Speedrunning Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage with AlexDest

In the wake of Spyro coming back to modern consoles in a big way, we thought it was a great time to talk to some Spyro speedrunners to see how the classic trilogy translates to playing quickly. Arguably one of the best games in the trilogy, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage! as an Any% run (as indicated over on SpeedRun.com) is incredibly quick, coming in well under ten minutes by utilizing out of bounds skips to get to each boss. While the runner we’ll be interviewing is fairly high on that leaderboard, we’ll be focusing on his 100% run because it’s more robust.

We caught up to AlexDest, who is an expert on Ripto's Rage to say the least. In his speedrunning resume, Dest has admirable records on the SpeedRun leaderboards for the game, including the current first place for a 100% run. We first went into what brought him into speedrunning the game.

“I tried getting into speedrunning Spyro around 2011, but gave up on that dream quickly, because I didn't have a good computer for screen recording anything at the time. There were more let's players of Spyro trying to speedrun it at that time than there were actual speedrunners, so there wasn't the community for it like there is today.”

This eventually led Dest to Twitch. “Around 2012, I got into watching speedruns on Twitch, namely siglemic when he was running Super Mario 64. I think he was the only speedrunner I was really interested in watching at the time.”

Like many runners, watching runners online led to watching Games Done Quick. “Way later on, I found Games Done Quick over on YouTube around late-ish 2013, which led to finding a Spyro 2 100% speedrun done at Summer Games Done Quick 2013, ran by spudlyman. I was actually blown away at all the tricks he did and wanted to get into speedrunning Spyro again immediately.”

From there Dest pick up Ripto’s Rage and hit the ground, well, running.

“I got a good computer finally, setup an emulator, and starting learning and practicing Spyro 2 100% straight from that GDQ run.”

For some runners, having a game that is extremely short is appealing. We asked Dest why he chose to do 100% rather than Any% when he got started.

“I don't think I knew of the Any% run for Spyro 2 until much later, I was mainly interested in learning 100% at the time. However, for all categories in Spyro 2, they all have some tricks that were pretty difficult for me to learn at the time and were necessary for each category. So I officially started out on learning Spyro 3 100 Egg, a former Any% category, which was another run I found through GDQ. It was a usual go-to for beginners trying to get into Spyro runs.”

We then asked Dest what his main lesson was for going after the Ripto’s Rage 100% run. “Always start small,” he said, “Or maybe learn how difficult something will be before going for it.”

When learning either types of speedrun for Spyro 2, there is one skip that is essential to learn known as the Gulp Skip. This can also be one of the trickier things to learn.

Dest explained why it can be a challenging exploit, “It involves a lot of delicate inputs to clip inside a breakable wall, and then having to do more inputs to get Spyro out-of-bounds to skip into Gulp. There is a good tutorial for this by drashed for anyone learning this.”

“For me, they're all straightforward, Gulp skip can be consistent after dedicating a lot of time into learning it, plus it's done early in both Any% and 100% so it's not as frustrating to fail the skip. The ending tricks of Any% and 14 Talisman are more worrisome to me to fail. There's a fodder proxy in winter tundra to get over the mountains to skip into Dragon Shores, a skip into the Dragon Shores Theater to watch the 'Ripto defeated' cutscene that grants you all abilities, and the final swim-in-air trick to skip into Ripto. Failing any of these would end a run, or at least stop you from achieving an exceptional time.”

Usually runners will either really love the game they are running or they’re really into the competitive nature of getting faster times. For Dest it’s a bit of both with a bit more competition oriented fuel. “To me they're not mutually exclusive, but I do weigh competition slightly more over the fun of the game.”

“Spyro 2 100% is funny in this case, because I have held the record since September 2014 with a 1:51:16 at the time, and have continually pushed it down ever since. I have wished there was competition with me in the category, but i've had it down to a science for a while and still do compared to a majority of the community.”

That said, there might be some new developments in the run that could shake things up. “It has grown more in activity this year now thanks to a relatively new member of the community, drashed, finding faster routes and tricks in the game as a whole.”

Some speedrunners discover that they can overcome challenges outside of gaming after becoming a runner. Dest explained to us the benefits he gets out of being a speedrunner, “Speedrunning has helped me socially, because I used to be a hermit before getting into the hobby. I have attended AGDQ '16, '17, and '18 to go and see a lot of the people in the Spyro/Crash communities that I've grown to love, and even met my current girlfriend through these events.”

“I've become slightly more and more open about myself as time goes by because of speedrunning and the entire community in general.”

Speaking of Games Done Quick, Dest will be attending SGDQ and running Sypro 2: Ripto’s Rage! 14 Talismans. We asked if he was excited for the upcoming event.

“A little excited, it is the first time I'll be performing at the event, but it's not the category I wanted (100%), which I have submitted to all three of those AGDQs that I attended and have been rejected all three times. It is something though, so just gotta suck it up. At least we have two different Spyro games being shown this time.”

The other run he mentioned is by ChrisLBC who will be doing Any% for the first in the trilogy, Spyro the Dragon. Spyro has a bit of a following across the years, carried on by people like Chris, such as in the run he did of the original game at Awesome Games Done Quick in 2016.

The cool afterproduct of doing speedruns for such a large audience is that the games get another chance to become relevant, which is great for overall video game history. Speedrunners often pull out tons of details about the games, meaning they are often the best people to talk to about them. We asked Dest what he thought about speedrunners inherently being a part of video game history.

“I've not really thought about this, but I know it's certainly a great thing to preserve all these video games that have had a good impact on a lot of people. Modders, fan game developers, and even speedrunners really show how much they enjoy a certain video game and can build quite a community around it and if strong enough it can catch the eyes of people in the video game industry to bring back and remake the games that we love.”

Lastly, we asked Dest what sort of goals are in mind for the future. “Keep pushing myself, especially in speedrunning, go back to college for an Associates Degree in Software Development, mostly life stuff really.” 

You can catch Dest on his Twitch channel and be sure to keep an eye out for his run at SGDQ as we look forward to the release of the remastered trilogy later on this year. Hopefully it means we'll see a rekindled love and competition, and a whole new back of interesting speedrunning tricks come of the classic games as well.