10 Video Games Broken Beyond Belief While Speedrunning
2. Portal
Want to know how to make Portal even more complex? Try and speedrun it. Valve's classic headscratcher is a difficult enough game as it is, but when you add in the various complexities associated with world-record hunting, it becomes borderline overwhelming.
Regardless, some people have the time and the patience to figure these things out, which is why the current gold medal belongs to a slick 6 minutes and 53 seconds run.
Before speedrunners even start attempting to blast through Portal's story, there's an insane amount of planning and setup that needs to be done, and it takes an enormous Google Doc to keep track of: as was the case with Half-Life 2, numerous in-game settings need to be adjusted, certain key binds need to be implemented, and frame rates and textures can be optimised for maximum effectiveness.
So that's all the stuff that you're "normally" allowed to change, but when it comes to breaking the game itself, there are almost too many glitches and exploits to keep track of. There's the Save Glitch (manipulating saving/loading to create a "ghost body" that can walk through walls), the Angle Glitch (teleport the player to a different location than the exit portal), the Vertical Wall Warp (quickly reach out of bounds areas), and the Portal Quick Reentry (escape out of bounds areas safely and reenter the map), to name but a few.
All of these - and more - have given speedrunners a flexible set of tools with which to tackle their attempts at a speedy time. Puzzle games are supposed to mess with the player's head, but in this case, it's the players who are toying with the game.