The Most Hilarious Doom Speedrun Ever Performed 

Nuts competition rules: docs.google.com/document/d/1sDYZQDJ79c8qrZJUEoq8z548jN9IBjvPSSIy7gKVsMM/ Good luck!

The only reason it took 25 days is because the program lacked "the human element" as Todd Todgers would say. Should have began the level in 2nd gear

“The only person I’ve ever heard of that might have the skill to pull something like this off would be Todd Rogers In his prime” haha this caught me off guard gave me a good laugh

About the first level of doom... I remember getting stuck in the first level for hours thinking it was all the game had to offer. Then I realized you can open doors

I heard Tod Rodgers did this in the 80s without having to punch. He just conserved his ammo really really well.

As a quick correction just in case anyone cares, the map's creator, BPRD, said he created Nuts not only as a joke, but to also test the file size that he could upload on whatever website he was using back in the day. He said he wasn't sure how big it was, so he made this big map to see if it would still accept it.

If this speedrun is uploaded to any leaderboard with the runner listed as anything other than "Zero Master's CPU" I'm fucking rioting

The mere fact that a level pack for the original Doom, a game nearly 30 years old, can be played in such a way that it lags to *fractional* FPS on high-end 2022 hardware is hilarious to me. Yes, I know it's mostly because the game's code isn't optimized for modern GPUs or multi-core processors, but as a matter of spectacle it's still really funny.

The fact that a Doom video uploaded only a month ago has over a million views shows how legendary and interesting this masterpiece of a game still is.

"If you have a spare month, you can watch it for yourself" That line sums up this whole run

Only 10,000+ monsters? And only 1,758 Revenants? Well... that's _kind_ of a lot of demons, I guess.

I played Doom when my age was in the single digits, and only now at age 35 do I know that the hitboxes were taller than the monsters. It's just a fascinating thought.

“To achieve great things one must sacrifice stability and push ones limits past sanity.” I feel like this quote captures this run and Zero Master quite well.

Great video, Karl, and thank you so much for the mention. One small correction though, I can say with 92% certainty that there aren't mancubi in the second room.

It’d be interesting to see a version of this run that allows you to modify the game to optimize the sprites to see if you even could do an TASless run. Probably a waste of time to even attempt but could be a fun thing to see. Like removing the rocket trails, more intense culling, removing dead bodies, that sort of thing. Edit: love these comments, so neat seeing everyone’s takes and solutions to this problem, I just threw out the idea knowing very little about how doom really work on a deep level so it’s cool reading everyone’s insight. You love to see it

Important detail, covered in a Decino video: based on the tick your game starts on (I believe that's how it works) the chance of a Revenant rocket being a homing shot can either be 25% or 75%.

I remember being on Doomworld when Nuts was released. They had a regular article called "The /newstuff Chronicles" that reviewed all the new wads. This one just said "three rooms, 10,000 enemies". I beleive it was made in WadC, which allowed you to "program" maps using text. Made lining up 10,000 enemies much easier, I suppose. Just add zeroes.

"Ever since the invention of proof standards, he's been oddly quiet." Poor Todd Todgers lmao

Just trying to imagine 90,000 missile sprites all with their own hitboxes and tracking AI being processed at once without the game crashing in hurting my head.

What Zero Master did here is true beauty. And the circumstance that it is nearly beyond the capabilities of a human body and brain to perceive and witness the whole speedrun in real time, that we can literally only testify it by a summary of the results a machine made for humans so we can comprehend what happened here makes this even more beautiful 🙏❤️

I feel bad for whatever poor soul that had to verify the run.

We just need to get Google to lend him a supercomputer for 6 hours

The chance for a Revenant to shoot a homing projectile that you gave at 12:32 is technically incorrect. It's either 25% or 75% depending a certain global timer from game start, when a revenant woke up, and whether the revenant has been in a pain state or not. The specifics aren't really super important here, but it's basically a 50% chance for a revenant missile to be a homing missile, not 25% total.

