SpongeBob SquarePants Speedrunners Use Dirty Discs For Faster Runs

The speedrunning community has found a new way of improving its clear times in SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom that involves literally damaging their discs. Even for longtime fans of the speedrunning scene, altering the equipment or media itself is fairly unorthodox; generally, speedrunning tactics are confined to actions that can be performed in-game. They’ve also historically included employing different methods of holding the controller, manually inputting new code during the game, swapping save data, and resetting consoles at precise times. However, the actual game being played is usually left untouched.

Of course, these generalizations only apply to certain subsets of the speedrunning community. Other types of speedruns, such as Tool Assisted Speedruns (TAS’s), rely heavily on manipulating the game in any way possible in order to achieve the best possible times that a human being could most likely never pull off. For example, while a “standard” speedrun of Minecraft would require several “ender pearls” to randomly drop before players can fight the Ender Dragon, a TAS would allow players to ensure that these items drop every time certain enemies are defeated. For this reason, speedruns and their respective completion times are always labeled according to the methods allowed in achieving them.

According to Kotaku, the latest development in Battle for Bikini Bottom speedrunning is that players have learned that they can smudge or scratch their discs in order to make a technique known as “lag clipping” easier. In short, lag clipping is when a game is paused and un-paused multiple times in rapid succession, which can result in the player character “clipping” through objects while the game catches up. Cleaner discs are read faster–particularly by newer technology–so intentionally damaging discs can make the disc-reading process take just longer enough for players to clip through certain terrain and skip over 30 seconds of the game. While this may not seem like much, half a minute is tremendous in terms of speedrunning in an 18-year-old game, and speedrunners are known for taking their craft quite seriously as it is.

To weigh in further, speedrunner SHiFT discussed the process in more depth on his Twitch channel, although he personally does not approve of it. According to SHiFT, the art of speedrunning is to preserve games, and it would be unethical to achieve better times this way. Furthermore, he specifies that gamers would need “something as fine as a scratch on the disc to make these things work,” which could obviously end badly if the game was irreparably damaged in the process. While there is probably a sector of speedrunners who might take advantage of this strategy, it seems as though that might be one of the smaller niches.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the speedrunning scene is how often new strategies are concocted and old records are broken. Even a game like Super Mario 64, which turns 25 years old this year, saw a new world record for the 120-star speedrun just one month ago. Other classic games such as Crash Bandicoot 2 and the original 1989 Prince of Persia had top-10 world records broken just today. Although none of those three require the actual game to be damaged, it may only be a matter of time until there’s a category for that.

Source: Kotaku, SHiFT

About The Author

Johann Hamilton
(106 Articles Published)

Johann Hamilton is a Screen Rant freelance contributor based in New York City. When he isn’t combing the internet for the latest developments in nerd culture, he can usually be found scouring the PlayStation Store for the best deals or enjoying some old school Super Nintendo. He is also a proud NYU graduate, completing his Master’s degree in Professional Writing at New York University. Johann’s favorite gaming genres are RPGs, hack n’ slashes, and (overly challenging) platformers.

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