speedrunning community seems to have been captured by the YouTube user JJGyzmo who commented on the video by Jobst, receiving hundreds of upvotes in the process. “Can you imagine being a speedrunner of a game you've played countless times, hundreds or even thousands of hours, and one day some random player who doesn't even speedrun presents you the holy grail of strategies that was laying there all this time right in front of you,” JJGyzmo pondered. “It must feel so awesome, but maybe also gut wrenching at the same time. I love it when something like this happens. You never know what is still possible, but simply hidden!”