Bethesda devs watch speedrunner complete Doom Eternal in just 27 minutes

The creative team behind the latest instalment of Bethesda's Doom series are thinking of new ways to treat speedrunners after watching the current world record holder get through Doom Eternal in less than half an hour.

IGN sat down executive producer Marty Stratton, director Hugo Martin, lead level designer Jerry Keehan, and lead game programmer Evan Eubanks to watch speedrunner Xamide complete the game in an astonishing - and record-setting - 27 minutes.

While, naturally, many a corner was cut - including level collision exploits that enabled Xamide to skip many encounters as well as running at a blistering 250fps - the player's efficiency affected the team in a variety of ways, including pondering on the idea of including special easter eggs for speedrunners.

"It'd be fun to just mess with them," said director Martin, while executive producer Stratton suggests "adding an unskippable, exposition-heavy cutscene that only triggers when you fling yourself up into the skybox the way Xamide does to pass over large chunks of the levels" (thanks, PCGN).

As Tom recently reported, Bethesda recently trumpeted the launch of Doom Eternal by announcing it earned the series' best ever opening week sales.

Here in the UK, shops began selling boxed copies of Doom Eternal early in a bid to shift stock before stores were shut down. As we reported at the rime, physical sales of Doom Eternal's boxed version were down around a third on those for Doom's 2016 reboot, though it's likely the rise in digital console sales made up much of this.

How many copies Doom Eternal sold altogether, Bethesda isn't saying. But it was enough the game doubled the launch weekend revenue of Doom's 2016 reboot.