Devs Conspire With Twitch Viewers To Troll Clustertruck Speedrun

097Aceofspades currently holds the world record for beating Clustertruck, a game where you hopscotch across a death course of rampaging semis and pileups, so naturally during his attempt at Summer Games Done Quick the game’s devs collaborated with the Twitch chat to screw with him.

Clustertruck is notorious for a backdoor that allows its developer, Landfall, to come in and start modifying people’s games. Because of its in-client Twitch integration, the developers are able to affect playthroughs remotely by introducing different colours, effects, and physics such as 4x gravity.

When the game first came out last year, the developers made a habit of popping onto popular streams of the game and trolling players.

Not entirely surprisingly then, Landfall was around during 097Aceofspades’ run to field votes from the Twitch stream concerning what effects to introduce to complicate things. They officially said hello to SGDQ around the 10 minute mark. “At this point you’re allowed to blame Landfall for everything,” said one of the commentators.

Viewers started by pushing things such as low gravity without realising that would help 097Aceofspades (he spends most of his time exploiting acceleration tricks to launch himself across levels, bypassing the madness underneath). Other effects such as inverted controls had the opposite effect, forcing him to try and take things slow since he couldn’t rely on muscle memory to pull off certain time-saving manoeuvres.

And of course there was everyone’s favourite: Laser trucks.

If you’ve never played or seen Clustertruck before, 097Aceofspades’ run is a great demonstration of how the games quirky premise (demon trucks) and gonzo physics can actually lead to something extremely relaxing and therapeutic when placed in the hands of someone who’s perfected it.

You can watch the run in its entirety here (time-stamped), with a full overview of the rest of the week’s SGDQ programming here.