Web Video / Summoning Salt

"This is the history of (game name/subject).".

Summoning Salt is a world-record-holding Punch-Out!! Speedrunner who makes documentary-style videos detailing the history of speedrunning in specific video games, such as Mario Kart Wii, Super Mario 64, or Pokémon Red and Blue.

His videos incorporate a lot of information, dating back to the first known speedrun of the specific game, certain glitches the speedrunners may have used to get ahead, and using video footage of the actual runs when possible. In addition, he has also spoken about other related topics in the same format. On March 1st, 2021, his channel hit 1 million subscribers.

Watch the series here.

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These are the tropes for Summoning Salt's TVTropes pages

• Alliterative Name: Summoning Salt.
• Always Someone Better:
  • A recurring theme in many episodes. One of the few things Summoning Salt treats with a hint of sarcasm is hearing the runner boasting "This record is unbeatable!" No matter how perfect a run seems to be, no matter how long it takes, someone will always beat that seemingly impossible time eventually. Summoning Salt also makes a point that this isn't a bad thing, much on the contrary, this is what drives people to work so hard to get new records, improve their times, or discover new tricks to make a run even faster.
  • Matthias Rustemeyer came close to being this for an entire community when he came in and started demolishing Mario Kart 64 records like they were nothing. The only thing stopping him from achieving 32 out of 32 non-shortcut records was an entire alliance of the best Mario Kart 64 speedrunners actively conspiring against him and even then he always got back to 31 out of 32 no matter how many records they took from him.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: In "The History of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! World Records", Salt describes a new runner suddenly making it to the top ranks on the leaderboard in late January 2016. He subsequently reveals that runner to be himself.
• Art Evolution: Earlier videos had rougher audio with noticeable echo and noises. From the Portal episode onward the audio from his videos took a leap in quality.
• Awesome, but Impractical: "The Hidden Shortcuts of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!" ends by explaining the Wario Colosseum shortcut, which is very difficult to pull off for only a tiny time save. In fact, at the time of the video's release, only one runner, Mathii, had ever managed to use the trick to save any time, and even then, only by a hundredth of a second; for everyone else, this "shortcut" actually takes longer than just driving normally. There's also a mention of a Dino Dino Jungle shortcut that has not yet been used to save time.
• Badass Unintentional: Sometimes people end up breaking records or discovering amazing new tricks or skips unintentionally or by sheer accident. For example, the Frappe Snowland video mentions the time when Myles was simply trying to record a video tutorial showing how to do a particular shortcut, only to accidentally break the fastest lap record while he was doing it.
• Bait-and-Switch: In the Super Mario 64 16-Star video, after saying how the first sub-16:00 time was achieved not by one of the top runners at the time, but by someone who had never held the record before:
  Summoning Salt: And his name... was Matt Turk. [music starts up, but then abruptly stops] Nah, I'm just kidding. It was Akira.
• Brick Joke: In "The History of Super Punch Out World Records", the intro of HOME - 4 plays over an early run by zallard1 that falls flat at Nick Bruiser, and cuts off as soon as it's certain the run is dead. Much later, at 41:57, Mysteryman95 achieves the first sub-2:40, and the main part of HOME - 4 immediately starts playing.
• Chekhov's Gun: At the beginning of "The History of Mega Man 2 World Records", Salt mentions that making contact with the final boss, the Alien (referred to as "hugging the Alien" in the speedrunning community), deals massive Collision Damage to the player. None of the runs shown in the the following 50 minutes have problems with this...until near the end of the video, when a world record pace run by cyghfer from early 2021 was ruined when he died to the Alien after failing a risky strategy caused him to take contact damage.
• Cluster F-Bomb: In "The History of Mega Man 2 World Records", speedrunner ellonija belts out multiple F-bombs in rapid succession after defeating the Boobeam Trap in one of his runs, one likely reason why the video suddenly became age-restricted on YouTube.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Due to Summoning Salt's involvement in the Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! speedrunning community, it's inevitable that his own contributions will come up whenever he does a video about the game, even if "World Record Progression: Mike Tyson" and "The History of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out World Records" are the only ones he was directly a part of. "The History of Blindfolded Punch-Out!!" briefly mentions he was one of the runners helping zallard and Sinister come up with strategies for their race at AGDQ 2016, and "The Quest to Beat Matt Turk" includes his Tyson record in the ending montage comparing Turk's times to the current world records.
