From Start to Credits in a Single Blink: The Strange Glitch That Rewrote Ratchet & Clank's History

Daily Games

16/04/2026

For years, the speedrunning community has been a world of obsessive perfection, a place where shaving off a single frame can feel like a monumental victory. Runners spend thousands of hours mastering every jump, every glitch, every nuance of a game’s code. Then, a message rippled through the Ratchet & Clank channels, a claim so audacious it bordered on myth: the third game, Up Your Arsenal, could now be beaten in under one second. It wasn’t a joke.

It was a moment that felt less like a new strategy and more like digital wizardry. The discovery, credited to a runner known as Joaof, wasn't about finding a clever shortcut through a level. It was a fundamental break in the game's reality—a glitched warp that catapults the player from the very beginning of the game straight to the rolling end credits.

The Glitch in the Machine

The secret lies not in the original PlayStation 2 classic, but in its more modern, and apparently more fragile, PlayStation 3 port. As speedrunner Xem explained, “the PS3 port is strange and quitting the game fucks things up.” The trick involves manipulating the game’s memory by quitting at a precise moment. When the game is reloaded, it can be forced into a new state—in this case, the state of having just been completed.

However, this incredible power comes with a significant catch. The feat isn't currently possible in a standard, real-time speedrun. To trigger the warp, a player must first use a hacked save file to edit a specific value, 'frames played,' to a negative number. “Speedrunners are fast,” Xem noted, “but we're not that fast yet.” This means that, for now, the sub-one-second run remains a tool-assisted spectacle, a theoretical proof of concept rather than a competitive category.

But to dismiss it for that reason is to miss the point entirely. The true magic of the speedrunning scene isn't just in the final timesheet; it's in the collaborative, forensic process of discovery. It’s about a community of digital archaeologists picking apart the games they love, uncovering secrets the original developers never intended. These discoveries are the lifeblood of the scene, pushing the boundaries of what’s considered possible.

Who knows what the future holds? Glitches that were once purely theoretical, like the famous wrong warps in Ocarina of Time, eventually became staples of real-time runs. Perhaps one day, a new method will be found to execute this trick on the fly. Until then, it stands as a testament to the community's ingenuity—a reminder that even in games two decades old, there are still wizards working to bend the code to their will.

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