The Cuphead speedrunners setting retro records
Meet the players keeping the spirit of the high score alive in the ultimate throwback game.
Piotr Delgado Kusielczuk is not your average gamer. Nor for that matter is he your average streamer. As “The Mexican Runner”, Piotr makes a living speedrunning retro games, broadcasting his feats to his 88,000 fans on Twitch and 31,000 YouTube followers. It’s his fulltime job.
As a speedrunner, he competes to finish classic video games in faster and faster times, using his reflexes, cunning and plenty of in-game glitches to push his pixel protagonists over the finishing line in world record times. He spent three years trying to complete every 1980s console game he could find — and managed it — but of late he’s been streaming a game only released late last year on Windows PC and Xbox One: Studio MDHR’s run’n’gun platformer Cuphead.
At first glance, it’s a curious choice for a player who holds record runs in decades old games like Battletoads and The Lion King. Why a new game from an indie developer duo of two Canadian brothers? What’s the connection?
“I was gifted the game from one of my fans and a lot of people in my stream told me that I should definitely play the game, that I will love it because it’s like Contra,” Piotr explains. “Not knowing anything else about the game, they convinced me and I decided to give it a go.”
As it turns out, Cuphead’s link to classic games of yesteryear run much deeper than its vintage animation style. Between its 2D layout, torrents of bullets hurtling around the screen at all times and its imposing difficulty level, Cuphead is inspired by bullet hell and shoot ’em up (‘shmup’) games of old as much as it is the first cartoons of the 1930s.
Now Piotr is all in on the game. His streams focus on Cuphead; he has his own Cuphead mascot sporting a sombrero and can be found most days blasting through the game’s gauntlet of colorful bosses, from two pugilistic frogs in Clip Joint Calamity to an entire ghost train in Railroad Wrath, all the while chatting to his fans and fellow speedrunners on stream about new tricks, strategies and just life in general.
He needs to be; he’s already had his world record in Cuphead’s regular difficulty mode beaten by three other speedrunners in the space of three months. A game which could take most players weeks or months to finish can, with a savant-like series of precisely timed button inputs, be finished in just 24 minutes and 24 seconds. At least, if you’re Erik “Kirthar” Kristoffersson, a Swedish tech support who speedruns in his free time.
Kirthar set the record in May after being inspired by The Mexican Runner, who he says is still an “absolute beast” at Cuphead. “It’s just a really fun and challenging game. Seeing yourself steadily improve your time brings a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. You just want to keep going to see how good you can get,” he says. Soon after we speak, Kirthar’s record is broken again by Italian speedrunner SBDWolf, who gets a near optimal run on every boss save for pesky queen bee Rumor Honeybottoms, hitting the end credits in just 24 minutes and 11 seconds.
Beating Cuphead, even on ‘regular’ mode, is no short order. Playing as the adorable Cuphead (or buddy Mugman) you must blast through two dozen intimidating boss fights, most with multiple stages, armed with a literal peashooter and only three bars of health. You can’t even see how much damage you’ve inflicted on an enemy until either it dies, or you do. Mostly the latter.
Even the game’s co-creator, Jared Moldenhauer, co-founder of StudioMDHR, finds the game tricky: “I’d say Cuphead is challenging, as it’s something you continue to improve at, and the more you kind of are in the zone — you’re not thinking about the buttons or the placement or the something — the more you can start taking in the patterns,” he says. “And I feel like there’s an intuitive growth to playing it — so if it becomes more of a willing to learn the initial curve, and then the game doesn’t seem as much as a burden or a task as it had initially.”
Seeing a speedrunner blitz through the game is a spectacle equal to any Merry Melodies cartoon on a film projector. In the right hands, Cuphead darts through barrages of projectiles, finds openings to unload on bosses at point blank range you couldn’t get near, and even appears to clip through scenery and explosions like a beverage-based Neo from the Matrix. It’s an awesome sight, in the old school sense of the word.
Eat, sleep, speedrun, repeat
The challenge for Cuphead speedrunners comes in first mastering the patterns each boss moves in: punch here, swallow there, now turn into a giant slot machine and start firing out lethal gambling chips. Then comes the practice, playing over and over until you learn to parry every punch, dodge every bite and duck every bang. Once you understand the mechanics of the game, only then can you really exploit them.
“For some bosses you have a specific strategy or glitch that you need to know how to do, but most of the time you’re really just trying to constantly deal as much damage as possible to the boss without dying, and beat them as fast as you can,” says Kirthar.
This is where the sharpest, smartest speedrunners begin to pull ahead of the pack, as they uncover strategies (“strats”) and glitches that help shave time off a run. Players quickly noticed that making Cuphead switch weapons repeatedly let you fire both at once, which became an essential tactic.
The Cuphead creators knew that plenty of these glitches existed in the game, but with deadlines looming, the StudioMDHR team couldn’t completely sort them out. “The majority we knew about — there was just no time to fix them,” Moldenhauer explains.
“Even some things that wouldn’t have taken too much time to fix. Like, we knew the weapon swap glitch, because that’s what breaks Contra III and a lot of other games like that,” he says. “And it was one of those things that was in a list of ‘mandatory things that have to get done’, and then the ‘things we’d ideally like to fix’, and then the whole subset of ‘things that could be fixed’. There were definitely a few [we didn’t], but the majority we definitely knew were sitting there.”