  • Besides the Punch-Out!! videos, Salt also makes a cameo in "Mario Kart Wii: The Ultra Shortcut Revolution," showing up in the TASer Malleo's chat to offer encouragement as he attempts to prove the Rainbow Road Ultra Shortcut can be completed with just one mushroom.
  • Played for Laughs in The Hidden Shortcuts of Mario Kart: Double Dash!! where it turns out that the runner Goomba was inspired to crack the code on Double Dash's checkpoint system after watching the above mentioned video on Mario Kart Wii and Salt refers to it as "some random guys video."
• Deadpan Snarker: Occasionally throws in jokes without changing the tone of his voice, usually involving punchlines that are the opposite of the setup.
  • In his Warpless Super Mario Bros. video, he states the runner went crazy upon setting a new record. Cue the clip... where the runner makes no sound upon setting the record.
  • Another variation is to say a record went untouched for a long time... only to reveal it fell within the week it was set.
  • A third variation is for him to spend some time talking about a runner who spent months and months grinding out thousands of attempts until finally beating the record and what an amazing accomplishment it was... only to then unceremoniously reveal that that guy's record was quickly smashed to pieces within a week or even the same day, usually by the same guy he had just spent all that time taking it from.
• Delayed Narrator Introduction: Halfway through "The History of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out World Records", the video becomes a retrospective of Salt's own experience with Punch-Out!!, as it inevitably reaches the point where he became the unbeaten record-holder since 2016.
• Double-Meaning Title: "The Quest to Beat jimmypoopins" ends up not just being about other runners trying to surpass the titular runner (especially his rival Beco), but also jimmypoopins' own journey to improve himself and surpass his own record.
  Beco is a great rival. But it wasn't just his quest. It was also jimmy's quest to beat jimmypoopins.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect:
  • Mentioned in the Wii Sports Resort Golf video. Making really good shots (holes-in-one, long putts, getting in or really close to the hole from far away, etc.) trigger unskippable replays that cut into the run time and therefore must be avoided. Also, having a really good score overall will make the game put the hole on more difficult sections of the green to give skilled players a challenge. To get around this, runners exploit the game's Mercy Mode that forces you to give up and move on to the next hole if you do badly enough by deliberately shooting into the water repeatedly on Hole 1 until they can move on to Hole 2, making their score bad enough to ensure easy hole placement for the rest of the game. It's slower than playing Hole 1 normally, but the easy hole placement allows them to more than make up for that time loss later.
  • Defied in the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 video. Sonic 2 does have a similar issue, where finishing a level in under 30 seconds awards a large point bonus, which the game takes an ironically long time to tally up. When measuring in real time, it's slightly faster to waste a few seconds and finish a level in exactly 30 seconds. So the Sonic 2 speedrunning community doesn't use real time, instead keeping records based on the in-game timer, precisely to disincentivize "going slowly to go fast" and encourage actually going fast.
• Dramatic Deadpan: A staple of his narrative style. Summoning Salt will often convey big discoveries in speedrun history without ever raising or lowering his pitch, but with enough of a dramatic pause to make this work.
• Dumb Struck: Speedrunning can be tough. It's not uncommon for Summoning Salt to show clips where the person regresses into someone barely able to form coherent phrases (either due anger or shock) after losing a run in world record pace. The opposite is very well just as true, though, as sometimes people breaking world records react in a mild manner as if trying to process what they just accomplished.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • The very first World Record Progression video, Mike Tyson, included a mention of Matt Turk, a legendary Punch-Out!! speedrunner who pioneered many new strategies for the game and held unofficial^note Due to a lack of video proof world records for the majority of the fights that wouldn't be matched by other runners for years. Salt would later dedicate an entire video to the Punch-Out!! community's battle to overcome Turk's times.
