The Simpsons Hit & Run has quietly been the arena for an incredible 10-year speedrunning gauntlet, dominated by one runner who broke 45 records in a row

gamesradar.com:

For more than ten years, The Simpsons Hit & Run has been the home of a speedrunning arms race of blistering intensity, and I'm shocked that this is pretty much the first I've heard of it.

Last week, speedrunning YouTuber Summoning Salt released their history of the game's speedrunning scene, starting by revealing that for the first ten years of its life, Hit & Run was something of a no-go for runners. The grind for coins required to complete the game, coupled with a combination of both unforgiving late-game levels and the ability to simply skip past anything that gave you too much trouble, meant that runners largely ignored Hit & Run until the early 2010s.

Eventually, however, a run requiring players to legitimately beat all 49 levels emerged, with a few leading contenders. The first of those to break the two-hour mark was a runner named Pessimistic Mango, using relatively simple skips - such as trapping vehicles in place during destruction levels - to establish the game's first real breakthrough in 2014.

For a while, the world record time would be traded back and forth between Pessimistic Mango and another player Pet Pet Iguana, as the community discovered new skips. Those included the ability to drop aggro from the police by ducking into the Simpson home, but were also focused around sheer optimization. In early 2015, however, a new contender named LiquidWifi entered the scene, setting a new record thanks to an improved coin route - by sacrificing as much as a minute in the early game to gather more coins there, he could save far more time in the late game and eventually set a record despite nearly losing his run to police intervention.

Over the next few months, this trio of runners would repeatedly hand the world record time off between them, relying on further optimization, the removal of load times, and a rapid acceleration technique known as 'E-brake boosting' to help with certain missions and bring the time plummeting down to just 98 minutes. No one else came