One of the biggest names in speedrunning has just beaten a three-year-old record for defeating the titular final boss in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, one of the most legendary challenges in gaming history.
"I just beat Mike Tyson faster than anyone has before - 2:00.61, beating a world record that stood for over three years," Summoning Salt wrote on Twitter. "I put tens of thousands of attempts into lowering this time, and it finally paid off last night." In fact, in the description of the full video of the run, Summoning Salt says this record "took something like 20,000+ attempts." That's some darn impressive dedication.
If you're at all familiar with speedrunning, you've probably heard the name Summoning Salt before - after all, his YouTube videos offer some of the most definitive explanations of speedrunning history you can find on the internet. As you might expect, he does a fair bit of speedrunning across a variety of games, but he's downright dominant in Punch-Out, holding number one records in standard categories as well as more extreme rulesets like the Tyson Challenge, where you attempt to beat Tyson 14 times in a row without losing a single fight.
- Punch-Out speedrunner "took 75,000 attempts over nearly 5 years" landing 1-in-10,000 luck and 21 frame-perfect punches to finally beat Mike Tyson in under 2 minutes
- It took 490 days, but the Super Mario Bros speedrun world record is now 4 frames better – and just 18 frames away from literal perfection
Summoning Salt has held the single fight record against Tyson since 2017. He set his long-standing record of 2:00.97 back in 2020 and now, three years later, that record has finally been broken. Behind him, it's a four-way tie for second place with a number of others having set 2:05.25 times, but nobody's been able to touch Summoning Salt's sub-2:05 record.
Mike Tyson is one of the most legendary challenges in gaming history. It's impossible to objectively quantify just how tough a particular boss is compared with any other, but in subjective, anecdotal terms, I can tell you I beat Tyson after 104 attempts when I finally conquered Punch-Out last year. I can tell you for darn sure that I didn't do it with a 2:00.61, though.
The past month has been big for speedrunning, with Super Mario 64 speedrunners discovering a massive time save that has ultimately resulted in only the puniest new world records. Meanwhile, that half-A press video you might've watched years ago has finally been rendered obsolete, and Portal speedrunners are shattering world records with some very creative solutions.
Check out our list of the best NES games of all time if you're looking for something to get competitive in.
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