D Tea’s playthrough, seen above, achieves the current world record time in the Hell category, which requires following a precise series of extremely difficult steps outside the scope of normal gameplay.
The run begins with D Tea seeking out both a teleporter and a jetpack — two items that are crucial for speedy playthroughs of Spelunky‘s labyrinthine levels. In a stroke of luck, both items are found in a shop on the game’s second level, greatly increasing the speed at which D Tea can travel through subsequent worlds.
Given that both items require quite a bit of in-game cash to buy, D Tea opts to steal them, angering the game’s shopkeepers and ensuring their shotgun-toting wrath for a majority of the playthrough. The speedrun takes a number of other risks like this throughout, greatly increasing the game’s difficulty as a tradeoff for faster completion time.
In order to access Spelunky‘s final Hell world, D Tea first discovers a hidden black market (1:25 in the video above) and steals many of the items it has up for sale, including the crucial Ankh. D Tea then uses the Ankh in the game’s third world after intentionally dying (2:35), obtaining the Hedjet item in the process. From there, unlocking Hell requires killing Anubis in the game’s fourth world (3:08), using the item Anubis drops to reach the City of Gold (3:38), and then defeating the Olmec boss in a specific location (4:48) in order to access a hidden doorway.
Death lurks around every corner throughout Spelunky, and any number of events could have instantly ended D Tea’s run at any point. The teleporter is especially volatile, as using the item at the wrong time will teleport the player’s character into a wall, killing them instantly.
The Hell world itself contains some of Spelunky‘s most difficult challenges, but D Tea uses previously collected items to speed through and defeat the end boss King Yama, achieving a world record of three minutes and 44 seconds. The time beats Spelunky‘s previous world record of three minutes and 52 seconds, and will require an unlikely mixture of extreme luck and expert-level skill to beat.
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