In Teslagrad, the first thing speedrunners notice is not the steampunk skyline or the silent storytelling. It is the way the boy sticks to metal, the way a charged cloak snaps him across an empty space, and the way a tiny misstep can turn a careful jump puzzle into an improvised recovery. The tower at the heart of the game is supposed to be a lonely place where a nameless child uncovers a conspiracy around a tyrant king. For speedrunners it becomes a vertical racetrack, a dense web of magnetized rooms where every puzzle is a possible skip and every animation is a chance to steal back a few frames.
This Speedrun Game Chronicle looks at how a hand drawn Norwegian puzzle platformer from 2013 found a durable home on speedrun.com, how its community shaped a full route library on the Teslagrad Wiki, and how version changes from Legacy to Current to Remastered keep forcing runners to rethink the fastest way up the tower.
Building Teslagrad In Bergen
Teslagrad began inside Rain Games, an independent studio based in Bergen, Norway. The company originally worked on a different project set in the same world, a casual focused multiplayer game called Minute Mayhem. As that concept evolved, the team shifted its effort to what became Teslagrad, a side scrolling puzzle platformer built in Unity and centered on magnetic mechanics.
The game first released for Windows, OS X and Linux on 13 December 2013, then steadily reached Wii U, PlayStation 3 and 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and mobile platforms over the next several years. Its world blends a steampunk vision of old Europe with hints of Eastern European architecture. The central Kingdom of Elektropia is ruled by a despotic king who has tried to destroy a sect of technological wizards known as Teslamancers, and the boy players control ends up fleeing into their abandoned tower at the city’s center.
Rain Games pushed Teslagrad at indie showcases, including PAX Prime and Eurogamer Expo in 2013, and supported a long tail of ports and, eventually, a remastered edition published with Modus Games in 2023. Across that decade the studio also leaned into streaming culture. In its press materials Rain Games explicitly grants permission for captured footage and monetized video content, a choice that quietly helped make Teslagrad a safe target for speedrunning marathons and tutorial uploads.
Magnetism, Momentum, And Voiceless Storytelling
Teslagrad is built around electromagnetism. The boy finds a series of tools inside the tower, including a glove that punches objects to flip their polarity, a cloak that lets him charge his own body, boots that alter his movement, and later a short blink teleport. With these powers he can ride beams of magnetized light, launch himself from repelling platforms, and chain jumps through rooms that are equal parts obstacle course and logic puzzle.
The tower itself is a non linear maze with more than one hundred hand drawn environments. Combat is sparse and many encounters are closer to mechanical tests than traditional boss fights. Instead of dialogue boxes, Rain Games uses pantomime, theater scenes and background murals to tell the story of Elektropia, the Teslamancers and the king.
On a first casual playthrough that means long moments of careful routing, drifting along energy beams and experimenting with how different polarities interact. For speedrunners the same rules become an invitation to break rooms open. Whenever two magnets push or pull each other, there is a chance to ride that momentum in a way the level layout never anticipated. Whenever an animation locks the boy in place, there is a chance to cancel it and keep moving. The result is a game where physics, movement and puzzle logic all share the same underlying system, and where understanding that system matters as much as raw mechanical skill.
From First Clears To Sub Twenty Minutes
The earliest recorded Teslagrad runs on speedrun.com date back roughly a decade. They show twenty minute and low twenty one minute completions on PC, often by runners like Rykirel and Renardo who were still feeling out the first reliable routes up the tower.
Over time the leaderboard thickened. By the early 2020s more than two hundred runs had been submitted across the main categories, with over fifty players on record and several active moderators helping manage rules and resources. The Any Percent New Game board in particular drew runners who wanted to compress a full tower climb into something that felt like a single long movement combo.
At the top of that list sits Dioxymore, also known as MetalFox Dioxymore on YouTube. Around three years before this writing, Dioxymore pushed the Any Percent Legacy New Game world record down to 17 minutes and 55 seconds on PC, a time that still defines what a full speedrun of Teslagrad looks like for many viewers. Alongside submitted runs, his channel hosts a long series of “Teslagrad Speedrun Tricks” clips that document individual techniques and room specific strategies.
In that sense Teslagrad followed a familiar indie pattern. A relatively small group of dedicated runners built routes through repeated attempts, recorded proof of concept videos, then worked backward to document those routes for anyone who might join the community later.
Legacy, Current And Remastered Versions
One of the defining features of Teslagrad speedrunning is the way version differences shape what is possible. The community formalized these distinctions in a dedicated Speedrunning section of the Teslagrad Wiki that serves as a living manual for runners.
The Legacy version is Teslagrad 1.3.1 on Windows. According to the wiki this build is the fastest for speedrunning, partly because of quicker menus and partly because several exploits and debug features remain intact. In Legacy, the physics engine runs at 150 frames per second and supports aggressive movement tricks such as Blink Bounces and the Tower Bridge Clip, and menu quirks allow save manipulation and other time saving exploits.
The Current designation covers versions 1.4.0 and higher. In these builds the developers removed the debug menu, slowed menus, and changed physics to 120 frames per second. That subtle shift makes certain bounces harder or impossible and forces routes through sections like Alternation and Grand Design that Legacy runners can skip.
Teslagrad Remastered sits apart as a standalone release with new challenge levels and visual upgrades. The wiki notes that Remastered significantly reduces the power of Blink Bouncing, alters how standing on magnetic bars affects physics, and closes the door on techniques such as Trials Skip, Magic Carpet Skip and several dungeon skips. At the same time it opens a new teleporter room structure and a different path to the scroll vault, which changes how scroll related categories can be approached.
