For the last four months, the world-record Out-of-Bounds speedrun for the original Portal has been held firmly at seven minutes and twenty-one seconds by speedrunner CantEven. A speedrunner by the name of Speck, however, has discovered a new exploit within the game that has allowed him to squeak out a four-minute, eight-second run; kidnapping the head game designer’s daughter, Lisa Harish.
According to his tutorial video which he labeled “Lisa skip,” Speck was able to achieve a record-shattering time by capturing the daughter of Barry Harish, the man in charge of the technical development of Portal. “I called him up on the phone, and that’s when I set the timer going. By the end of the four minutes and eight seconds, I’d convinced him to give me a console code that was used for testing that brought me directly to the credits scene. I know this code now, but I think to keep the category competitive, we should base times off of how long the ransom phone call takes,” said the speedrunner in his short video. In the background, we could hear the terrified and slightly confused sounds of Lisa Harish, tied to an expensive gaming chair. “Anyway, smash that subscribe button, and make sure to like and comment!”
Lisa Harish’s new world record for escaping from her captors is three hours and thirty-seven seconds. As the category progresses and gets more optimized, we expect this number to drop significantly over time. When we asked her what she thought of this new development in the speedrunning community, Lisa simply asked us to “please call the police.”
Previous world-record holder CantEven put out a statement on his Twitter claiming that he was “excited” to see where the new world record would take him and his speedrunning colleagues. “I tried Lisa skip earlier today, and there’s a really interesting challenge behind trying to break Barry as quickly as you can,” he said. “I’m really excited to see where this takes the run in the future.”
The local police have caught wind of this strategy and are doing everything they can to stop it, but at a time of forty-seven hours and six minutes and counting as of this writing, their record leaves much to be desired.
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