This record-breaking Doom 2 speedrun will melt your eyes

The speed with which this gamer runs through a vicious first person shooter explains why gamers make such good pilots. You can’t pull something like this off without insanely good eyes, and super fast reflexes.

A new record for beating Doom 2 has been set by a speedrunner named Zero Master. He published the video of his 23 minute, 3 second Doom 2 run on YouTube on Nov. 16. This beats the previous record of 23 minutes and 25 seconds set by a speedrunner named Looper. And a long-established community of Doom speedrunners is already dissecting the details of Zero Master’s run.

Doom, the first person shooter that popularized the genre (more so than its equally-famous predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D), birthed one of game culture’s richest speedrun communities.

There’s no single, unified course for DOOM speedrunners. It’s better to think of DOOM speedrunning along the lines of track and field events, and specifically foot races, that occur at different lengths, and with or without hurdles, but all of which involve the same, basic skillset.

You can break the different categories of DOOM speedruns down by a nomenclature of abbreviations. Zero Master’s run, for example, is labeled like this:

IWAD: DOOM2.wad

Category: UV-Speed

Map: Movie 1-30

Source Port: Competition Doom v2.0.2.1

IWAD refers to the source file for the game’s primary data (sounds, graphics, level maps). DOOM2.wad is the original, unaltered copy of the game. UV-Speed refers to Ultra Violence, the difficulty at which the game is set for the speedrun, and the fact that the speedrunner is not also trying to kill every monster in the game, which would be a UV-Max run.

Movie 1-30 means that the run starts at the first level and ends at the thirtieth. Naming a Source Port identifies that the speedrunner is not playing the game through DOS, like the original release, but rather is using a port that behaves precisely the same as the original release.

If you mix and match those variables around, you can design a slew of different speedrun events, which explains how this particular speedrun community has enough variety to keep itself going strong 21 years after Doom was released.

H/T Eurogamer