Here's the craziest thing you'll see all day. A Twitch user named "BubblesDelFuego" recorded his speed-run through Fallout 3, as he set a new world record time of 23 minutes, 55 seconds. In doing so, he beat the previous record of 24 minutes, 20 seconds, which he also happened to set.
It seems impossible that anyone could speed through a game as dense as Fallout 3 in under half an hour. Anyone who's played Bethesda's award-winning RPG knows that it's easy to spend 40 hours, 100 hours or even more playing through its radioactive wastelands. Completionists determined to do and see everything have been known to spend more than 250 hours on a single play-through. Most of the side quests — smaller missions not part of the main storyline — average three to four hours in length each.
How does BubblesDelFuego manage to cut his play time down to 24 minutes? Unsurprisingly, Kotaku explains that he uses glitches in the game to his advantage. For example, he uses a single button quick-save to cut through lengthy dialogue. He also does much of his running while game levels or areas are still loading, a tactic that lets him "clip," or move through walls and other physical objects. This sort of thing might strike some as cheating, even though the player never changes any of the game's existing mechanics or underlying code to get ahead. He simply exploits issues that are already there. Regardless, without these glitches, there would be no way of finishing the game so fast.
BubblesDelFuego also manages to make up time with nerves of steel. Watch the video below, and you'll see him run right through a number of major battles and set pieces. He sprints past dozens, maybe hundreds of enemies, including brute-level monsters, without flinching and without dying. You have to wonder how many attempts he needed to manage that.
Fallout 3 was created by Bethesda Game Studios and published in 2008. A follow-up/spin-off, Fallout: New Vegas, was made by Obsidian Entertainment and released in 2010. Since that time, fans have been feverishly waiting for Bethesda to return to the Fallout universe to create a true sequel, but aside from assuring fans that the company has long-term plans for Fallout, no specific future titles have been revealed.
Bethesda Game Studios is the Maryland-based game developer best known for The Elder Scrolls series.
