Boba Skip was elected to the Hall of Fame by the community in December 2022.
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.
“To find a skip this huge, in a game (that’s) this optimized and this competitive,” JSR remarked about it in preparation for this election cycle, “I think that’s pretty remarkable. Consider for a second, that in August 2021, the month that this glitch was found… the world record back then, wouldn’t even be in the top 20 today. I don’t know… just for me, that’s pretty incredible.” 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 BobaWitch. A gamer 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 get in this tower, with this super long staircase,” Boba told us before the election, “and I die in there a whole bunch. And then, I play it again on my next stream, and I’m struggling over and over again to get up this staircase. And part way up the staircase is this door which (you weren’t allowed to go in). And I kept dying over and over… I was panicking, and I was smashing a whole bunch of buttons, and I leaned up against the door that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be able to get through. And I went to switch to the level clearance I got (since the earlier game was so cerebreal and cryptic) so I was like, ‘I’m supposed to do something weird, and I just don’t know it’.”
As is the case in many finds, there’s usually two ways a major glitch is found in a game. On one hand, either someone was actively looking for a way to do some shenanigans, or on the other, someone accidentally found it playing the game casually. And in this case, Boba’s big find was certainly in the latter category. She was struggling along in this tower for multiple streams and then…
Boba is an awesome streamer and podcaster in her own right as well! Follow her @ twitch.tv/boba!
“I just kind of panicked a lot, and pressed some buttons, and I opened my inventory and tried to switch some things. And then, all of a sudden, I was on the other side of the door, and I was kind of happy, because I thought, ‘OK, I finally figured out what I was supposed to do’, and so I was on the other side of the door and I started singing.”
Although unbeknowingst to her at the time, since she isn’t a speedrunner, her accidental glitch would change Metal Gear Solid speedrunning forever, and nobody at the time knew it. It took a few days until Boba decided to tweet it out, that the Metal Gear Solid speedrunning community heard the word. Immediately, the community, upon finding out about the big skip find, began to gather and attempt to reproduce this remarkable find, with over a dozen runners in the Discord voice channel trying feverishly to determine what exactly Boba had done.
“The Boba Skip was one of the most wholesome community collaborative experiences that I’ve ever been a part of,” NickRPGreen told us while researching Boba Skip. “It was an absolute delight; it was sort of chaos for 24 to 48 hours. We had a member of the community share Boba’s tweet.” Boba laughed about it when we asked her. “I had no idea. At first I thought I just figured it out. And then, after a few days and I tweeted about it… I didn’t think it would make much of a difference. Someone was like, ‘Oh, Speedrunners will want to know about that’, so I think I said something like ‘GET REKT SPEEDRUNNERS’ or something… and then I tweeted about it.”
It didn’t take long for her find to spread like wildfire through the speedrun community. “They posted it quite innocently, thinking that someone would say ‘Yeah, we know about this, it doesn’t work, you can’t put it in a run’, but no-one had ever seen it! And, upon seeing it, the whole community collectively lost their minds! Very quickly, things started to happen. We had people piling into the voice channels and sharing clips and thoughts; people contacting Boba (asking her) which version of the game were you running, because we have so many versions of Metal Gear Solid 1… what system were you playing it on, and stuff like that.”
Boba Skip is very simple; when Snake takes damage, there is a 50/50 chance depending on which animation Snake plays when he takes the hit, that his hitbox will expand. If this does, and you do it at this door, you can hit the invisible trigger that loads the next area of the game (that you’re not supposed to be able to get to yet). Shout out to Metal Gear Solid speedrunner NickRPGreen for helping to explain it to us MGS mortals!
Boba just happened to be the first person to ever get it on tape. 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 (strats when they’re found),” Boba told us, “so I was like, I don’t want to name it anything where it sounds like I’m conceited. I remembered that my English teacher would always talk about his friend that had a cat named Kevin. And I was like, Kevin is such a funny name for something that is not a person. So I was like, you know what? Just call it Kevin!”
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…
“I just didn’t really understand (until) there started to be some interaction with (my) tweet,” she told us, “I joined the Discord where they were all in a voice call trying to figure it out, and I just thought it was really fun… I just thought it was neat!”
Watch the original VOD of Boba's first Boba Skip HERE
Nick had a final statement about the community reaction and his experiences before his interview with us ended. “It was one of the most wholesome experiences I’ve had, because it’s people coming together to share in excitement; and share in something new and mysterious and wacky and online, in a space that’s quite often full of negativity, it was so refreshing to see something like this… and I think it’s for those reasons that Boba Skip deserves a place in the Speedrun Hall of Fame.”
Well, wish no more! Thanks to the wonderful people that voted, Boba Skip will forever be enshrined in our Gallery. Winning by only a single vote over another moment (AndrewG’s first sub-5 in 2010, in Super Mario Bros., so you KNOW this moment meant a lot to the community), Boba and her accidental find will live on!
