A Dance of Fire and Ice Speedrun World Record

May 2024

What is it?

Theory Over Timesave (TOT) is a charity speedrunning marathon event hosted by the University of Chicago's Game Design Club that raises money for the Trans Lifeline charity by providing livestreamed video game speedruns (i.e. when people try to complete a video game as fast as possible) to incentivize donations. This event is heavily inspired by the Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathon events. Both times we ran this event (2023 and 2024) were highly successful, each raising over $5,000 for Trans Lifeline!

In TOT'24, I participated as a speedrunner for one of my favorite games: A Dance of Fire and Ice. This game is a one-button rhythm game that can get really difficult, especially as you increase the speeds of the songs. During the live event, I performed a speedrun of the Fiery% speedrunning category where you try to unlock the "fire" particle effect as fast as possible, which you can do by completing the main game twice - once at normal speed and once at any sufficiently fast speeds of your choice. 

This speedrun went near-flawlessly with only minimal timeloss, and I ended up setting the world record live (13:33) by over 20 seconds! The full video of this run (and also a bonus song blindfolded at the end!) is linked below along with the speedrun.com global leaderboard for this category.

World Record Speedrun Video

Speedrun.com Leaderboards