Because "the PS3 port is strange," Ratchet & Clank speedrunners can now beat Up Your Arsenal "in under 1 second"

Sure, I've seen plenty of very fast speedruns in my time, but I'm not sure how many I've seen that go literally under one second. But the Ratchet & Clank speedrun community has discovered a wild new way to cheat the system in Up Your Arsenal, the third game in the original trilogy, and that's led to a wild new one-second speedrun.

"Ratchet and Clank 3 can now be beaten in under 1 second," as Xem explains on Twitter. "This is not a joke." You can see the glitch demonstrated in the clip below, but it's essentially a glitched warp to the credits that you can execute from the very start of the game. A runner known as Joaof is credited with discovering the trick.

So how does it work? It's possible because "the PS3 port is strange and quitting the game fucks things up," as Xem explains. "By hitting a specific address when quitting, you can set game states when you reload." The catch is that you need to start from a hacked save file in order to set the necessary state, which means "this is not possible in real time."

Xem explains that "in order to do this, you need to save-edit your 'frames played' to a negative number. Speedrunners are fast, but we're not that fast yet."

The skeptics among you might question the value of this discovery if it hasn't resulted in a 'real' speedrun, but that's the thing – the process of uncovering these sorts of tricks and cheats is, for my money, the most interesting part about speedrunning. There are secret, arcane workings hidden within all the games we've all spent so many hours playing, and figuring out how to harness that magic makes speedrun theorists genuine wizards in my eyes.

And who knows? Maybe someday this discovery will lead to a run that players can execute in real-time. Wrong warp glitches are a staple of Ocarina of Time speedrunning, for example, and that's the fun part of watching a speedrun community develop. You never know which glitches are going to completely break these games open in the future.

After 40 years, Super Mario Bros speedrunners discover "the Holy Grail of glitches."