Uploaded August 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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Any% for King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow has seen another time saving adjustment to the speedrun.

The emulation software that runs the game can only obtain a certain level of accuracy with regard to how quickly Alexander runs when his speed is at max, and the settings on scummVM developed by a previous runner Urquan provide the fastest results when compared to other emulators, especially Dosbox, which was the emulator I used to get the previous world record of 13:38.

Speedrunners of this game have worked to fix the emulation to balance accuracy and competition for the game to keep things fair regardless of what your computer specifications are. The emulator contains a patch to prevent additional dialogue from Alexander while he's climbing the cliffs.

The run itself is my most skillfully played run, and would have been below 13:30 if I had gotten better luck with the cutscenes. There are many instances when things will take up to an extra second before they happen in the game. The most common of these in the run is how long it takes for Alexander to pull out the map and have the map screen show up. This run had, by my estimate, worse than 1/3 luck throughout the run, which was enough to make it just not quite fast enough for a sub 13:30. My sum of bests in this category is now 13:26.

All of the runners for this game who want to improve their times will need to switch to running on Urquan's build of scummVM instead of Dosbox. There are multiple sections where the movement results are different from Dosbox and adjustments needed to be made in the speedrun. These mostly come in the form of moving the cursor to a different position from the Dosbox run in order to get a zip, or even adding an additional movement input to setup a zip that would work in Dosbox without the extra input.

Overall this is an excellent run and I don't expect it to be beaten any time soon, unless I keep pushing it down more. I would love to be proven wrong on that.
speedrun.com/kings_quest_vi_heir_today_gone_tomorrow/full_game#Any