Nov 2022 “Phenomenal Feats” Moment #3: A 17-year old Doom world record falls to Dwaze in 2020

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, November 2022, marks our first nominees, and now, it’s time for YOU to pick which of these Phenomenal Feats will be immortalized in the Speedruns Hall of Fame!

Moment number 3: A 17-year old Doom world record falls to Dwaze in 2020

A screenshot from Dwaze’s 5:36 RTA run, the first of the two to bop stx-Vile’s 2005 World Record.

Speedrunning has a complex legacy that is difficult to track, as a lot of the earliest speedruns are now lost to the ether of the internet. As speedrunning has existed since the 1980’s, a lot of the original footage of these runs have long since been lost. The origins of ORGANIZED speedrunning, however, aren’t nearly as untracable, and a lot of the history leads back to the earliest speedrunning days of the mid-90’s, where Doom was by-far the most popular speedrun online.

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Dozens of runners would upload their runs to Usenet, an early internet message board, using WADs, which were files designed to play back as a “movie” in the actual Doom game. Users could create “demos” of their run by performing attempts and recording a WAD (which some claim stands for “Where’s All the Data?”). Once they finished a run they were happy with, they could upload their WAD (which was typically only a few KB of data) to the boards. This way, you could download someone’s run and watch it back natively on your copy of Doom! This was the only way to verify runs back then, as the early internet did not have the bandwidth or storage space to hold full videos. Leaderboards were non-existent to start, and were very unorganized, with rampant cheating attempts, and nowhere to watch them live. Luckily for the early speedrun communities, eventually the popularity of speed demos led to websites being created for the purpose of verifying and hosting demos for folks to watch and compare, which quickly led to greater visibility, as well as legitimacy.

A screenshot from dsdarchive.com, one of the oldest Doom WAD-hosting websites still around. It was founded in 2000.

This legacy persisted into the 2000’s with games such as Quake, but Doom continued to be one of the most popular speedruns, with thousands of runs being uploaded to sites such as COMPET-N, dsdarchive.com (Doom Speed Demos Archive), and eventually Speed Demos Archive and others. These sites, though unorganized and crude by today’s standards, were the only true way to compare your times to the other folks throughout the world that were running Doom, and the WADs made it easy to detect cheating. Splicing was extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, and cheat codes and other ways to cheat were easily detected. Thus, speed demos were a very legitimate way to verify runs, at least for the time. In fact, to this day, an active community still exists on doomworld.com, one of the original places users could upload WADs to forums.

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Into the new century, Doom was still a very popular speedrun, and was hyper-competitive. On April 5, 2005, a runner by the name of Drew “stx-Vile” DeVore set a world record in the Ultra-Violence Speed category. This run, submitted as a 5-minute in-game-time WAD, was later re-timed to 6 minutes and 17 seconds of RTA time, in order to fit with the modern leaderboards years later on speedrun.com. stx-Vile is one of the most prominent Doom speedrunners of all time, having been active for many years. He submitted over 250 demos to COMPET-N and almost 400 to the Doom Speed Demo Archive. He was the first in the world to sub-30 the Nightmare! difficulty of Doom II, as well as the UV pacifist runs he did, including MAP07: Dead Simple, which was considered nearly impossible to perform for many years. His 5:00 IGT WR was considered untouchable, and was the toast of the Doom community when he accomplished it. As of 2022, he still holds over 70 Doom and Doom II world records (you can see his DoomWiki profile here.)

A screenshot from stx-Vile’s 2005 WR, with a 6:17 RTA and a 5:00 IGT run that was an untouchable time for 17 years.

This run persisted as the only known record for years. Even through the rise of speedrun.com, Games Done Quick, and Twitch, nobody seemed to be skilled enough to challenge the run. On October 20, 2018, a runner named KingDime was approaching the record, getting as close as one second away from Vile’s WR, when he posted a run of 6:18 RTA which fell just shy of Vile’s 6:17. But, despite this, Vile’s run persisted as time went on, seemingly untouchable. That is, until 17 years after that fateful spring day, when the run finally fell.

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Speedrun.com post of Dwaze’s RTA run, the first of his two to bop Vile’s 17-year old world record.

On March 13, 2020, a Belgian speedrunner named Dwaze performed a run of Ultimate Doom (the same version stx-Vile’s run was done on). Dwaze wasn’t new to the scene, having submitted runs to SRC as early as 2018, but he was a relative newcomer compared to the runner whose time he was chasing. However, he was finally able to break one of speedrunning’s longest standing records. With a time of 5 minutes and 36 seconds, his RTA time did in fact end the reign of that legendary speedrun, topping one of Doom’s highest watermarks.

Now, you might be thinking: wait a second! Just because Dwaze beat the RTA time, the old record’s in-game time was still faster! Some might say so. Doom was traditionally timed using IGT because it was easier to track, and the game did a phenomenal job of timing itself, so timers such as LiveSplit weren’t necessary. So in some folks’ eyes, you might think that Dwaze’s run shouldn’t be considered the world record. I mean, the in game timer was the traditional method of timing, so his RTA run shouldn’t count… right?

A screenshot from Dwaze’s April 2020 run, which beat Vile’s 5:00 IGT time through map 7 with a 4:49 IGT time.

Well, you’d be wrong! Because, just a month later, on April 15, 2020, Dwaze was able to beat the IGT world record as well! Although his RTA time of 6:39 doesn’t beat either his own personal best or Vile’s 6:17 RTA time (the RTA timing of his 5:00 IGT run), Dwaze’s April 15th run completed the game with an in-game time of 4 minutes and 49 seconds, beating Vile’s mark by 11 seconds! After 17 years, there was no disputing it: Dwaze was the new king of the Doom UV Speed Ep. 1 world, no matter how you sliced it!

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Now, he sits alone at the top, holding the records for both IGT and RTA. Doom continues to be a hot commodity in the speedrunning scene, with console ports and Steam ports beginning to take over the landscape, but seeing the Crispy Doom port still being utilized in serious speedrun attempts is both endearing and exciting. How long will THIS record stand? Only time will tell…

Will this moment be forever enshrined into the hall of fame? Go to our Phenomenal Feats menu (under the Hall of Fame tab at the top of our page) and click “Vote Now!” Results will be announced at the start of December; join our Discord or follow our Twitter to get all the updates!