On speedrun.com these differences appear as version filters, letting runners choose whether they want to chase records on the glitch heavy Legacy boards or on the more constrained Current and Remastered environments.
Any Percent: Climbing The Tower In One Breath
Any Percent New Game is the showcase category for Teslagrad. Runs start at the very first chase sequence in the rain soaked streets of Elektropia and end when the final cutscene triggers after defeating the king. There is no scroll requirement, which frees runners to route almost entirely around movement and mandatory boss fights.
The first stretch of the game is about reducing downtime. Techniques such as moonwalking, moonjumping and bunnyhopping let runners keep horizontal speed while manipulating their polarity or recovering from landings. Animation cancels, especially on item pickups, shave off pauses that casual players accept as part of the pacing.
Once blink and the boots are unlocked the route becomes almost unrecognizable. Blink Bounces allow runners to convert vertical and horizontal momentum into huge bursts that clear entire rooms. Spider Skip, Magic Carpet Skip and Trials Skip are used to cut around large puzzle sections, while room specific optimizations like Fast Thunderbolt smooth out transitions between powers and set pieces.
Late in the game the focus turns to bosses and endgame arenas. Techniques such as Iron Lice Skip, Oleg Fast Kill and King Skip transform multi phase encounters into brief scripted sequences where positioning and timing matter more than raw damage output. In Legacy builds these tricks can chain into Back In Time and wrong warp style effects that collapse entire sections of the tower. The “Back in Time: Boots to Well” and “Boots Wrong Warp” tricks, documented through community videos and wiki entries, are among the most dramatic examples of how Teslagrad’s physics and save systems can be pulled out of their intended order.
A clean Any Percent run by a top player becomes a single flowing line from the city streets to the top of Tesla Tower, interrupted only by a handful of loading transitions and required cutscenes that the community has not yet found ways to skip.
Scroll Routes, New Game Plus And Side Categories
Teslagrad is full of collectible scrolls that serve as both lore delivery and progression checks. For speedrunners they also define several major categories. 15 Scrolls requires a New Game run that collects at least fifteen scrolls, which opens the vault area near the end of the game. 100 Percent demands all thirty six scrolls. New Game Plus versions of those categories start from a fully completed save where the boy already has all his equipment, which changes the early game dramatically.
The Scrolls Vault Skip technique, which lets runners bypass parts of the vault sequence while still meeting category rules, appears across these routes. In 100 Percent, runners use Forge Skip and other room specific bounces to collect particular scrolls while minimizing detours. Routes become a balancing act between efficient tower ascent and the need to dip into side chambers that are never seen in Any Percent.
Beyond the main story categories the community maintains leaderboards for a full Teslagrad demo run that collects its nine scrolls and for the Xbox One exclusive challenge levels, which play like focused gauntlets built specifically to push magnetism mechanics to their limits.
These side boards are smaller in raw number of runs but they speak to the way Teslagrad’s design supports many different types of timed play. Some runners specialize in a single room or challenge level, grinding for marginal improvements. Others treat the demo as a short category where they can practice key techniques without committing to a full tower climb.
Tools, Tutorials And A Community Knowledge Base
For a game without built in timer tools or practice features, community infrastructure is crucial. The Teslagrad Wiki’s Speedrunning hub reads like a collaborative textbook. It opens with version definitions, then breaks down general movement techniques, room specific skips, theorycrafting notes on glitches not yet used in live runs, and tool assistance resources such as TeslaTools and TeslaSplit to help with timing and save manipulation.
On the video side, MetalFox Dioxymore’s “Teslagrad Speedrun Tricks” playlist functions as a visual appendix. Short clips cover concepts such as Extended Blink Hitbox, Eclair gap passing, early spider skips and dungeon one shot routes, often capturing both the inputs and the resulting motion in a single concise demonstration.
Threaded through that documentation is a sense of ongoing experimentation. The wiki’s theorycrafting pages track ideas like invisibility glitches, ghost ledges and other edge case interactions that may be too difficult for human runs but useful for tool assisted speedruns. In that way Teslagrad’s community mirrors the science focused subcultures around larger platformers, just with a smaller player base and a single tower as its laboratory.
Teslagrad’s Place In Speedrun History
Teslagrad will probably never match the sheer run volume of giants like Super Metroid or Celeste, but it has settled into a distinct niche. It offers a complete speedrun that fits comfortably under twenty minutes for top Any Percent times, a movement system that rewards both mechanical improvisation and deep mechanical understanding, and a visual style that keeps casual viewers engaged even if they do not follow every glitch name.
It also represents a particular moment in indie history. Developed by a small Norwegian team and released in 2013, it arrived during a wave of physics heavy platformers that were quick to land on PC and consoles and quick to be adopted by streamers. The later release of Teslagrad Remastered and Teslagrad 2 shows that Rain Games still sees value in the setting. For speedrunners, those later versions are both opportunity and challenge, closing some of the most dramatic glitches while creating new routing puzzles inside updated spaces.
A decade after the first runs up Tesla Tower, the game sits on speedrun.com with a stable set of categories, a polished wiki, and a small but persistent group of runners. Teslagrad’s story inside the tower is about a child uncovering a buried conflict. Its story in the wider world of speedrunning is about how a carefully built physics toy can keep revealing new tricks long after the last platform port ships.