The annual Celeste race
Since New Year’s Eve 2021 some some friends and I have done an annual race of the game Celeste. We all start at the same time and then the first person to get to the summit wins. We track it using the in-game speedrun timer.
2021
I was very into Celeste at the time and won by a pretty wide margin. I don’t have a record of how everyone else did, but I completed the game in just under two hours, with three hundred and six deaths and six strawberries1.
| 🏃 | ⏱️ | 💀 | 🍓 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇Caoimhe | 1°54′55.047″ | 306 | 6 |
2022
After this two of my friends got into the game very hard. My friend Jen ended up getting most of the golden berries2, something I haven’t even attempted and another friend, who wished to be called The Shadowblade in this post, started getting into Celeste mods. So when the next race happpened on the 8th of January 2022 Jen took the gold medal from me, beating my time by half an hour while I barely improved. The Shadowblade sadly did not finish and gave up four flags from the summit due to hand pain.
| 🏃 | ⏱️ |
|---|---|
| 🥇Jen | 1°22′10.918″ |
| 🥈Caoimhe | 1°51′25.318″ |
| 🥉The Shadowblade | D.N.F. |
2023:
On the same day the next year myself and Jen both improved our times, with Jen coming in first again, a newcomer who I will call D. in second and myself in third. The Shadowblade did not finish again.
| 🏃 | ⏱️ | 💀 | 🍓 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇Jen | 1°08′01.275″ | ||
| 🥈D. | 1°21′03.071″ | ||
| 🥉Caoimhe | 1°34′46.007″ | 245 | 0 |
| 🏅The Shadowblade | D.N.F. |
2024:
The next race was on the 14th of January 2024 and I managed to take more than twenty minutes off of my time, which was not enough to beat Jen’s best time, but Jen did a worse race than the previous year and it was enough for me to win for the second time.
| 🏃 | ⏱️ | 💀 | 🍓 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇Caoimhe | 1°12′40.296″ | 128 | 0 |
| 🥈Jen | 1°14′53.679″ | 144 | 3 |
| 🥉The Shadowblade | D.N.F. |
We also decided to do a little race of the Pico-8 version of Celeste, which Jen won.
| 🏃 | ⏱️ | 💀 | 🍓 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇Jen | 5′11″ | 29 | 4 |
| 🥈Caoimhe | 7′50″ | 57 | 1 |
2025
Finally, this year’s one took place on New Year’s Day. Jen had a clear lead from the start and has gotten very close to the one-hour mark, just three minutes short of it. I came in second, doing a bit worse than last year, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering an hour before the race I posted about how worn down, tired and sore I was. The Shadowblade finished this time, coming in at just over an hour and a half.
We were also joined by our friend Stella who had never played Celeste before but decided to join in on the race. After the rest of us had finished Jen said if that Stella actually finished she would forfeit her victory to her and shockingly Stella actually did. She finished the game in one sitting in just over ten hours with closing in on four thousand deaths and nine strawberries.
Jen insists that I should record Stella as the winner, but I am a petty bitch and I never said that I was going to forfeit. If she wants to fine but if I she does I’m saying that makes me the winner.
| 🏃 | ⏱️ | 💀 | 🍓 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇Jen | 1°03′38.846″ | 75 | 1 |
| 🥈Caoimhe | 1°22′37.421″ | 190 | 0 |
| 🥉The Shadowblade | 1°31′51.536″ | 275 | 0 |
| 🏅Stella | 10°06′38.428″ | 3839 | 9 |
2026
Maybe next year we will come in under the one-hour mark?
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Strawberries are optional collectables throughout the game. They don’t mean anything for the race but the game records how many you collect so I’ve included them for the runs that we recorded that information for. ↩
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A challenge for completing chapters in zero deaths for a game where an average number of deaths per playthrough is in the thousands. ↩