Something about this map is hypnotic. I didn't discover it till around 2013 and for some reason, every time I play it and beat it, I'm replaying it for hours. Just that one map. I haven't played it in a year but next time I do, I'll have to make sure I have the entire evening free.

What's insane is that Zero Master had 6% Health remaining and managed to clutch it out.

Final Doom is extra cool, because it started out as TNT : Evilution, a project by a bunch of fans in a team to make a full 32 level replacement for Doom 2, complete with a bunch of custom textures and custom music. Particular attention was paid to make the maps as impressive as they could make them at the time, featuring lots of detail, along with various engine tricks, and some levels being enormous in size. John Romero had noticed this project, and as it neared completion, he contacted the leaders of the team to make them an offer for iD Software to buy the rights to TNT and have it published as an official product. One of the conditions though was that iD would be provided with a second 32 level set, so that it could be sold as a double bundle. This was accepted, two brothers who were part of Team TNT, Dario Casali and Milo Casali, pitched a set they were working on, which had 8 levels at the time (a couple which had been rejected for TNT Evilution because they were deemed too hard). The guys at iD thought it looked really promising and said they'd love to see that filled out to a full 32, so Dario and Milo got to work, they had 4 months of time. The Casalis loved Doom, but one of the things which nagged them was a lack of challenge, Doom 2 wasn't hard enough for them, hence why they started making their own levels to begin with, with Team TNT pushing back against their levels for TNT becoming too hard, but they now had the free reigns to make a really challenging Doom campaign on their own terms, and as an official product. Balancing it for the Ultra-Violence difficulty as their base (and scaling it down for lower difficulties), they made sure to make their levels tough, if they felt that a part wasn't giving them a hard enough time, they'd go and revise it to make it harsher, so that it never felt easy or like they weren't getting by just by the skin of their teeth. They deliver the levels to iD on time, to their relief they don't ask for any changes. TNT and Plutonia gets published as Final Doom, 64 high end levels total, shipping with the included Doom 95 port for Windows, required for playing. Doom 95 raises static limits (as some levels got too complex for the original .exe), and offers higher resolutions with a more streamlined way of playing multiplayer and loading custom content. Final Doom would also be released in a revised form for the Sony Playstation. In many people's opinions, Plutonia makes up the very best part of the official classic Doom games. It's very smartly designed, and very good looking. Approachable for most on lower skill levels, while offering a good challenge on Ultra-Violence, for those who were really looking for something more. Plutonia got some notice, Dario Casali got hired as lead level designer by this small upstart company headed by a former Microsoft programmer named Gabe Newell, a company called Valve Software, where Dario worked on a game with the working title of Quiver, using a licensed Quake engine for its base. Quiver would release in 1998 as Half-Life, which would win 50 different Game Of The Year awards from various different publications and reviews. Milo Casali got a job at Epic Megagames, being part of the Unreal series.

This is the kind of painstaking planning and execution required to execute the Apollo missions... nerds are amazing creatures.

My first proper girlfriend knew I was into videogames, so downloaded GL Doom to give gaming a go. One day I heard what sounded like her PC crashing really badly, and I asked her what it was, and it was several minutes of the stats of level 1 racking up the time it had been played for. Shed played it a bit, done some studying, played a bit more and so on, and was under the impression the first level was the whole game. She still didn't get 100% of the items. I really was touched at her trying to share an interest. Hope she's happy.

Speedrunning is a performance art. I love that Zero Master made this, and I love that your analysis exists.

slight correction. Spidermasterminds are immune to splash damage same as Cyber demons but they have a pretty high pain chance wich stops their attacks somewhat regulary

Zero Master is truly a Doom god.

It's been a very bad last few months for me. But the random Todd Rodgers joke caught me off guard so much that it actually cheered me up a lil. Thank you Karl.

GIGACHAD doesn't even begin to describe the crazy SoB that is Zero Master. What a legend.

