I heard a pretty good explanation once from a glitchless speedrunner in the Ocarina of Time community that distinguishes what makes certain techniques a "glitch", while others are not (at least within the rules of that community). So this is just my opinion, and of course the rules for this particular game could be completely different if desired.

If a technique introduces a new game mechanic, it is considered a glitch. I interpret this to mean that if a technique modifies the intended behavior of Indy or his environment, it is a glitch. For example, using the chalk out of a roll jump allows Indy to avoid taking fall damage (when he normally would) and survive standing in a death zone (when he should be killed instantly) -- I would say that this modifies the intended behavior of both Indy and the environment, so it should be considered a glitch. Also, something like clipping through a wall modifies the intended behavior of the environment (since walls should be solid), and would also be glitches.

However, if a technique uses only existing game mechanics, it is not a glitch. Something like the jump shortcut in Canyonlands that allows you to skip the shimmy ledge, I would not consider a glitch. It involves only jumping and grabbing a ledge, which are both perfectly intended behaviors for Indy. The developers may have not foreseen that Indy could make such a jump successfully, but it is perfectly possible without modifying any game mechanics. So in my opinion skips like this should be allowable.

In my opinion, a "glitchless" category should not necessarily impose any restrictions regarding skipping puzzles or items -- if they can be skipped using only intended game mechanics as described above (albeit in unintended ways), that should be allowable in a strictly "glitchless" category. For example, banning the chalk glitch would have everything to do with game mechanics, and nothing to do with skipping most of the Canyonlands level. There could be other categories such as "no major skips" that impose such restrictions.

But of course, all this is just my humble opinion -- it doesn't necessarily have to apply to this game.

Right, unfortunately both the chalk and all forms of rolling were apparently removed in the N64 version, so to the best of my knowledge there's no way to get to the bottom of the canyon early (though I have tried many times).

I just timed the difference between falling down the waterfall normally and using this glitch to skip climbing out of the pool at the bottom -- even with the perfect launch to trigger the cutscene (which is rare), it was a few seconds slower to skip the water pool.

In my experimentation I encountered some weird behavior with the waterfall in the Canyonlands level.

(See YouTube description for more details.)

I'm not sure if it could be useful for anything, but I'm curious if you can replicate it in the PC version. I also don't fully understand why this happens, so I suppose it could potentially be useful elsewhere if better understood.

All I can think of is it ¤may¤ be very slightly faster to use this glitch in order to skip climbing out of the pool of water to trigger the cutscene -- but even then Indy needs to die and continue before progressing, which may waste more time than it saves from skipping the water (not to mention that this seems precise and inconsistent to set up). So it seems to me like any application here is doubtful.

Thanks! I found that skip while I was looking around as well and tested it out, I was able to get a consistent setup for it. But it's a bummer that not much more has been documented.

I'm not familiar with the PC version hardly at all, so I suppose testing some of those strategies on N64 would be a good place to start. Are there any other resources beside this forum that you would recommend for finding glitches/skips in the PC version?

Hi, I'm new to the site but have been watching speedruns of various games for quite a while.

This game (on N64) was a very memorable part of my childhood, and I've been thinking about picking it up as my first speedrun. It seems like not very much has been done with it on N64, so I thought it might be fun to do some glitch hunting and routing of my own.

I see some resources for skips and glitches on the PC version around -- does anyone know of any documented speedruns/routes/strategies/glitches for the N64 version?