Goals
- Manipulates luck
- Beats a really hard game really quickly
- Don't blink!
About the game
Porky's is a video game released for the Atari 2600 in 1983. Yup, that WAS also the year of the 1983 video game crash. Coincidence? The game is based on the 1981 film of the same name and published by 20th Century Fox. In the game, you play as Peewee Morris. The objective of the game is to get to a detonator to blow up Porky's bar.
The game makes no fucking sense at all. I found out about the game actually from one of my favorite shows, the Angry Video Game Nerd, starring James Rolfe. He reviewed the game in 2014. You can watch this review here:
So...what is going on? How do you play this?
You won't be able to see this in the run, but in order to start the game at all you have to press the Reset button on the console for 7 frames. Otherwise, it shows the same sequence that you see in the ending over and over. The game will NOT do ANYTHING else unless you press Reset.
In the first stage, you have to dodge cars and pigs and people and stuff. Sort of like in Frogger games. You do that until you reach the building (which is presumably the bar). The route shown in the video is the best one I could come up with. Even at the start, you can just stay to the side while waiting for the pedestrians to walk by, and the pigs won't even touch you.
This is the part that makes the least amount of logical sense in the whole game. So, you have to follow a specific pattern to get up to the end. You can't just go up there. And you have to jump over poles to get over them or else you'll just slide down, usually resulting in you hitting the guy at the bottom who takes you down to the sinkhole. The pattern is chosen by a time-based random number generator (RNG).
Each pattern chosen, by the way, is down one pole, and then up that same pole four more times. So, naturally, it's fastest to have the leftmost pole be the one that you do, since you start at the left. If you go down any other pole and go back up, it won't let you finish the level. The game tells you whether or not to go down or up.
Not seen in this run obviously, but whenever you make any mistake at all you have to go through a whole ordeal of building a ladder next to some kind of water. Then, you have to throw items down a hole under a lady taking a shower, while a ghost chases after you. It's all seen in the AVGN video; he explains it a lot better. I've never seen the film Porky's, but I'll tell you right now, I bet this game has close to nothing to do with the movie.
The game ends with Porky detonating the bomb, and the screen flashing. This happens continuously too, with the ground turning a different color each time, but the cool sound effects only happen once. But this continuously happens at the beginning of the game too, for some odd reason.
I end input on the last frame when pressing Up actually matters, on the last ladder, where if you leave it alone it still goes to ending. That's 00:08.31!
You know...most Atari games don't make a whole lot of sense. So, eh.
It's definitely worth mentioning that THIS GAME IS EXTREMELY HARD!!!!!! It's known for that too. Beating it in only 8 seconds is phenomenal; it took the current WR non-TAS speedrunner (as of 12/22/17)
FOURTEEN WHOLE MINUTES to complete. If you wanna see what I mean, try it yourself. Just start playing, and count how many times you fail.
RNG
The RNG is very simple, and it's completely time-based. There are only 128 (1-byte, unsigned, Little Endian, Main RAM) RAM addresses in the game. Out of these 128, there's the address 46, which defines which pattern the game chose for the climbing room. Of these, the game has a few patterns it can choose from. The value "0" defines the pattern I see most, which is the right-most pole. That's obviously slower, so we want to get the value "255", which defines the left-most pole.
Conclusion
What else is there to say? I'm excited! I hope you enjoy the run. It's only 8 seconds long, so don't blink any.
Special thanks to
