How Speedrunners beat The Dagger of Amon Ra in 9 minutes

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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They say the first 24 hours are crucial in any murder mystery. But for speedrunners, any investigation that can't be completed in MINUTES is a failure. If you skip all the usual pesky detective work and incorrectly identify the killer in the process, well, c'est la vie.

After treating us to a lengthy, in-depth retrospective of The Dagger of Amon Ra, OneShortEye shifts back into hyper-speed in his latest documentary video, detailing just how quickly one can get through Sierra On-Line's 1992 Laura Bow classic by manipulating its many "tricks, exploits and glitches."

For mere mortals, normally the game would take hours to complete, even if you knew exactly what to do. For speedrunners, the "best ending" still clocks in at over fifteen minutes (for now), but here OneShortEye details swimfan's "any ending" playthrough that nudges that number down just under nine. On the floppy disk version of the game with a DOSBox emulator, that is, which affords a few additional workarounds that the later CD version does not.

In this video you'll discover how to skip talking to suspects, avoid looking both ways before crossing the street (a typically fatal faux pas), fool the game into mechanically losing track of where you are, even bypass the discovery of most murders inside the Leyendecker Museum and jump straight to the next act entirely. Some tricks are new, like using the keyboard to maneuver yourself into impossible positions, while others will be familiar, like the infamous "turning isn't walking" exploit found in other Sierra speedruns. And Schrödinger's cat has nothing on Ernie the janitor, who can be both dead and alive simultaneously, or Barney the snake, who can be two places at once.

Sure, unless you're extraordinarily lucky in randomly answering the final quiz questions, you're practically guaranteed to bungle Laura's investigation, but you sure will be fast! Once again, OneShortEye shows us a whole new side of a game we thought we already knew, so have a watch and enjoy The Dagger of Amon Ra as you've never seen it before. (At about half an hour long, the video should take about three times as long to finish as it took swimfan to play the game.)

OneShortEye is part of the Adventure Game Hotspot Network, a collective of talented, dedicated content producers who work entirely independently but have joined forces to promote each other’s efforts. All opinions expressed belong solely to the original creators.