Prolific Bethesda game speedrunner pekkanen has been on a quiet hot streak: Over the past two months, he has set nine world records in two categories of Fallout 4 speedrunning, first beating the competition before repeatedly lowering his own records.
The categories are Any% and Any% (No Intro), so anything goes, glitch-wise, while the latter category explicitly does not count time for Fallout 4’s iconic, but slow-paced and largely on-rails pre-war playable intro. On March 4, he bested longtime runner tomatoanus’ 33:51 Any% with a 33:44. Pekkanen then took the No Intro crown from tomatoanus 15 days later on March 19.
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Since then, pekkanen has lowered his own Any% record five more times, and improved on the No Intro record twice. As a note, the Speedrun.com Fallout 4 leaderboards do not yet display pekkanen’s most recent improvements on the record, only the first month or so worth of optimization.
As you might expect from a Bethesda game, pekkanen’s speedruns are eminently watchable and entertaining—except, of course, for the beginning of the normal, not No Intro Any%. I can see why they made a separate category for it: You just gotta stand there and wait for the scripted parts of the intro to play out. Though it is funny and relatable to hear pekkanen impatiently mash the “use” button waiting for something to happen.
After all that, though? Baby, we’re off to the races: Sprinting across the Commonwealth, cooking mutant meat for uncertain ends, engaging in some kind of arcane save-load routine at crafting benches to unlock teleportation and turbo speed, all the stars are here.
As a frequent viewer but relative dilettante when it comes to speedruns, I live for some kind of bizarre sequence of inputs resulting in a burst of godly power or world-altering consequence—that Super Mario 64 trick where you backwards jump into the stairs a few times before getting launched into the stratosphere is the platonic ideal of the form, to me. Pekkanen’s Fallout 4 hot streak does not disappoint on this front.
Years ago, at the end of 2021, I reported on him beating his own Skyrim glitchless world record twice in the same week. Since that time, he’s been active in a variety of categories for Bethesda’s 2011 classic. Going by YouTube uploads, Fallout 4 is a more recent addition to his repertoire, but boy has he taken to it.
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