I’m not sure if anyone besides the three people listed on the Vidmasters’ Page (Jim Mitchell, Dr John Sumner, and Jeffrey Lindquist) has ever completed the Marathon 1 Vidmaster’s Challenge, since the FAQ of the Vidmasters’ page indicates that they don’t post every film people send them. As a result, I have no idea how many people have actually completed the challenge, nor how noteworthy it is for someone to do so. This is something Hamish might be able to shed light on for us.
In any case, I figured people here might find it noteworthy that Tooncinator has now completed the Vidmaster’s Challenge for Marathon 1 using various versions of Aleph One 1.3: all 27 levels of the current Aleph One release of M1 on Total Carnage from pistol starts, with no Caps Lock involved. To my knowledge, no one had posted any footage of how the M1 Vidmaster’s Challenge might look running Aleph One, so I’ve posted all of them on YouTube (link below). This includes some brutally unforgiving levels, of which the hardest of the lot look to me like “Pfhoraphobia”, which has no recharger and no save point, and “Habe quiddam”, which gives you no ammo beyond the three clips you start with. (Dr Sumner concurs, remarking that he felt that “Pfhoraphobia” was the hardest level to complete, and that “Habe quiddam” wasn’t much easier.)
Also in the playlist below are aperturegrillz’ Total Carnage speedruns of M1 levels (he is still doing these and may attempt to complete one for every level). My personal favourite is a hilarious “Bob-B-Q” film that may be the first TC film to actually show the “success” message, even though aperture doesn’t kill a single Pfhor. (Bungie neglected to mark any mission flags except “rescue”, so all you have to do is get to the end. “Thanks, Leela. Hope you don’t mind that I didn’t fight any Pfhor!”) Amusingly, “Bob-B-Q” is also faster on TC than it is on Kindergarten, because the TC strategy depends on damage boosting from Pfhor fighter projectiles, which they fire much less often on Kindergarten, and which also do less damage (meaning the damage doesn’t boost you as far).
Dr Sumner has also encoded a few of his films and put them on YouTube for us: “Habe quiddam”, “Pfhoraphobia”, and not one but two “Ingue ferroque” films, one completed without recharging, and one showing the Bungie credit terminal. These are also found in the playlist below. “Habe quiddam” and “Pfhoraphobia”, in particular, are two of those heinously difficult levels like “Acme Station”, “Hang Brain”, and “Begging for Mercy Makes Me Angry!”, where I feel like just completing them on TC is noteworthy. I’ve yet to see a film of any of those levels on TC that wasn’t an impressive feat of skill.
A few other, non-M1-related feats of which I’m not sure whether Hamish is aware (they’re at least not currently on the Vidmasters’ Page): Dr Sumner completing every level of M2 and all but two levels of Infinity with fists only, and all but two levels each of both M2 and Infinity without recharging; and aperturegrillz completing “Acme Station” twice, the second with the fastest known time to date. I have dedicated playlists for Dr Sumner’s fists-only and no-recharging films, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/marathonvidmaster/playlists. aperture’s Infinity films are currently mixed in with my Infinity playlist, though I may make a dedicated playlist for his films as well, particularly once I get all his TC speedruns encoded. I don’t know if Hamish is still updating the Vidmasters’ Page, but all of these might be of interest. Links to Dr Sumner’s actual film files can be found in the playlists, although a couple of them, strangely, appear to have been recorded with a different map file. Simply changing the film header will cause them to play correctly (the respective levels must not have been modified); I should upload corrected versions at some point, although they won’t have the correct timestamps.
Toon’s M1 film files can be found at https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/669769856974979093/752618550849437736/M1_vid_toon.zip, if anyone wants to replay them on their own copies of Aleph One. You will probably need Aleph One 1.3.1 to play them all back correctly, however – “Habe quiddam” (and probably others) will desync on 1.3RC1 and 1.3.0, and releases before 1.3RC1 will not even have the correct film profile to play back the films starting with “Pfhoraphobia”.
Has anyone else completed the challenge? If you’ve got films, post them!
