Summer Games Done Quick Control Run Interview With DemonicRobots
With SGDQ underway, I began looking at the schedule and there were a few games and runs that jumped out at me almost immediately. With Control being one of my favorite games from 2019, I am really excited for the Control run coming up on July 1st at 3:59 am EST/3 am CST/1 am PST. So I wanted to reach out to Demonic and they were more than happy to talk about the run!
Justin: How long have you been in the speedrunning community?
Demonic: I have been speedrunning on and off for about six or seven years, and I’ve been part of the Control speedrunning community for two.
Justin: What was it that made you want to start speedrunning?
Demonic: I met someone who enthusiastically talked about Pokémon Yellow and I started looking into games. I loved seeing glitches and out-of-bounds and making those useful which was really cool because most of the OOBs I knew about didn’t have any practical use.
Justin: Was Control your first game to speedrun?
Demonic: Control wasn’t, I think it was probably my tenth game.
Justin: How technical is the run of Control?
Demonic: Control is very technical. There are some techniques that require essentially hitting four frame-perfect inputs in a row and also controlling a very volatile movement tech that is almost impossible to control without knowing how beforehand. As the run goes on and you gain more abilities your moveset and the glitches become much more complicated. It is one of those games that you can expect to practice one trick for a few hours to get used to it.
Justin: Is there one part/trick/glitch that we should keep an eye out for that’s really hard?
Demonic: The trick to look out for is Shieldy McSoary, where we can essentially trick the game to let us noclip through walls and go almost anywhere at the map. The problem is it is extremely difficult to control with your input keys, jumps, and even the camera’s position all affecting what angle you end up traveling by.
Justin: Is Control an easy game speedrunning-wise to get into?
Demonic: I would say it is easy because Control has a great variety of categories. While Any% or All Bosses can be daunting to start there are smaller categories like Inbounds which basically has no glitches, so you can really get down the movement and combat of the game which is just as important as all the tricks. So you get a lot of options to choose from.
Justin: Spoilers for a big moment in Control. But the moment where the music kicks in as we are going deeper into the facility. Are we still going to be seeing that?
Demonic: Unfortunately not, but the way that we skip it is almost as cool to make up for it. Another reason to run Inbounds (The glitchless category) is you do get to go through that segment!
Justin: So what is the category your running for Control?
Demonic: The category is All Bosses (Legacy, Standard) All Bosses we fight 10 bosses compared to Any% which we fight only one. Legacy means we play on the earliest patch of the game that has all the skips and no DLC content, 0.96. and Standard means there is no restriction on going out-of-bounds.
Justin: How was your experience applying to and getting accepted into SGDQ? Is this your first one?
Demonic: The experience is very streamlined. You fill out your game’s information and give a brief explanation of the game, and some of the highlights that make it interesting. If the game was in before it helps to explain what is different now from when it was last ran as well. Getting accepted was very fun because I got a lot of ‘Congratulations!’ messages before I even knew about it. And while this technically isn’t my first GDQ event, this is my first in-person and doing it on the stage which I’m really excited for!
I want to thank Demonic for taking the time to talk with me about their run the week of the event I can’t even imagine how stressful it is.
Be sure to check out Summer Games Done Quick on Twitch and check out Demonic on Twitter and their Twitch page!
for more horror features be sure to stay tuned into DreadXP and check out Dread Delusion over on Steam!
