Before 1998, first-person shooters were all about, well, shooting. Half-Life came along in ’98 and changed everything though. Sure, it played a lot like Quake, but it had a story. It wasn’t one of those in your face stories either. It was subtle and left most of the story up to the player to find. In that sense, Half-Life is not a short game as it wants players to take it all in. If you are aiming to beat it quickly, however, it can be done rather fast.

YouTuber quadrazid and some other runners smashed the speedrun world record for Half-Life this week when he completed the game in 20 minutes and 14 seconds. Previously, speedrunners calculated that the fastest speedrun would take 27 minutes. Here’s how they were able to cut almost 6 minutes off the previous time:

Starting back in the summer of 2010, the estimated time for this run was thought to be roughly 27 minutes. However, after almost four years of painstaking planning, theorycrafting and execution, we have arrived at our final time, smashing all of our wildest expectations.

Not only do we owe this new world-record time to all the new tricks we’ve discovered, the new routes we’ve found and the new ways we’ve learned to manipulate the game. A lot of the improvement from the first estimation and the previous world record (29 minutes, 41 seconds) comes from the very hard work and countless hours put into perfecting each and every segment, no matter how short or trivial. This run has truly been an endurance test for everyone involved, and we’re extremely happy to finally be able to share it with you.

If you want to learn more about how they were able to complete Half-Life in less than 21 minutes, this Google Doc explains everything. It will tell you which runners completed which sections and how much of the game each runner completed. It’s a pretty fascinating look at a communal speedrun.

If you want to see more amazing speedruns, check out our coverage of the world record speedruns for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Portal.

[h/t: Rock Paper Shotgun]
Image via quadrazid/YouTube