New “Portal Done Pro-er” Speedrun Smashes Previous Portal 1 World Record

July 19th, 2012 · By Vic · 8 Comments

A year and a half ago, in late 2010, Michael “DemonStrate” Yanni created a jaw-dropping 9-minute speedrun of the original Portal, titled “Portal Done Pro“. It was the new world-record time for the fastest playthrough of Portal 1, and understandably, it was widely publicized at the time.

But you know what they say: records are made to be broken. And yesterday, PDP’s world record was not only broken, but smashed wide open. Read on!

This is “Portal Done Pro-er“, a new world-record segmented, scriptless speedrun of Portal 1 that has been 3 months in the making (although the bulk of it was completed in about 2 weeks).

PDP-er was performed by 4 members of the SourceRuns team: Nick “Z1mb0bw4y” Roth (with 12 segments), Nick “Gocnak” Kerns (with 6 segments), Josh “Inexistence” Peaker (with 5 segments), and guest runner Sebastian “Xebaz” Dressler (with 1 segment).

The new world record time for fastest time in Portal, as performed in Portal Done Pro-er, is 8 minutes, 31 seconds, and 93 milliseconds (timed in realtime from the moment you gain crosshairs to the moment you lose them as GLaDOS dies), almost a full minute faster than the previous time as performed by DemonStrate in the original PDP.

PDP-er uses a variety of new glitches, skips, and tricks to achieve what I can only describe as a near-perfect performance. They say there’s always room for improvement in a speedrun, but I’m not so sure PDP-er has left anything for future speedrunners to work with, though that isn’t a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. And the run even includes a lovely surprise at the end – but you have to see it (or hear it, rather) to believe it.

And again, Portal Done Pro-er was also done using no scripts, which is an even greater achievement. This also means it is “SDA-legal“, which is very good – let’s hope we get to see the run on the SDA fairly soon.

The PDP-er team have provided full text explanation and commentary for the run in a Google document, and apparently an audio commentary video is on the way and will be made available soon.

So, without further ado, here is Portal Done Pro-er:

I am now eagerly anticipating a possible “Portal Done Pro-est”.

And in other speedrunning news, Coolkid has performed two exceptional Half-Life speedruns: one is a single-segment, scriptless run of the original Half-Life on Hard difficulty. The other is a single-segment, scriptless world-record run of Opposing Force.

And 3 members of the SourceRuns team, Nick “Gocnak” Kerns; “Darkevil”; and Jokūbas “eXeC/Executable” Banaitis, have performed an awesome 9-minute speedrun of the HL2: Episode Two mod “Precursor”.

Consider checking all three runs out, and keep an eye on the SourceRuns YouTube channel for more great runs from the team.

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