10 Video Games Broken Beyond Belief While Speedrunning
1. Pokemon Red
There are lots of things you can do in one minute. Eat a couple of finger sandwiches. Boil the kettle. Muster up the will to get out of bed in the morning. But one thing you can't do in that time is complete a Pokemon game. Right?
Well, technically yes, that is right, because the current world record for Pokemon Red is 1 minute and 18 seconds, but let's not split hairs: that speedy time is an unprecedented achievement that sounds impossible on paper.
Fortunately though, for everyone wishing to speedrun Pokemon Red and aim for a similarly crazy time, there's an extremely powerful exploit called the item underflow glitch that can be used to instantly warp to the end of the game. As you'd expect for such a handy little trick, it's pretty complicated and hard to pull off, which is why you don't see minute-long speedruns cropping up all over the place. But it absolutely works if done correctly.
The concept of the glitch is to trick the game into thinking that you have -1 items in your bag, which will cause that number to "underflow" to 255. Because of this, the player will gain the ability to manipulate RAM - including things like coordinates and map data - which opens up the possibility of teleporting to the Hall of Fame at the end of the game, rolling the credits in no time at all.
Unlike the other entries on this list, there's basically no gameplay when using this speedrun method - it's really all about that glitch. "Broken" is an understatement.