In October 2023, Dan the Man Classic was added to the (at the time limited) Halfbrick+ games library, offering the definitive Dan the Man experience complete with automatic premium and making all other in-app purchases obtainable by other means. Fright Zone is finally available with regular progression, unlocking alongside Frosty Plains after beating Normal Story. Adventure levels also now no longer have a timer, with levels simply unlocking when the previous one is completed on easy difficulty. Most importantly of all, story levels no longer have timers, which for the first time since the release of version 1.1.6 in July 2017 allows us to have a run of Dan the Man starting from a fresh save file with no need to watch minutes of ads just to play the game.

As of right now, the Dan the Man Classic leaderboards are live. There are 8 subcategories, with differing objectives but the same broad set of rules: they must be done from a fresh save file (the run must start on the initial character select screen), they are timed with LRT (real time without loads), and you are not allowed to go to the special events tab or unlock Barry by any means. The categories are (with time estimates from very rudimentary testing):

• Any%: beat 8-4-3 on normal difficulty (~45 minutes lrt, 50 rta)
• Any% Hard: beat 8-4-3 on hard difficulty (~1 hour 40 minutes lrt, 1:50 rta)
• Free Lincoln: beat Free Lincoln! in Adventure mode on easy difficulty, Shark Adventure optional (~35 minutes lrt, 50 rta)
• 38 Achievements: get every achievement except for Dude, Where's My Jetpack? (~2 hours lrt, 2:40 rta)
• All Campaigns: beat 8-4-3 on hard difficulty, as well as Frosty Plains 2-3 and Fright Zone 2-2 (2 hours 20 minutes lrt, 2:40 rta)
• All Trophies: get all 34 gold trophies in Adventure mode (~2 hours lrt, 2:45 rta)
• All Stars: get all 263 stars: 15 from Prologue, 96 from normal story, 96 from hard story, 30 from Frosty Plains, and 26 from Fright Zone (~5 hours 10 minutes lrt, 5:30 rta)
• 100% Minus Costumes: get all stars, get all trophies, upgrade every weapon and character other than Barry to maximum level, unlock survival hard, and get all achievements other than Dude, Where's My Jetpack? (~7 hours 45 minutes lrt, 9 hours rta)

As an aside, while it is technically possible to also get all the non-event costumes in one sitting to make a 100% run, this would require over 12 hours of in-game time just to grind enough coins to buy them all and tokens to unlock them all. Given that 100% Minus Costumes is already expected to be a just under 8 hour run, this would more than double the RTA time making the majority of the run the mind-numbing task of coin grinding, so we will not be including this as a leaderboard. If you for some reason do want to try that anyway (I seriously do not recommend that you do), then you will probably have to allow closing the game during vortex shops because otherwise the token grind for the Prize Machine costumes requires excessive amounts of time travel. Point being, 100% Minus Costumes is as close to a true 100% run as you are going to get from our leaderboards.

For people lacking a Halfbrick+ subscription, the game does offer a 1 hour (real time) free trial, which happens to be enough time to complete either Any% or Free Lincoln. You can restart your free trial at any point by just uninstalling and reinstalling the game, giving you a fresh save file again and an hour to do what you will with it. For android users, I have posted a link to an older version of Dan the Man Classic that doesn't require a subscription in the first place, which you can find in the resources section of our leaderboards.

Happy running everyone!

After polling the top runners, I have decided to go back on the decision to include time spent on the map in the real time without loads (LRT) timing method. As of now, LRT no longer includes time spent on the map screen. I have already gone and retimed all (non-rejected) runs that used LRT so that they no longer include time spent on the map, so this change is effective immediately.

At the time that LRT was first conceived I polled the top runners and we agreed that having map time was necessary to punish people for stalling on the map for excessive periods of time. With retrospect, having map time included in LRT when practically all other out-of-gameplay menus are not included is not only inconsistent, but also it adds on unnecessary variance to the time and can lead to the unfortunate "Halfbrick Special" (as coined by @Tezca) where entering a level too quickly softlocks the game on the map. For the most part, keeping map time in LRT was more of a holdoff from the old RTA timing method rather than it being actually a good idea.

