Quake II any% in 19:09.6 [WORLD RECORD!]

What a ride. After about 7 years of running this category on and off, the record has finally landed in my lap. I first played q2 when I was 6 or 7. My dad had played it since the 90s, and we did co-op playthroughs a couple times. I always enjoyed the art style, the ambience, and the different items/weapons to find and use. I went on to play many different FPS titles, but always found comfort in the quake games (all of the id software games, really). I discovered speedrunning in middle school and promptly decided to pick up q2. After I learned the route, I completed a run in about 56 minutes. Only a few weeks later I submitted my first time of 32:06. The next 6 years or so I would do runs on and off, eventually lowering my time to the 21 minute area. For a couple years in the middle, I was focused on other games and rarely ran q2. I think my time only improved by two seconds during this. This past year (2022-2023) I started running more and improved rapidly, mostly thanks to implementing new strats found/used by other runners. The past couple months I’ve been grinding quite heavily, something like 4,000-5,000 attempts. As you can see in my splits, it took 32 sub-20 runs to get here. I want to thank everyone in the q2 community, all my friends who’ve been around the whole way, and everyone who’s watched my videos/streams. This is not the end, however. I’m gonna take a fiver, then work on sub 19. The only thing I have to say about this run: f***in’ outer courts. 00:00 intro thanks 00:33 UNIT 1: is good but not perfect 02:02 UNIT 2: goes quite smoothly 02:41 this was a weird grenade jump, bad setup 03:44 UNIT 3: is overall quite good, plus gold jail2 04:13 the gold jail2 07:25 UNIT 4: goes surprisingly very well 08:43 SHUT UP JOHN 09:52 UNIT 5: five seconds for free due to bad processing in PB 11:13 UNIT 6: reactor goes well and I’m now starting to defecate bricks 12:13 UNIT 7: good hornet kill and swag button 12:45 UNIT 8: clean. no issues with inner hangar or launch command yay 16:55 UNIT 9: despite an absolutely abhorrent outer courts, still good 17:07 run nearly dies: the worst outer courts of my life 18:12 guard gets lodged in elevator, saving me 2s coming back 18:25 im nearly shaking at this point, almost nade myself lol 19:42 UNIT 10: first try BFG jump, optimal movement. clean finish 20:37 GG Quake II or Quake 2 was released on December 9, 1997. It was developed by id Software and distributed by Activision. Quake II isn’t a direct sequel to Quake, it merely uses its name due to id feeling the game’s fast-paced, tactile feel felt closer to a Quake game than a new franchise. It also has two official expansion packs: The Reckoning and Ground Zero. These two expansion packs contain new levels, weapons, and enemies. Quake II takes place in a futuristic sci-fi environment. During the single player campaign, you take the role of a Marine called Bitterman, taking part in “Operation Alien Overlord“, attempting to save Earth from the Strogg invasion by counter-attacking their planet, Stroggos. During the first attack on Stroggos, the Big Gun strikes down most of the Marine pods with a powerful EMP blast. This causes most of the pods to crash land (many miles from their target landing zones). Most of the Marines are captured or killed, but Bitterman is one of the lucky few to survive. He finds himself many miles from the Big Gun in a Strogg base on the outskirts of the city. Operation Alien Overlord has 4 key objectives that Bitterman must complete over the course of the game. I) Establish a communication uplink II) Destroy the planetary defense system III) Disable the interplanetary gateway IV) Assassinate the Makron commander