Portal Speedrunner Explains to Valve How He Breaks Their Game

Portal speedrunning has been around for a long, long time, so we had some of the developers from Valve Software watch one of the speedruns on our show Devs React to Speedruns. Not surprisingly, they ended the video with way more questions than answers about what exactly speedrunner CantEven was doing to make his playthroughs so quick. So, we had CantEven join the call to answer any and all questions the Valve team had about the secrets of speedrunning Portal.

Participating in the interview from Valve are: Erik Wolpaw (writer), Jeep Barnett (programmer), and Garret Rickey (programmer).

Check out more from speedrunner CantEven here:

#IGN #gaming

[KonkaBass]

"Speedrunner Explains" follow ups like this NEED to happen more. Love hearing the devs mind explode as they realize exactly whats going on.

[ItsGibsy]

"I'm gonna try to explain it as quickly as a I can" Man speedruns conversations too

[johncox]

The Devs are true Engineers. They are not defensive about what the speed runners are doing but are genuinely interested, if not fascinated, in the mechanics of how they are exploiting the game engine.

[iradnuriel]

what a modest person can't even is, when he say "yes the portal 2 wr is 57:57" and not mentioning in was also by him

[justanonymouse]

It’s funny, Valve is so mysterious at times but listening to their devs talk about stuff made them seem so approachable and chill.

[RaceTheAce]

As a developer myself, it is pretty fun to listen to these guys hear about how their software has been pushed to the absolute limit and found cracks that they didnt even know were possible. So cool

[freyjathehealer]

This is the cutest thing ever. They’re like all equally excited about this 14 year old game. They’re so excited to talk about it and it’s just a testament to how amazing the Portal games are where over a decade later people are still in love with this game.

[sylphorsylvie]

Them-we'll have to figure out who destroyed the speedrunning glitch on portal 2
Dev 1-it was dave
Dev 2-it was prolly dave
Goddammit dave, its always dave isnt it?

[chibi.k.o.]

This is how all "devs react to speed run" should be, conversation between devs and runner, not "wow, how he did it, what". This is much more interesting and educational, thus some viewers can try those tricks and glitches them self.

[EsteLmao]

this is like a student explaining to his teacher how he cheated

[RhumpleOriginal]

Portal dev: " is portal 2 broken? "
Speedrunner: " no. The game makes sure its not broken every tic "
Portal dev: " someone is getting fired! "

[chestertamayo]

If this guys do decide to watch the Portal 2 Inbounds speedrun, wonder what their reaction is going to be seeing the 57:57 speedrun is done by him as well.

[mario_actually]

Seriously. Please try to incorporate this approach into the upcoming episodes in this series. It’s so much more fascinating to hear the exchange, than to just hear the incredulous gasps.

[GamingGodsAmongUs]

IGN you best be putting out more videos like this one. It’s so amazing to hear the devs actually learning from the community of games we all share and love and seeing them truly invested in what they have to say so much respect all around absolutely loving it!

[davidthorne]

There are devs who get mad at players for breaking their game, and then there’s these guys, having a blast discovering how much players have managed to break it down to its simplest form.

[nikx]

The fix for the save glitch is the most programmer thing ever! If you can't solve the cause of the problem, just constantly check if the problem has occured and let the program fix it "manually". Those fixes are horribly resource inefficient, if you do them too often, but at one point you just can't fix the cause anymore.

[XnonXte]

fyi: can't even also held portal 2 wr, his 57:57 still standing strong. this man is cracked at both games, if you interested in portal 2 speedrunning you can check his tutorial on his youtube channel

[BarnyTrubble]

These devs have a great attitude toward speedrunning, some devs seem to take it as an insult to their game, not realizing that the speedrunners HAVE experienced the game as a whole, probably hundreds of times in aggregate, thousands of hours played, speedrunning is a compliment to a game.

[ZaphodJan]

Valve staff: Now they're teaching us how to play our games!

[skyboxmagee]

Hey IGN, this is some of the best content (in terms of Game theory and Design) that you have ever put out there. This whole series should be a model going forward. Thank you