Hacker goes Speedrunning: Beating a 25 hour game in under 2 minutes

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Presented at Area41 Conference 2026 by

Gynvael Coldwind

"The Aethra Chronicles" is a 1994 open-world RPG game that I greatly enjoyed as a kid, but never managed to finish. Around the New Year, with a bit more time on my hands, I finally decided to change that — and it took roughly 25–30 hours. And then I started thinking — can I "cheese" this game somehow and complete it faster? This said, I am not a speedrunner. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me... What I'm trying to say is that I'm pretty good with software. Join me on a hacker-goes-speedrunning adventure: there be dragons, file formats, real-mode reverse-engineering, bugs in the game, and even some cryptography!