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For more than ten years, The Simpsons Hit & Run has been the home of a speedrunning arms race of blistering intensity, and I'm shocked that this is pretty much the first I've heard of it.
Last week, speedrunning YouTuber Summoning Salt released their history of the game's speedrunning scene, starting by revealing that for the first ten years of its life, Hit & Run was something of a no-go for runners. The grind for coins required to complete the game, coupled with a combination of both unforgiving late-game levels and the ability to simply skip past anything that gave you too much trouble, meant that runners largely ignored Hit & Run until the early 2010s.
Eventually, however, a run requiring players to legitimately beat all 49 levels emerged, with a few leading contenders. The first of those to break the two-hour mark was a runner named Pessimistic Mango, using relatively simple skips - such as trapping vehicles in place during destruction levels - to establish the game's first real breakthrough in 2014.
For a while, the world record time would be traded back and forth between Pessimistic Mango and another player Pet Pet Iguana, as the community discovered new skips. Those included the ability to drop aggro from the police by ducking into the Simpson home, but were also focused around sheer optimization. In early 2015, however, a new contender named LiquidWifi entered the scene, setting a new record thanks to an improved coin route - by sacrificing as much as a minute in the early game to gather more coins there, he could save far more time in the late game and eventually set a record despite nearly losing his run to police intervention.
Over the next few months, this trio of runners would repeatedly hand the world record time off between them, relying on further optimization, the removal of load times, and a rapid acceleration technique known as 'E-brake boosting' to help with certain missions and bring the time plummeting down to just 98 minutes. No one else came close to these three for more than a year until a mysterious player known as Robot Crocodilz - who has since deleted all of their speedrunning vods - blasted past all of them before vanishing as quickly as they appeared.
It would take another year before anyone could beat this mystery runner. In May 2017, LiquidWifi reclaimed the title for the first time in two years. Now a full-time streamer, Liquid was playing Hit & Run all the time and had become so prolific in this category that he proceeded to beat his record again. And again. And again. Over the following six years, he would claim 45 different world record times, chipping away past 90 minutes and then closer to 85 thanks to various out-of-bounds skips discovered in the game's punishing final level. Under threat from a new runner, Liquid eventually brought that figure in sight of just 80 minutes as new skips and optimizations were discovered. In April 2021, he set a time of 1:19, which would go untouched for more than a year, but he still wasn't satisfied and chased down a 1:18 that he eventually achieved in January 2023.
Liquid's times were so far ahead of the competition - and had been for so long - that it seemed unlikely anyone would ever overtake him. So it came as quite a surprise when, just a few hours after Liquid set his 1:18 record, a new runner emerged as only the second player ever to claim a 1:19 time. HomerofSteel - who discovered the run through Liquid's pandemic-era skips - not only started to nip at Liquid's heels, but eventually surpassed the historical runner, emerging victorious after a second three-way arms race between himself, Liquid, and another runner, 12 Kelvin. It took six months for the dust to settle on that race before, in June 2024, HomerofSteel set a run so well-optimized that he was more than a full minute ahead of any competition.
For now, that 1:16 time is where the record sits, and with the focus more on the game's 100% category right now, it seems it might stay there for a long time. But the intensity and speed at which these records have been fought over and broken over the past decade has me shocked that this is the first time I'm hearing about the Hit & Run speedrun scene. It also has me yearning for a PS2 to play it on, though I'm not sure I'll be grinding out the levels quite like these runners have been.
