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TKO

Punch-Out’s Mike Tyson has been defeated in under two minutes for the first time

After 75K attempts over 5 years, Summoning Salt is hanging up the virtual gloves.

Kyle Orland – | 71
Getting that 1:59 in the corner took years and years of focused work. Credit: Summoning Salt
Getting that 1:59 in the corner took years and years of focused work. Credit: Summoning Salt

Since Mike Tyson's Punch-Out was first released on the NES in 1987, millions of players have undertaken millions more digital matches against one of the hardest video game bosses ever—Tyson himself (or, later, the reskinned "Mr. Dream"). Only a small percentage of those players could survive Tyson's flurry of instant-knockdown uppercuts and emerge victorious with the undisputed World Video Boxing Association championship. Even fewer had fast enough fingers to take out Tyson in the first round.

In all this time, no one has been able to register a TKO on Tyson in less than two minutes on the ever-present in-game clock (which runs roughly three times as quickly as a real-time clock). At least, that was true until this weekend, when popular speedrunner and speedrun historian Summoning Salt pulled off a 1:59.97 knockout after what he says was "75,000 attempts over nearly 5 years."

Summoning Salt's record-setting sub-2:00 run.

Incredibly good and incredibly lucky

Breaking the storied 2:00 barrier on Tyson is a matter of both incredible skill and incredibly unlikely luck. As Summoning Salt himself started documenting in a 2017 video, getting the quickest possible Tyson TKO requires throwing 21 "frame perfect" punches throughout the fight, each within a 1/60th of a second window. Punch too early and those punches do slightly less damage, making the fight take just a bit longer. Too late and Tyson will throw up a block, negating the punch entirely.

A top-notch Tyson speedrun also requires well-timed dodging and ducking of Tyson's own punches so that Little Mac (the player character) can get back into counter-punching position as quickly as possible. Summoning Salt says he was just seven frames off of perfection in this regard, which cost about 0.35 in-game seconds over the course of the fight.

Even with that nearly unmatched execution, though, Summoning Salt's record-breaking run would have fallen well short if not for unreasonable amounts of luck from the game itself. As Bismuth explains in a 2024 video, Tyson can pause for anywhere between a fraction of a second and up to eight seconds between punches.

Ars Video

 

Getting the longest of those delays can hamper any chance of beating Tyson in the first round. But for his sub-two-minute TKO, Summoning Salt needed almost all of those pauses to luckily come down at the minimum of eight frames (~0.4 seconds on the in-game clock).

Bismuth explains the unreasonable luck needed for a record-setting Tyson fight at around the 56:30 mark in this 2024 video.

Summoning Salt says Tyson here gave him a "perfect pattern" during his first phase of endless uppercuts, something that happens only 1 in 1,600 bouts. And later in the fight, the game's random-number generator cooperated by adding only an extra 16 frames of delay (~0.8 in-game seconds) compared to a "perfect" run. Combined, Summoning Salt estimates that Tyson will only punch this quickly once every 7,000 to 10,000 attempts.

"It's over," Summoning Salt said live on Twitch when the record-setting match was finished, in a surprisingly even tone that came over what sounds very much like a dropped controller. "I thought I'd be a lot more excited about this. Holy shit, dude! It's fucking over... Dude, am I dreaming right now? ... I'm sorry I'm so quiet. I'm kind of in shock right now that that just happened."

Where do we go from here?

With his near-perfect combination of both skill and luck, Summoning Salt's new record surpasses his own previous world record of precisely 2:00.00 on the in-game clock. That mark, set just eight months ago, was just three frames off of displaying 1:59 on the in-game timer for the first time.

Summoning Salt was also the first runner to break the 2:01 barrier on Tyson in 2020, a feat he has since replicated just 15 times over tens of thousands of attempts. "There's essentially no difference between all of those [2:00.xx] fights and this one, except I got better luck from Tyson on this fight," he writes. "Finally, after nearly half a decade, the 1:59 has happened."

Summoning Salt discusses the difficulty of beating 2:13 on Tyson in 2020, months before setting a then-record time of 2:00 himself.

Ironically, just before posting his first 2:00.xx fight in 2020, Summoning Salt posted a video discussing in part just how difficult it was for speedrunners to beat Matt Turk's 2007 record of 2:13 on Tyson. "For years it was just this impossibly fast time that the top players just couldn't get close to," Summoning Salt said at the time. "Of course, other top players fought Tyson years later, but their best efforts came up short... they couldn't touch it. It stood alone."

Summoning Salt is now just over a second off of the tool-assisted speedrun record of 1:58.61, which uses emulated gameplay to fight a theoretical "perfect" bout every time. But after spending years on what he writes "is the greatest gaming achievement I have ever accomplished," Summoning Salt seems ready to hang up his virtual boxing gloves for good.

"I have no plans to ever improve this time," he writes. "It will be beaten by somebody one day, likely by matching this fight and then getting better luck in phase 3. I have no interest in competing for that but am extremely proud to have gotten the first sub 2 ever on Mike Tyson."

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Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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MisterMano
If there's one thing I've learned from some of SummingSalt's "history of world records" videos, is that old record-setters very often come back after some years of hiatus.
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