Welcome to “Phenomenal Feats”, brought to you by the official Speedrun Hall of Fame! These moments will be forever remembered in a special gallery, designed for those moments in time where a specific runner, run, or accomplishment deserves to be forever chronicled. These are the moments in time we want all of speedrunning to remember. This month, December 2022, marks our 2nd class for this gallery, and now it’s time for YOU to pick which of these Phenomenal Feats will be immortalized in the Speedrun Hall of Fame!
Moment #2: Boba finds a skip by accident which redefines the Metal Gear Solid leaderboards in 2021.
Metal Gear Solid is a very optimized & tight speedrun, to say the least. A game this popular with almost 100 runs on the leaderboard, the top runs have become closer and closer to the limit over time. As of August 2021, the leaderboard was already very competitive, with a world record of 36:56 by the runner ‘dlimes13‘. That all changed that summer, when a streamer named Boba accidentally found a game-changing skip in Metal Gear Solid.
Boba is a popular let’s player and YouTuber, also known as Boba_Witch. Once known for her playthroughs of horror games, she now plays a variety of different titles, and in August of 2021, she was playing Metal Gear Solid for the first time when…
“I was playing Metal Gear Solid for the first time ever,” Boba told us in 2022, “so I had no story spoilers, nothing like that. So I completely didn’t know what direction the game was supposed to (direct me towards). And I get in this tower with this super-long staircase, and I die in there a whole bunch… I think I ended a stream after dying a whole bunch in the staircase and I was like, ‘I’ll see you next time!’. And then, I played it again on my next stream, and I’m struggling over, and over, and over… trying to get up this staircase, to get to this place I needed to go. And, part of the way up this staircase there was this door which was like, ‘Oh! You’re not allowed to go through here!”. And I just kept on dying over and over again. So I was panicking, and smashing a bunch of buttons, and I leaned up against the door… and I went to switch to the level clearance I got, because I thought that if I messed with this a few times it will do something, because I had just recently done that fight where you have to take the controller out and switch it or something, so I was like, ‘It’s probably that I need to do something weird, and I just don’t know it.
“So I just panicked a lot, and I pressed some buttons, and I opened my inventory trying to switch to something. And then, all of a sudden, I was on the other side of the door, and I was kind of happy! I thought, ‘OK! I finally figured out what I was supposed to do!’ I started singing, I was like, ‘Great! I don’t have to fight these idiots anymore!”
Her accidental glitch would change Metal Gear Solid speedrunning forever, and nobody at the time knew it. The news hit Twitter when Boba decided to tweet it out with the caption “Get rekt speedrunners!”
“I had no idea, ’cause I thought I just figured it out. And then after I talked about it on Discord and then after a few days I Tweeted about it… I just didn’t think it was gonna make much of a difference. Someone was like, ‘Speedrunners will want to know about that!’ so I was like ‘Get rekt speedrunners!’. I left my PC for a few hours, and when I came back I had a lot of messages that were like, ‘Oh my God! What were you doing at that exact moment? Can you repeat what were you doing?’ All of a sudden, all of the Metal Gear Solid community was in a Discord (voice) call with everyone trying to figure out what I did, and I was like ‘I guess I did something! I don’t know!”
It didn’t take long for her find to spread like wildfire through the speedrun community. Though it took a few days for news to leak, once it did, the Metal Gear Solid discord was full of speedrunners trying to replicate the glitch, and once it was found how to consistently reproduce what Boba had done by mistake, the biggest new find in years was confirmed, and Boba Skip was born. Although, she didn’t want to call it that at first… preferring to call it “Kevin” instead!
“I didn’t know how people name them!” Boba admitted. “And, I didn’t want to name it anything where it sounds like I’m conceited, or something. So I was like, what name do I really like? And I remember the funniest thing; my English teacher would always talk about his friend’s cat named Kevin. And I was like, ‘Kevin is such a funny name for something that’s not a person’. So I was like, you know what? Let’s call it Kevin. But they were like, we want to (name it after you), so I’m fine (with it) either way!”
This was one of the biggest strat finds in years. IGN even wrote a short article about it, and Metal Gear creater Hideo Kojima himself retweeted the article. This put Boba on the map in the world of speedrunning, where she will live on as a legend for all eternity…
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- News, Phenomenal Feats, Phenomenal Feats 2022
- November 30, 2022
