*New Glitch* AD&D: Cloudy Mountain (100%) in 1:36 [World Record]
13Achieved on November 19, 2023 on easy difficulty on a real model III Intellivision console. This run beats the previous 100% record by 22 seconds, thanks to the discovery of a brand new "graphics glitch". I could easily see why people would think this is "cheating", so here's the run where I don't use the glitch: • AD&D: Cloudy Mountain (100%) in 1:58 [Worl... . This video took me so long to upload because I was planning on making a full long-form video about the graphics glitch. It's clear that isn't going to happen anytime soon so I will simply explain everything in this description box.
The graphics glitch can be performed on any Intellivision game developed by Mattel Electronics which has the iconic olive-green title screen with the multi-colored rectangles across the top. It is executed by pressing any valid key(s) to start the game, followed by pausing the game 2 frames later (usually by pressing the 1 and 9 keys simultaneously). This supposedly interrupts the switch from colorstack to BG/FG graphic modes, resulting in an array of improperly assigned colors.
The significance of this glitch discovery is that for speedrunning or highscoring purposes, I have found the following use cases:
1) Here in AD&D: Cloudy Mountain, the mountain colors on the main map screen get completely scrambled with no discernible patterns. The drawback is that you'll never know what color mountain you'll be stepping foot in, so you'll have to play the game a lot to know what mountains are likely to be what color. When you do enter a mountain though, the entire cave network including items will be visible from the start! This removes all the blind searching you would have to do for finding all the tools in 100%, greatly increasing the odds of getting a new world record time.
2) In Space Armada, the graphics glitch changes the background from black to olive green. Invisible aliens which appear in the later levels are just colored black to give the illusion of invisibility, but with the background now olive green, they are completely visible! This should yield a great benefit in both a speedrunning and high scoring context.
3) In Night Stalker, the graphics glitch will change the background color from blue to olive green. The "Invisible" Robot, which spawns after the player scores 80,000 points, is simply colored the same shade of blue as the background to give the illusion of invisibility. So if we change the background to olive green, we can now see the Invisible Robot, making defeating him a lot easier! The big drawback is that the spider is also colored olive green, so now he's invisible when the graphics glitch is active! It's unknown as of yet whether this makes things easier or harder for highscoring purposes.
I first found this glitch on emulator back in 2018 (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/275259-intellivision-graphics-glitch/), but couldn't pull it off on console because doing such a specific button sequence with those awkward Intellivision controllers is next to impossible. It wasn't until 2023 where I realized three things:
1) I could disassemble the controller and remove the top piece of plastic with the button numbers printed on it to expose the bare mylar sheets and increase input accuracy.
2) Pressing the 3 and 7 keys also pauses the game
3) I theorized that by continuously alternating between pressing 1 and 9 with 3 and 7, and delaying by 2 frames between each alteration, I could double the chances of me pulling off the glitch.
These discoveries are what led me to finally pull it off for the first time on console. This is also the method I used for pulling it off in this run. The downside to this method is that you could accidentally start the game on easy difficulty if 3 is the last key you held before pausing, which is what happened here unfortunately. Ehh, next time I'll be sure to get it on Hard difficulty!