Despite this, there is one notable upside to including map time that now needs to be addressed. Whenever you reach a checkpoint, the game is saved and when you pause and quit or close the game you will be able to continue from the checkpoint at your leisure. A small quirk of this is that when you respawn from the checkpoint you respawn to the right of the checkpoint, so you can skip over 2-3 tiles just by forcibly closing the game the moment you touch a checkpoint. This is obviously a very small effect, to the point where the time you spend on the map after reopening the game completely nullifies all the advantage that this strategy could have, so with the old system this was kept in check. With map time removed from LRT, this is now completely free time save (assuming the route doesn't require you to asm across the checkpoint or anything like that), and while it's unrealistic that someone would actually go for it right now, the fact that this is optimal means that it's possible that someone would try to go for this to shave off a few frames in super optimized categories (Prologue comes to mind). If this were to ever actually become a real strategy, it would inevitably cause headaches for both the people trying to attempt it and for moderators trying to retime runs, and just generally wouldn't make for a fun gameplay experience (or viewing experience for that matter). For this reason, I am going to futureproof against this by adding the following rule to the global game rules:

Closing the game during gameplay is not allowed: the game may not be closed while in a level, at an in-level shop, at a vortex shop, on the pause menu, on the screenshot screen, on the revival potion screen, on the hospital screen, or on a loading screen.

As far as I am aware, the only collateral damage this has is that a particular token grinding method in survival is now illegal, which is obviously completely irrelevant to all of our categories. This also opens the door for using the time played statistic as a timing method, which theoretically could only be circumvented by closing the game during gameplay, but it is still a flawed timing method since it fails to track milliseconds, which is a problem since you can again pause and quit at every checkpoint to save between 0 and 0.983 seconds every time from the in game time truncating the milliseconds. Because of this, we will not be switching to this as a timing method for our current categories unless this issue is fixed somehow.

Now that map time is removed, the list of things that count to the final time with this method is as follows:

• Time spent with the HUD visible (ie you are playing the game) except after the cutscene in 8-4-2 (you are not playing the game in this particular instance) and after the Arena complete! message appears in arena levels (to prevent the slow motion effect from causing massive time losses for no reason)
• Time spent entering, browsing and exiting an in-level shop
• Time spent during the revival potion animation and death animation (up until the first frame of fade-out)
• Time spent on the pause menu (and settings submenu in the pause menu)
• Time spent on the screenshot menu
• Time spent on the Save Point popup screen when reaching the first checkpoint on a new save

A non-exhaustive list of things that do not count to the final time is:

• Time spent watching a cutscene
• Time spent on a loading screen / black screen / fade-in or fade-out
• Time spent on menus other than the pause menu, screenshot screen or in-level shops (this includes the map screen, character selection menu, costume selection menu, main menu, vortex shop, and all others)
• Time spent on the "No internet connection detected" screen (unless you are still able to move while this screen is up)
• Time spent waiting for an ad to load, watching an ad, or watching the cassette cutscene at a checkpoint
• Time spent on the "Revive?" screen (from first frame of player showing the damage animation to first frame after the vendor disappears from the bottom left corner)
• Time spent on the level end screen and level intro screen
• On runs that were done on low end devices on v1.6.20 and below only, time spent frozen before a checkpoint/other freeze times if it is particularly noticeable (in 1.7.0 and above, the game will do multiple frames' worth of calculations if it detects that it's missed frames, meaning there are technically no pauses in gameplay)
• Time spent on the hospital screen (normally only visible in v1.4.44 and below after dying, but sometimes appears after dying in 8-4-2;1 in later versions)

LRT still functions under the rationale that anything that every runner has to experience during gameplay in a run must count to the final time. Other than map time which has just been addressed, I don't see any reason to change whether the rest of these categories are included/excluded from LRT since these are pretty logical.

Happy running everyone!

After 8 years of being in the game I have finally added Frosty Plains and Fright Zone as their own leaderboards. Unlike the main story, there will not be individual chapter categories for either side story, since they are each only 2 chapters long and all of their levels are shorter than typical story levels. Additionally, the levels from each campaign have been added to the pool of individual levels, excluding Fright Zone's battle stages as they do not have an in-game timer (though I am open to including them if there is enough demand).

