Punch Them All Out!

I've spent all week watching the Awesome Games Done Quick speed run marathon charity event. I was planning on doing a post about all the awesome things I've seen after the event ended but I just watched the most amazing thing I've ever seen in a video game stream...

I just watched someone beat Mike Tyson's Punch Out on the NES followed by someone else beat Super Punch Out on the SNES. That doesn't seem so strange considering I've only watched one game run all event that didn't end in a beaten game. They didn't even use any glitches or cheats or anything that have made some of the other games so interesting to watch. What did they do to be so amazing?

THEY WERE BLINDFOLDED!

Many of the fights in both games are very scripted and performing an exact sequence of actions will guaranteed win the fight. But for someone to be able to perform one of the those sequences using no visual cues at all, just auditory ones, is crazy. And then some of the fights aren't nearly as scripted and require adaptation to the enemy... So they need to listen to the sound of the enemy punches to know how to react.

Both guys called out the exact time of some of the fights. Presumably the exactly scripted ones but it goes to show how much time they spent practicing that they were able to know the exact time it would take to pull off a given sequence of punches.

The room was also as packed as I'd seen it for any of the games and the cheering when they managed to win a fight was by far the loudest I'd heard. For many games it isn't clear to a layman watching the game how hard a given move actually might be to pull off. But I feel like everyone was able to appreciate playing a timing game without your primary timing sense.

The NES guy had to take his blindfold off to beat Mike Tyson but just making it that far was incredible. The SNES guy had to continue on one of the final guys but managed to beat them all while blindfolded. It was awesome to watch and I'll try to dig up a VOD of it to put in my post next week.