Other crafty shortcuts took much longer to uncover; Finnish runner Jussi “Kalevan” Herraonly recently discovered that standing close to the frogs Ribby and Croaks fills up your special meter twice as quickly, shaving more seconds off a theoretical frame perfect run. Other glitches may lie undiscovered still.
Fans quickly coalesced around Cuphead when it launched last autumn. It isn’t hard to see why: the gorgeous hand drawn animations are eye catching, and the fastest runs, even at launch, were still very snackable compared to speedruns of tens of hours for some new games.
“The game was inspired by many different good retro games and the way people behind StudioMDHR put it together was just magical,” explains Piotr. “That makes the game a great candidate for people wanting to speedrun it.”
The community began to build in the weeks after release, with players meeting on Reddit and Discord to share their times and work their way up the leaderboard — just as they might once have done by putting their three initials in at the arcade. Half a year on, and the community is still going strong, with records falling over time. Kalevan’s recent record for all bosses, no glitches, in under 32 minutes looked unbeatable — until it was broken less than an hour later.
Despite the heated competition, a spirit of friendly cooperation underpins the Cuphead community. When top runner luigi100beat The Mexican Runner’s world record of 24:39.520 by only around 20ms, it was in good faith declared a tied record. Kirthar meanwhile set his own WR time while sharing workout tips with another speedrunner in the comments.
“This community has such a good spirit. The majority of people are supportive and friendly and there’s lots of runners willing to help anyone,” says Kalevan.
“Everybody is really helpful and friendly towards each other,” Kirthar agrees. “You always feel welcome, no matter if you’re a veteran speedrunner or just starting out.”
Speedrunning for sport
Cuphead doesn’t just invite your straightforward speedrunners however. Its series of escalating, frenetic boss battles that can be over in minutes, if you know where to aim, have attracted all sorts of completionists and self-flagellants.
Most top runners use a keyboard or gamepad to boss rush, but not PeekingBoo, an Australian streamer who insists on speedrunning games using a Dance Dance Revolution mat, making Cuphead a serious workout for the limbs rather than thumbs. Not only has PeekingBoo jammed his way through the game in under 44 minutes, he’s even done it without dying once.
“I wanted to get a time that’s less than double the current world record time,” he explains of his phenomenal feat. “Performing a speedrun with DDR pads is all about sacrifice; since I can’t switch weapons quickly, I have to rely on the charge shot which is nowhere near as powerful.”
Still, thousands of calories later PeekingBoo reached his goal. His efforts caught the attention of the wider gaming community, though he’s not quite sure he’s earned the respect of his fellow Cuphead vets just yet.
“Think of it sort of like the Wild West. I’d be the guy that enters the saloon only to be met with everyone stopping what they’re doing to throw a glance my way. ‘Yer not from ‘round these parts are ye’, the bartender would say as I introduce myself and explain what I’m doing here,” he jokes.
“My mind was blown,” Moldenhauer tells us, when we asked him if he’d seen PeekingBoo’s feats. “I thought it was going to be a lot longer, like an eight hour video of him trying to beat it with a Dance Dance Revolution mat. His skill set was probably like, close to equal to what I was doing on a controller, in a different way, in a planned out different way, but the time he completed it in is astonishing.”
Retro gaming future
Though the world record is edging closer to a theoretical maximum, those same veterans plan to stick around for the long haul. Piotr is still streaming Cuphead regularly and doesn’t see the community moving away from the game in the year to come.
“It’s hard to predict the future but I really see it the same way that it is now, the community consolidated after six months of the release of the game. I think it’s a great active community and it will only keep that way,” he says.
Cuphead is also set to feature at Summer Games Done Quick, the biannual speedrunning fundraising event that draws in millions of viewers and even more in dollars raised for charity — several of the top speedrunners including The Mexican Runner plan to be in attendance. The record could fall again in front of a crowd of cheering fans, another way the game captures the communal spirit of arcade classics.
For his part, Kirthar thinks his time can be bettered again, and soon.“It is possible to improve this time and get close to the 24 minute mark, or even below that. But to push the time that low you’re not only going to need a lot of skill, but also some luck as you can save or lose seconds depending on which attack patterns you get on some of the bosses.”
A sub 24 minute run is something Jared never anticipated, however. While he’s the fastest guy in the studio with a time of around 50 minutes, (“I had everything down in my head and I was like, not even thinking when playing it,” he tells us,) he didn’t think people would be finishing the game in less than half an hour.
“Not really. I hadn’t thought of the exact timeline. But I think when I estimated it, it would be around 30 minutes,” says Moldenhauer. “If someone can sub-30 it, I’d be pretty shocked — and I think it’s currently around 24 minutes, and I never, never, never would have assumed that,” he says. “And there’s still time. who knows if someone will come up with a sub-20 time — that will really blow my mind.”
The Moldenhauers might not be able to conceive how anyone could beat their creation so quickly, but the game’s best players are adamant that the world record will fall again.
As The Mexican Runner puts it: “There is only one guarantee in speedruns: the time can always be faster.”
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