Zero Master is the GOAT of DooM. He finds those things that are "impossible" and makes them reality. This one is painfully long, but doable. He's got some achievements that are unbelievable. TNT Evilution Nightmare Single Segment was considered virtually impossible. That map set has way too many hitscanners to make it a reliable run, but Zero gave us the 1st complete run. No one else has replicated this. This gave him the NM Speed WR in each official release of the classics. Doom 2, Map 2, Underhalls Pacifist. It was considered impossible, but he did it. The run takes over 20 minutes and it's a lot of setup and waiting, but the theory took longer. Doom 2, Map 30, Icon of Sin Pacifist. Possible as a TAS. Zero Master hinted at this one in the the Underhalls video and then did it. It's TAS, but there is a way and the proof of concept is there. The RNG still leaves this one impossible in the practical sense. Doom 2, map 15, Industrial Zone. All official 100S and Max times allow for less than 100% secrets because one line def is incorrectly place and "impossible" to trigger in a normal run. Zero Master used a Pain Elemental to push him into the line def and get a true 100% secrets run. It's not practical, but it's possible. He also used this to get a true NM 100S run. Sometimes, things are done just to prove they can be done. At this point, we're just seeing Zero Master show off his total understanding of the game paired with his ability to play it better than anyone.

It would literally be faster to download the doom source and make your own port that had nuts-specific rendering speedups, then play the thing in 24 hours. Why, indeed. Still one of the most impressive things I've seen on this channel.

Nuts doesn’t refer to the title of the map, it refers to the people who would go out of their way to 100% kill every enemy in the map

1:57 my mans lookin like a great value Borris Johnson

12:32 Actually, Revenants either have a 25% chance or a 75% chance to fire a homing rocket, depending on what gametic they wake up on- Decino has a really interesting video on this.

It was entirely worth it, not simply for the goal of 100% kills, but because that amount of effort put into literally anything is just beautiful to witness and inspiring. A human dedicated enough can really accomplish anything (within the laws of physics and stuff)

1:30 If you enjoy doing something, then it will never be a waste of time

I’m not even a speed runner, but one of your videos crossed my dash and I clicked out of curiosity. I loved Doom as a little girl, so I thought I’d check it out. I’ve been binging all your doom videos and Mario as well. Gonna move on to goldeneye soon. I can’t believe the depth of speed running. I knew about it before, but it is so fascinating to watch someone who knows what they’re talking about really break down the skill and technique it takes to claim mastery over their beloved games. I don’t think I’ll ever speed run myself, I like a nice relaxed pace, but I love hearing the absolute insanity these players dedicate themselves to just to shave off milliseconds, or to find a glitch that opens up brand new possibilities! Also, your voice is beautiful, smooth and calming. Thanks so much for producing all this content!!

I think Zero Master just wanted to make his own personal Hell

Karl is the kinda guy to pull his weight during a group project. I respect it

This kind of speedruns is what we should consider a form of art. Just the dedication, engineering, skill, game knowledge and the absurdity combined its like crafting a masterpiece

That Todd Rodgers joke. You nearly killed me laughing.

Hey Karl, just wanted to mention that Wad-Archive, the biggest hub of Doom wads, will sadly be going down soon. There are other wad hosting sites like idgames (the oldest and most reliable), but it’s still a real shame, and will make finding old wads much harder. Glad you mentioned that excellent site. (YT is having a field day with automatically deleting my comments for some reason!)

Karl is the only guy who could talk in such a monotone sleep inducing voice that is equally intriguing and focus inducing on such boring topics to some but then make it so so interesting to many during and after watching.

He just keeps doing things to further cement his position as the best doom player there will ever be. He doesnt need to. But he does and we love him for it.

Zero Master is such a legends, that he speedrun the game even before its release.

All the props to them for pulling this off. Mildly sad that they didn't grab all the items so all the numbers would say 100% at the end but that would just be a cherry on the top of this amazing cake.

The purpose behind the run was so Karl could give us a breakdown. There. Not pointless.

This is unbelievable, fascinating, and hilarious. Definitely worth it.

This video will now forever hold a special place in my heart. This is the video that got me into DOOM. Thank you so much for making this video about how Flynn Taggart goes zoom zoom, next slide please for 25 days.

