I’ve played hundreds of hours of Spelunky and know the basics: run, jump, whip, bomb, die. I know there are strange, intricate strategies in order to be really good at Spelunky, to achieve world record runs. That’s normal. But nothing about this video makes sense to me, and so I closed it, until the strangeness of it all started bugging me. I had to know what’s going on.

Few games are ever truly solved , there is always more to learn. 33 years later, for example, people are still trying to achieve the perfect speedrun of the original Super Mario Bros . But over time, the bar is raised ever higher, with more and more time needed to eventually climb over. Progress happens in fits and starts, a wild combination of study and happy accidents.

Boom, boom, boom goes a shotgun , firing at...well, so far as I can tell, nothing? There’s a plasma gun on the ground, I guess, and a ghost to the right, but there’s no enemies in front of the player, and while the ghost can be killed , they’re not firing in the ghost’s direction. This is a Spelunky world record run for—*checks notes*—collecting the most money? And the part that people are hyped over involves firing a shotgun into the vacuum of space? Huh.

There is rhyme and reason to this, as it turns out. The explanation is truly baffling, a form of quiet code manipulation fans are still trying to fully understand, unearthed by Spelunky’s self-described “scientists.” It’s a living testament to the way the Spelunky community has prospered nearly seven years after it debuted on Xbox 360. A proper sequel, Spelunky 2, is coming in 2019, but in the meantime, Spelunky continues to have its rewards.

Glitch or not, even the game’s developers are impressed by the dedication.

“What the Spelunky community has done with the game has already blown so far past what we thought was possible,” said designer Derek Yu on a recent episode of the Spelunky podcast The Spelunky Showlike. “I don’t know. For me to now be like ‘Hey, now that’s too much. That’s where I draw the line!’ [laughs] It doesn’t make sense. They’re already way into the stratosphere, I can’t even see them at this point. It’s just another cool thing.”

The world record scene for collecting the most money in Spelunky has been humming along since 2013, with a new record every few months. Since the summer of 2016, it’s been largely dominated by Kinnijup, one of the Spelunky demigods, as he beat his own score again and again. (Try not to sit slack jawed while watching him destroy Spelunky at this year’s AGDQ.)

Don't Get Caught Duping

Years ago, the community discovered a duplication glitch in Spelunky. If you stacked gems on top of one another and collected it all at once, you’d get some of them twice. This was especially important for score (aka money) runs; it meant you could, in theory, collect more money than the game had spawned into the world, opening up new avenues for world record runs. But the glitch was not fully understood, and was difficult to reliably repeat. All the community knew was that sometimes, if you pushed money into a pile, it would duplicate. Other times, it didn’t work.