  • "Frappe Snowland: The History of Mario Kart 64's Most Broken Track" notes that at the time of recording, both of the track's non-shortcut world records were held by a runner named Matthias Rustemeyer, with an offhand mention that he'd also held world records on every other track in the game. These world records, and Matthias's attempts to hold all 32 of them at the same time, would later be the subject of their own video.
  • abney317, one of the members of the alliance that attempted to take Matthias's Mario Kart 64 time trial records, would later be the subject of another video detailing his efforts at holding onto his own 150cc All Cups with skips world record for the same game.
• Exact Words: In his Wii Sports Resort Golf video, he builds up a monumental event that "changed the way viewers would see Wii Sports Resort Golf speedruns": Top runner Sir_Tyler, who had been recording his runs with a potato-quality camera pointed at his TV, finally got a capture card, making it much easier to literally see his runs.
• Expospeak Gag: In "The History of Super Mario Bros. 2 World Records," the recurring bus analogy for explaining frame rules is slightly changed to refer to a "4 Wheeled Vehicle of Transportation" instead.
• The Faceless: Unlike many other streamers, Salt does not show his face at all, and seems to value the anonymity being an online content creator provides (his real name has also never been revealed).
  • He's never attended GDQ events despite being the world-record holder for Punch-Out!! and his extremely engaging speaking style (the runner-up, zallard, usually represents the community instead). Only when GDQ began hosting online/virtual events did he start "attending" them (with no facecam of course).
  • When he broke the blindfolded WR for Punch-Out!!, he did so with a paper bag covering his whole head.
  • When he announced he had merch (including clothing) and modeled it for the camera, he cropped the frame so that it cut off his head.
• Friendly Rivalry: Matthias Rustemeyer versus the rest of the Mario Kart 64 speedrunning scene. It's clear from the forum posts shown in "The Quest for World Record Perfection" that there's no animosity between them and Matthias is a popular, well-respected, and friendly member of the community. Of course, none of that made their battles over the time trial world records any less fierce.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Sharply averted. While some records documented were broken with the discovery of new tricks and skips, all world record holders worked very hard to earn or keep their records. Usually the easier a skip or trick is to perform the fiercer will be the competition in the end.
• Humble Hero: Salt himself holds the two greatest Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! records: fastest full playthrough of the game from start to finish and fastest TKO of Tyson, but he never brags about it in his videos. He casually mentions it towards the end of his first MTPO video, in the same tone one might describe the weather. In the Matt Turk video, he never verbally acknowledges his Tyson record and just shows it at the end of the video as part of a compilation of Turk's times alongside the corresponding current records.
• Leitmotif: While his channel has no "official" theme, "We're Finally Landing" is used in most of his episodes at the beginning and/or ending, and thus is easily one of the most recognizable tracks Summoning Salt uses in his videos. Look no further than the linked YouTube video for proof — about 99% of the comments are Summoning Salt references.
• Lost Episode: Many World Record runs from the early days of Speedrunning (the end of The '90s and the beginning to mid era of The Aughts) are lost. Runs from this time frame predate streaming sites like Twitch and video upload sites like YouTube, where they are easily saved today. Some runs were recorded on VHS but are still lost for the same reasons many early movies and TV shows were: No one thought anyone would want to see them in the future. Runs sent to verification companies like Twin Galaxies would not be saved after authentication. Lost runs happen in the digital era as well, the primary cause of these being Twitch's decision in 2014 to start automatically deleting Past Broadcasts older than a couple of months. Many runners at the time didn't bother to manually make Highlights of their runs (which don't get deleted), since they assumed the Past Broadcasts would last forever so they didn't need to. Other times, the runner simply deleted their content themselves and a third party didn't get to save it in time. Salt mentions these runs and their times for the historic importance and explains as best he can why they are lost to history. If there is some surviving footage he'll use it; otherwise he will use graphics or filler footage to compensate.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Turns out to be the defining element of speedrunning Super Punch-Out!!. On top of needing good execution, there are many fights in the game that have random elements that can swing the time by 5 seconds or more, killing potential world record runs through no fault of the player.