"Honestly i just don't understand how a lot of the glitches speedrunners use are found in the first place" Well if you don't understand how they're found, what chance do the rest of us have!

I feel like this would actually be the world's first qualifying 'Slow run' and the fact it still goes to the legend Zero Master is perfect.

New DOOM level is released. Zero master: i dont need it, i dont need it, I NEEEEEEED IT!!

Years ago I gave Brutal Doom a run. One memory that sticks is that, in that mod, the Spider Mastermind was more than a match for the Cyberdemon.

I'm so happy that someone managed to do this. I remember spending a couple hours on this map trying to figure out a way to do it but the best I ever managed to get was 93% kills.

Imagine the sheer compute power that we have today and a game from the 90’s coming to a crawl over 90.000 sprites with a smoke trail😂

Surprised he didn't find a way to remove the "smoke" sprites, so they didn't have to render. This is freaken beautiful though (and lucky he never had a power outage)

I really digged this video; thanks for explaining a bit of the history and culture around speedrunning for those of us who aren't a part of that community, and some of the insane nuance that goes into crafting and executing these speedruns

You could say... the dedication to this Speedrun TAS was NUTS!

The author of this level, BPRD, is a pretty influential mapper in the Doom community. Otherwise I don’t think Zero Master would bother.

Amazing video, it was really cool to watch!, hope you make more in this style.

You have such a nice voice that's somehow both engaging to listen to when awake and yet also relaxing to help sleep to.

I remember the day ZeroMaster dropped this run onto RU-vid it popped up into my feed in the middle of the night. Just watching a guy run laps around an arena for literal days at 3 am is a highlight of my insomnia career.

10:00 Okay, that Todd Rogers joke got a big laugh from me 🤣🤣

You are the first person I've heard call shotgunners former sergeants in about 20 years. Good job man

I remember watching this speedrun when it was uploaded. I mean, I've beat Nuts before, but only with Russian Overkill. Seeing this - even a tool-assisted run - is just madness.

"No one really cared for Equinox, only a few seemed to like it a lot. I know I did. It's a shame, and also damn ironic, that the wad that was just meant to be a trial upload for my main wad became much more popular than the main wad itself. How crazy is that?" - B.P.R.D. on his geocities page

This really was worth it as a fan of this stuff. ZeroMaster is a hero, and created value for a lot of people. ZeroMaster, I salute thee!

Little known fact; Toggers really did achieve 100% kills on this run, it was verified by a referee at twin galaxies

A wonderfully informative video as always. I do have two small corrections though. 1. Due to the way the RNG table works in Doom, the actual max damage a single BFG shot can do, assuming all tracers hit the same target, is roughly 3,500. 2. The odds of a revenant firing a guided missile is more kind of more complicated than just 25%. Every revenant has an 50/50 chance of which missile it "prefers" to fire, guided or unguided. And whichever it prefers has a 75% chance to be fired. So a large group of revenants will fire guided missiles roughly 50% of the time. All of this I learned from watching videos by Decino. If you like learning about the inner workings of Doom, I highly suggest giving his channel a look.

RIP Espi, he was a phenomenally gifted level designer.

Nothing will ever beat the speedrun of Portal without using portals.

For some reason I didn't get this in my subscription feed?.. Keep up the awesome content, you absolute legend!

You can't get that theoretical damage on a BFG shot, because there's nowhere on the RNG table where the highest number shows up 40 times in a row. Also, revenant missiles have a 50/50 of being homing, it depends on whether the tic on which they're fired is even or odd.

Minor nitpicks: *in the Doom engine enemies only have infinite height when colliding with the player. They have a very finite height for colliding with the ceiling. This is not relevant to the video. *Arch-vile splash damage CANNOT damage Spider Masterminds. Only the 20 direct damage can do so. *Revenant homing missiles are not a 25% chance. It's supposed to be a 50% chance; due to a coding error, it's more complicated than that. The short version, a single Revenant has either a 25% chance or a 75% chance of firing a homing missile. Averaged out over the crowd, a given homing missile from any arbitrary Revenant has a 50% chance of being homing

Didn't you know? Todd got 100% kills, 100% secrets, record speed, took no damage, and all with fist only, no berzerker pack, on his first play for the entire game of every version of Doom, all on DVD back in 1987.