The Frosty Plains category requires you to play through all 6 levels of its campaign, starting at Frosty Plains 1-1 and continuing along the main path until Frosty Plains 2-3. As with the main story, the time star is not required for 100%. On versions 1.0.9 through 1.2.5 Frosty Plains was a normal mode campaign, so that has a separate leaderboard, but the default is hard mode.

The Fright Zone category requires you to play through all 6 levels of its campaign, including the two battle stages, starting at Fright Zone 1-1 and continuing along the main path until Fright Zone 2-2. The time star is again not required for 100%, however you must obtain 3 stars on both of the battle stages (ie a score of 55000 on B1 and 60000 on B2).

As Fright Zone is the first campaign to require battle stages, here are the (load removed) timing rules for arenas: time starts upon releasing the go button on the vortex shop to enter the arena, and ends either on the first repeated frame right before the arena complete message displays or if there is no repetition then on the frame that the arena complete message first displays. To get the total load removed time for a level with multiple arenas, do this process for each arena and add up the time. (This doesn't matter for any level on the leaderboards, but all time spent watching a cutscene in the arena or watching an ad in the arena, which is possible in special event levels, is removed from the load removed time.)

Happy running everyone!

Dan the Man has been famously terrible to speedrun at top level, in part because loading times are inconsistent across devices (better devices will load faster and give a free advantage), and because if you really want to be at the top you have no choice but to get premium (either by buying it which is unfair on the users, or getting a cracked game which is unfair on the devs). We're going to change that.

As of now, all categories that require real time (Full Story, individual chapters and Prologue (new game)) will now be sorted by real time without loads (LRT) as opposed to the standard real time (RTA) that we had previously been using. (Don't worry, you won't need to try to time this yourselves. You can just submit a guess for the time with loads and leave the LRT field empty, we'll do the rest.) You will of course still be able to see the RTA time on the leaderboards and on individual runs.

There is of course the question of "What counts as a load?" Our rationale is that anything that every runner will have to experience during their runs that will always take the same amount of time will count as a load. This means that the time taken to enter a shop or watching your character's death animation should not be deducted from the overall run time, but the time spent in a cutscene or time spent waiting for the cassette cutscene at a checkpoint should since that depends on your device specs or not having premium respectively. The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of what will and will not be counted as a load in story levels.

Counts toward final run time:

• Time spent with the controls or HUD visible (ie you are playing the game) except after the cutscene in 8-4-2 (you are not playing the game in this particular instance)
• Time spent entering, browsing and exiting an in-level shop
• Time spent during the revival potion animation and death animation (up until the first frame of fade-out)
• Time spent on the pause menu (and settings submenu in the pause menu)
• Time spent navigating the map (counted from the first frame that the map is fully visible to the frame after a button is pressed to leave the map, such as a chest on the map, the character selection button, back button, adventure button, survival button, shop button, or play button on a level)

Does not count toward final run time:

• Time spent watching a cutscene
• Time spent on a loading screen / black screen / fade-in or fade-out
• Time spent on menus other than the map, pause screen or in-level shop (this includes the character selection menu, costume selection menu, main menu, and all others)
• Time spent on the "No internet connection detected" screen (unless you are still able to move while this screen is up)
• Time spent waiting for an ad to load, watching an ad, or watching the cassette cutscene at a checkpoint
• Time spent on the "Revive?" screen (from first frame of player showing the damage animation to first frame after the vendor disappears from the bottom left corner)
• Time spent on the level end screen and level intro screen
• On runs that were done on low end devices on v1.6.20 and below only, time spent frozen before a checkpoint/other freeze times if it is particularly noticeable (in 1.7.0+, the game will do multiple frames' worth of calculations if it detects that it's missed frames, meaning there are technically no pauses in gameplay)
• Time spent on the hospital continue screen (normally only visible in v1.4.44 and below after dying, but sometimes appears after dying in 8-4-2;1)

In arena levels, timing is as follows: time starts upon releasing the go button on the vortex shop to enter the arena, and ends the moment that the arena complete message displays. Time that is spent doing one of the things listed in the above list before seeing the arena complete message will also be removed from the final run time.

Happy running everyone!