    Summoning Salt: Because, you see, Super Punch-Out!! does not care about the runner. It doesn't care what pace you're on. It doesn't care how badly you want the record. It doesn't care how well you're playing. It can take away your run whenever it feels. You can be on the run of your life, execute everything perfectly, but if you get bad luck, it's game over. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
  • This also turns out to be a factor in speedrunning Mario Kart 64, as performing some skips is reliant on getting the right randomly-determined items from item boxes (in particular, triple red shells on Royal Raceway and Rainbow Road, and triple mushrooms on Yoshi's Valley), and part of the difficulty abney317 experienced in improving his record is due to him failing to do so because of bad RNG.
• Mickey Mousing: Salt likes to time his cuts to the background music, whether it's to spice up a montage of run footage or for dramatic effect during a reveal.
• Mundane Made Awesome: His "Wii Sports Resort" Golf video. Despite the seemingly simple and low energy concept of the video, he talks about the tricks and discoveries with the exact same tone as he did with every other video.
• One-Hit Kill: Discussed in "The History of LEGO Star Wars World Records" where speedrunners employ a trick on the Episode 6 Emperor Palpatine fight called the Ultra Kill, which Salt humorously describes as "really stupid". Normally in casual play, Palpatine is a Damage-Sponge Boss with twenty hearts and will constantly move around the entire level to force the player to pursue him, but with the Ultra Kill trick, all a speedrunner has to do at the start of the fight is to lure Palpatine close to the edge of a bottomless pit and carefully manipulate Luke and Darth Vader's positions with 1-player/2-controller strats to push him off the edge. This immediately triggers the post-fight cutscene and ends 6-5 quickly.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • In The History of Super Mario Bros 3 100% Speedruns Salt brings up how the game's Hammer Bros RNG on the world map can waste time by showing a clip from runner "Stewie_Cartman" getting what is considered the worst recorded Hammer Bros RNG. It goes on for almost 30 seconds.
  • In "The Quest to Beat abney317", to illustrate the bad RNG abney317 experienced in trying to improve his record, one attempt is shown of him trying to get the needed triple red shells on Royal Raceway. It goes on for about 40 seconds.
• Precision F-Strike: In his Super Punch-Out!! video, he talks about how bad luck can kill your run, "and there's not a damn thing you can do about it."
• Running Gag:
  • Any mention of framerules will inevitably cause Salt to launch into an explanation using the analogy of "imagine there's a bus that arrives every X frames to take you to the next level." In the Castlevania video, he uses a train instead, possibly because it's not a Mario game, or possibly because even he was getting sick of the bus analogy by this point. By the time of the Super Mario Bros. 2 video, he's just started calling it "a particular 4-wheeled vehicle of transportation" and never mentions it by name. In "Super Mario Bros.: The Human Limit," he just inserts a clip of Darbian (who came up with the analogy in the first place) explaining it instead. In "Mario: The Infamous History of Level 5-2", he actually speedruns the framerule explanation; complete with splits for "21 Frames", "Bus Analogy", and "Timer"; and then claims a world record at the end of it.
  • Salt will occasionally name drop Matt Turk as a Bait-and-Switch gag in some videos, mostly because he's become such a invokedMemetic Badass among Salt's viewers that any impressive gaming achievement you could make up and attribute to him would sound entirely believable:
    • In his Super Mario 64 16-Star video, he claims that Turk came out of nowhere to effortlessly demolish a minute barrier despite never having ran the game before... then admits he was just kidding, it was actually someone else who did that.
    • His New Super Mario Bros. Wii video has a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue that explains in text what all of the runners featured in the video are up to today. At the end, Turk's name appears despite not having been mentioned in the video at all up to this point... followed by an explanation that he has not actually speedran the game (yet).
• Screen Name: Most of the people talked about in the videos are referred to or known only by their usernames they use on community sites such as Speedrun.com. This, of course, includes Summoning Salt himself.
• Self-Deprecation: In "The Hidden Shortcuts of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!", he refers to "Mario Kart Wii: The History of the Ultra Shortcut" as "some random guy's video", even crediting himself as "Random Guy" in the bottom-right corner.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Invoked with the History of Blindfolded Super Mario 64, which began as a test to see if it could be done at all before ascending to world record speedrunning paces.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Matthias Rustemeyer attempts on eight occasions to win all 32 Mario Kart 64 speed records, managing to hold 31 out of 32 each time before another player manages to beat him on another course, forcing him back on the defensive. Given his tenacity it's hard not to start rooting for him, and the video clearly builds to a climax where he is finally ultimately successful... until it doesn't, and he isn't. Then it ends.