This dude is an absolute grinder , mad respect from one human to another 🤘🏽❤️

Not that you would be able to take advantage of it repeatedly due to infighting, but couldn't you use the archvile's attack to send you back up to the original room, thus reducing the number of rockets you would need to get in one go?

Slight correction: Revenant missiles have either a 25% _or_ 75% chance to be homing depending on when you start the level due to RNG shenanigans.

This is not only hilarious, but a work of pure art. Wackiness at its finest

When serial killers go to sleep, the check under the bed for Zero Master first.

It is cool that we're able to watch the run at 60 fps due to the nature of demos and the ability to render them.

"I frankly do not understand how some of these glitches are found." As a Software Developer who has a knack for finding bugs and glitches, it really comes down to the ideas to try and break something. For example, I will test my program, but do things out of the ordinary and just try random things, and sure enough little bugs and glitches can be found. If you know that A is the correct Path to take, then trying and testing out B can yield positive results. It also comes down to random luck at times, similar to the Zelda Glitch. Someone probably found out that by doing the pause screen in that way, you are able to glitch out part of the game, and by doing that little glitch at the certain point at the door, it clipped Link through the map to the level below. A lot of it comes from just putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Then there are the glitches, such as the one in Super Mario World level 1, to get the credits, which require actually software that shows memory locations and how the game interacts with memory. These software applications can help out with glitches and bugs by showing weird memory changes that can be exploited by speed runners. If you know you need Memory Location Z needs a specific input, you can somehow glitch that input into the game and allow things to be bypassed, such as doors and secrets. This is how the credit skip is achieved. By creating an absolutely crazy setup that no one would think to do, the credit warp was achieved. This was most likely done very slowly, testing out each action in the level and seeing their input, to where eventually the credits were achieved. I really am curious at what point, someone found out that it was possible to credit warp, or if they just tried World 1. I'm assuming World 1 has something special in it that allows for this to be done, or the fact it has all those enemies right away might have something to do with it, since the setup is extremely specific with specific enemies.

My best friend, that was born on the same day as me, died about two months ago. He would have absolutely loved this one. Here's to you bud.

Modder: "I've made a map so hilariously stupid, it's probably impossible to create a bigger waste of time in this game" Speedrunner: "Hold my beer"

The dedication to this "speedrun" is maddening

Your skill to consistently find interesting topics to talk about combined with your stellar commentary amazes me with every video you upload. Keep it up, please!

I first saw this map in a video that presented it as a "map that's intended to be cleared with monster infighting." So it looked very logical for that goal to put in tons of monsters -- to make it impossible (for a regular human) to complete it without that. So it's hardly a stupid map since infighting is a unique and criminally underused mechanic.

This map is also known as “Yo dawg, I heard you like Cyberdemons”

I love how he said it’s “probably” a waste of time. As if it’s even the REMOTEST possibility this wasn’t a waste of time.

WHAT A LEGEND.. Thank you Karl again, for explaining these incredible feats I would otherwise not be able to appreciate or understand without your speed run knowledge and expertise. Great video. Love u

A true completionist sir. Well done Zero Master

Gotta mention the genius coding of this engine, computers couldn't run giant maps full of enemies but yet the game engine wouldn't crash.

As a hacker, I can tell you that a lot of these glitches are found through a mix of intuition and experience. For example, a lot of glitches have the same underlying idea of putting the game into an "unintended state", such as doing two things at once, moving at high speeds or using "push" mechanics against solid objects like walls.

I guess this is the equivalent of 'rule 34' for gamers: if it is computationally possible someone will do it.

Rod Togers completed the level blindfolded and using an Atari 5200 controller, playing on a Sony Walkman TV.

The fact the most replayed part is when you finished the sponsor 💀