Contra Speed Record
Contra’s legendary difficulty and non-stop, no-quarter brutal action made heroes out of anyone who could defeat the game without resorting to the Konami code. For many of us, that was as far as we could imagine…but a select company of stalwart commandos decided to take the challenge even further.
Speed runs. The next frontier.
Now this is where I tip my hat to the true warriors. Sure, back in the day, simply beating Contra could get you the admiration of your entire neighborhood and no girls. Now you have to be able to beat it in under 15 minutes in order to receive the admiration of several anonymous game geeks on the Internet and no girls. How times have changed!
Here’s a true warrior who managed to complete the game in under 11 minutes (which, by the way, is about as long as most people could last — without getting anywhere near the end!):
Whew. That’s fast. That’s like being able to watch the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy in only six hours.
There are rumors of secret monasteries in the Himalayas which train young people with special powers to finish Contra in under ten minutes. My cousin was apparently one of these people, but nobody was around to see it (these were the days before everything electronic came with a built-in 10-Megapixel camera), and he also claimed for a while that he had a supermodel girlfriend who lived in another state.
If you think you’ve got the stuff, give a Contra record speed run a try. It’s not that we don’t trust your word, it’s just that something that magnificent deserves to be preserved so that our great-grandchildren can look back on this time and say: “wow, how did you guys ever manage to have sex?”