  • Contra runner DK seemingly found a game altering shortcut where he died halfway through the first level and was warped to the second. The speed running community tried to find out why this happened and how to replicate it consistently, even looking into the game code as the game was being played. After three months...it was concluded that DK experienced an unrepeatable hardware malfunction and not a new glitch that would forever change Contra speed running.
  • FatPotatoSeal manages to get a run of Super Punch-Out!! that's just about as close to perfection as one can get in such a luck-based game, with the absolute best possible luck on every fight except one (and that one was close) going into the final fight. Salt goes through the whole run keeping a running tally of the increasingly steeper odds to get so much good luck in a row, ending up with total odds of 1 in 2.6 million for the game to even give an opportunity this strong, to say nothing of making no mistakes going through it. All FatPotatoSeal needed to do to clinch a potentially unbeatable world record... was nail the hardest mechanical execution in the game while under unprecedented levels of pressure. He did not, totally fumbling the fight worse than a normal mistake just to add insult to injury, and achieving a choke that Salt himself describes as "heartbreaking."
  • Pidgey was on pace to break the 22:10 barrier in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but only just barely. As he jumped for the switch that would trigger the ending cutscene, he put down his Wii Remote so he could stop his timer... which accidentally triggered the motion controls, and therefore the Propeller Suit that Mario was wearing, causing him to fly upwards and away from the switch mere frames before he would have pressed it. Needless to say, this destroyed any chance Pidgey had to break the barrier, but there was still a possibility that he got a world record out of it. After re-timing the run with load times removed, it was discovered that he had missed the record by 2 frames. Fortunately, he managed to replicate this run a mere 11 days later, this time closing it out successfully and breaking the barrier.
• Shout-Out: The name Summoning Salt originates from a video by Stuart Ashen (30 Year Old Food Parcel) in which Stuart Ashen accidentally mispronounces "Seasoning Salt" as "Summoning Salt".
• Shown Their Work: His videos are heavily researched and full of details, even mentioning speedrunners whose runs were lost to the internet, or who went generally unnoticed by the rest of the speedrunning community. On the occasion he gets something wrong, he'll take strives to present the proper information afterward.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Has a tongue-in-cheek rivalry with Bismuth, a fellow speedrun and gaming challenge documentary maker. He's even referred to Bismuth as "[his] arch-rival".
• Stylistic Suck: In one of the Mario Kart videos, Salt quotes himself from earlier in the video, and shows grainy footage of his own visual with the quality of a shoddily-recorded run.
• Suddenly Shouting: Due to the competitive nature of speedrunning it is more than expected to see very energic reactions from people when they break new world records or discover a new trick, or if they fail. This is even more notable due to Summoning Salt's soft and constant manner of speaking in his videos— at one moment he can narrate one record/discovery and suddenly you'll be hearing someone else shouting at the top of their lungs.
• That One Boss: invoked Discussed. Some bosses stand out as particularly annoying to speedrunners due to having random patterns, meaning that even if the rest of the run goes perfectly, getting the world record could come down to the Random Number God.
  • In the Blindfolded Punch-Out!! video, Bald Bull and Piston Honda both gave Sinister1 a hard time when he was first trying to beat them blindfolded, as their combination of random patterns and high damage output made them difficult to counter prior to the discovery of input buffering.
  • In the Super Mario Bros. speedruns (both warps and warpless), Bowser is known for being incredibly random and needing extremely precise kills to get past him without wasting precious time.
  • Roughly half of the boxers in Super Punch-Out!! qualify, being able to make or break a run based entirely on the whims of their A.I. Roulette. Bob Charlie and Dragon Chan are considered early game hurdles for this reason, while every fight from the second half of the World Circuit onwards can cause significant time swings through no fault of the runner. By contrast the Final Boss Nick Bruiser is a fairer fight, but the fact he requires the player to land two counter-punches which border on the limits of human reaction times, even without factoring in input delay, to bring him down quickly makes him by far the hardest opponent in the game.
