For some players, simply creating a character in a Fallout game can take upwards of 20 or 30 minutes.
For speedrunner Kungkobra? It's the amount of time it takes to reach the end credits.
Specifically, it took Kungkobra 19 minutes and 52 seconds to Obsidian's finish Fallout: New Vegas in a new world record, narrowly beating the previous world record ... which he also set. By finish, we don't mean achieve 100 percent or complete all of the game's quests. Rather, Kungkobra sought to reach the end of the game as quickly as possible by using a number of glitches and tricks.
One of those tricks is playing the game with Italian voice overs, as they're faster than the English version. Another trick is skipping NPC dialogue by using the game's quicksave function. It's also with quicksave that Kungkobra is able to slip past certain walls.
Fallout: New Vegas is known for having its fair share of glitches, and speedrunners like Kungkobra use them to their advantage. For example, bringing up the map and quickly placing a custom marker will bizarrely cause enemies near the player to freeze up, allowing speedrunners to bolt past the game's more difficult foes. In what is probably the most counter-intuitive glitch in the game, speedrunners actually break their in-game legs in order to take advantage of a glitch that gives their character a 152 percent speed boost.
Over time, speedrunners have found a plethora of ways to run through the game at blazing speeds. There's plenty of sprinting across the wasteland and glitching through walls to be seen in the speedrun below, including a new method for getting into the locked New Vegas strip that Kungkobra calls the "McCarran Skip."
It's fascinating to watch, especially for players who spent the first 10 hours of Fallout: New Vegas trying to get into the Strip and start the game's main questline. In contrast, Kungkobra has killed the mysterious Mr. House and Benny within the first 10 minutes. Really makes you wonder if you've been playing games wrong all this time.
