Ever since the dawn of video game history, there has been a class of gamers who are truly only interested in one thing: They want to get through this game as fast as humanly possible, and they want to go out there and brag about doing this to everyone and their mother. There are several other classes too: There are the completionists, the people who are only playing to have fun, and the rest. But out of all of them, none are more despised than the speedrunners. This is why it comes as no surprise that some of these kids wasted five years of their lives trying to beat a Punchout record.
Punchout was created by Nintendo in the nineties, and it is one of the most disturbing games of all time. It is pure violence and mimics something we all commonly know as “boxing.” But, nevertheless, it is quite a bit of fun if you know where to look. Anyway: Enter the speedrunners to ruin everyone’s fun and good times. One of them, a human being named Matt Turk, ended up posting his name on speedrunning records all across the net as a huge brag.
Of course, nobody cared. And for many years nobody even paid attention to these forgotten scoreboards. But then, suddenly, one day! A fellow speedrunner was lurking the internet and discovered this Matt Turk’s record. He then started agitating across the speedrunner community to try to beat the record.
Needless to say, these speedrunners ended up spending five years trying to beat Matt Turk’s records on the infamous game known as Punchout! Did they succeed? Well, this really depends on how you want to define the word “succeed.” In many ways, the answer is no. Because even if they succeeded, they failed anyway.
Perhaps this is too harsh. Indeed, it is too harsh. But tough love is still love, right? The epic attempt of this community of speedrunners was captured in a documentary created by the mysterious YouTube figure “Summoning Salt.” In this documentary, we are instructed to follow the speedrunner’s code down to the heart of the greatest of their grafts. And do you know what they found there?
Be sure to watch the documentary on YouTube if you wish to know more, and give yourself a pat on the back for attempting to discover the power behind the man known only as “Matt Turk” and his strange prescience regarding the title Punchout!