• That One Level: invoked Discussed Trope. Almost every speedrunner has, or had, to deal at very least with one level that is very difficult and/or has a trick that is just as difficult to pull off in order to get records.
  • In "Mario Kart 64: The Quest for World Record Perfection," it's mentioned that Moo Moo Farm is the hardest track in the game to speedrun due to being the only one with a random element to it: moles pop out of holes at random, and the fastest path is over them, so you have to hope that their pattern doesn't get in your way.
  • "The History of LEGO Star Wars World Records" (specifically The Complete Saga) brings in 5-5 "Cloud City Trap", noted by many runners to be the hardest level in the entire run because of four difficult-to-execute Sequence Breaking tricks in order to skip mostly fighting Darth Vader. DV1 requires just barely making it over a large gap with a well-timed hover with R2, and both DV3 and DV4 require frame-perfect jumps as Luke over bottomless pits. But particular mention goes to DV2 for being the hardest skip to perform, since it requires precisely lining up Luke and R2 underneath a moving platform to clip the former out-of-bounds and go underneath the boss room. So many factors can go wrong that many world record paces have all died to DV2 alone, thus earning 5-5 its infamy.
  • In the videos about Super Mario Bros. 3, it's shown why speedrunners consider World 7 to be the hardest: several levels in that world have a way to skip huge portions of them, saving a massive amount of time, but each of these skips require pixel-perfect movement, sometimes even necessitating sub-pixel level precision (which is extremely difficult to manipulate and often boils down to luck). As runs became more optimized, runners were eventually forced to land every single one of these highly-precise tricks if they wanted a chance at getting a world record.
  • "The Quest to Beat abney317" shows three more from Mario Kart 64: Royal Raceway, Yoshi's Valley, and Rainbow Road. Not only does the runner need to get the right randomly-determined items from item boxes, they also need to hit the exact out-of-bounds area to perform the needed skips, and several runs are shown dying at these tracks due to either bad RNG or missing the skip.
• The Teaser: Summoning Salt's videos often start with him giving some information about the game or the trick he is about to talk about.
• Un-person: Salt has a policy of not mentioning any record-holding speedrunner who is now known to have cheated by name, and often glosses over their records entirely in his coverage. This includes the famous 17:31 Super Mario 64 16-star run by ShadowOfMyles from 2008, which was discovered in 2014 to have been spliced. This is explicitly brought up in his video about the 16-star records, where he notes that for 80% of the time from 2005 to 2014, the recognized world record was held by a cheater. So he makes a point of recognizing the (retroactive) legitimate record holder, but this creates a problem: video archiving was sparse enough already prior to the mid-2010s, and obviously videos by runners who believed they did not achieve the world record were far less likely to be archived than those who did.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: A common running theme in "The History of Super Punch-Out!! World Records" is speedrunners seemingly having amazing luck throughout their runs and are on world record paces, only for their runs to abruptly end either by bad RNG by fighters like Mad Clown, Super Macho Man and Narcis Prince, or poor execution on Nick Bruiser under intense pressure. zallard1 had his paces destroyed on a few occasions because of these factors, and FatPotatoSeal's run at the end of the video is the most tragic case because he had perfect luck on all fights except one which had almost perfect luck (a 1 in 155 thousand chance to happen) and a potentially unbeatable 2:27 record in sight, only to crumble under the massive amount of pressure and choke hard against Nick Bruiser.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Certain time-saving tricks discussed in his videos are widely hated by runners since they either extremely difficult to pull off, or require praying fervently to the Random Number God and hoping he sees fit to bless you with good luck, and failing to pull it off will almost always instantly kill the run. Occasionally, an alternative method of doing one of these tricks is discovered that is easier, more consistent, and/or less reliant on luck, but at the cost of being a bit slower. All the runners are quick to switch over to this new method, since the benefit outweighs the cost. However, as the run becomes further and further optimized, runners will eventually be forced to return to the old, hated method once it inevitably becomes the only way to save any significant amount of time. Two notable examples are Cannonless from Super Mario 64 and Final Rush Skip from Sonic Adventure 2.

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