Since Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out was released on the NES in 1987, millions of players have undertaken millions of digital matches against one of the hardest video game bosses ever: Tyson himself (or, later, the reskinned “Mr. Dream”).
Only a small percentage of those players could survive Tyson’s flurry of instant-knockdown uppercuts and emerge victorious with the undisputed World Video Boxing Association championship. Even fewer had fast enough fingers to take out Tyson in the first round.
In all this time, no one has been able to register a TKO on Tyson in less than two minutes on the ever-present in-game clock (which runs roughly three times as quickly as a real-time clock). At least that was true until last weekend, when popular speedrunner and speedrun historian Summoning Salt pulled off a 1:59.97 knockout after what he says were “75,000 attempts over nearly five years.”
Breaking the storied two-minute barrier on Tyson is a matter of both incredible skill and incredibly unlikely luck. As Summoning Salt himself started documenting in a 2017 video, getting the quickest possible Tyson TKO requires throwing 21 “frame perfect” punches throughout the fight, each within a one-sixtieth-of-a-second window. Punch too early and those punches do slightly less damage, making the fight take just a bit longer. Too late and Tyson will throw up a block, negating the punch entirely.
A top-notch Tyson speedrun also requires well-timed dodging and ducking of Tyson’s own punches so that Little Mac (the player character) can get back into counterpunching position as quickly as possible. Summoning Salt says he was just seven frames off of perfection in this regard, which cost about 0.35 in-game seconds over the course of the fight.
Even with that nearly unmatched execution, though, Summoning Salt’s record-breaking run would have fallen well short if not for unreasonable amounts of luck from the game itself. As Bismuth explains in a 2024 video, Tyson can pause for anywhere between a fraction of a second and up to eight seconds between punches.
Getting the longest of those delays can hamper any chance of beating Tyson in the first round. But for his sub-two-minute TKO, Summoning Salt needed almost all of those pauses to luckily come down at the minimum of eight frames (~0.4 seconds on the in-game clock).
Summoning Salt says Tyson here gave him a “perfect pattern” during his first phase of endless uppercuts, something that happens only 1 in 1,600 bouts. And later in the fight, the game’s random-number generator cooperated by adding only an extra 16 frames of delay (~0.8 in-game seconds) compared to a “perfect” run. Combined, Summoning Salt estimates that Tyson will only punch this quickly once every 7,000 to 10,000 attempts.
“It’s over,” Summoning Salt said live on Twitch when the record-setting match was finished, in a surprisingly even tone that came over what sounds very much like a dropped controller. “I thought I’d be a lot more excited about this. Holy shit, dude! It’s fucking over … Dude, am I dreaming right now? … I’m sorry I’m so quiet. I’m kind of in shock right now that that just happened.”
With his near-perfect combination of both skill and luck, Summoning Salt’s new record surpasses his own previous world record of precisely 2:00.00 on the in-game clock. That mark, set just eight months ago, was just three frames off of displaying 1:59 on the in-game timer for the first time.
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