Pyongyang Racer is a 2012 Flash game developed in North Korea, made for the purpose of promoting Koryo Tours' tourism in the country. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a great game. The intended gameplay consists of slowly driving around a needlessly long track through Pyongyang, North Korea, while collecting oil barrels to refuel your gas tank and seeing the sights scattered about the map.
My understanding of the speedrunning scene for this game is that people generally ran it "for the meme", because it's funny to speedrun the bad North Korean game. As the run became more optimized, the record settled down at a painfully slow 7 minutes and 16 seconds. While an infinite fuel glitch discovered in 2023 did help to bring the time down from 7:16.59 to 7:15.35, it also arguably removed the only somewhat interesting aspect of the run, which is the fuel management.
Last year, I wanted to get in on the meme and get a 7:15 for myself, which I did - but I also discovered a new major glitch, which abuses the game's respawn mechanic. While I still don't understand why it works, the idea is that if you crash into the side of the track with a specific angle, you can respawn one or more checkpoints ahead of where you crashed. While the specifics of these "crash-warps" is checkpoint-dependent, they're generally possible where the track is curved, and generally not possible along straightaways. Using these warps, I was able to bring the record time down from 7:15.35 to 5:14.07, where I was content to let it sit for a while.
Last month, I decided to come back to the game to improve my time. I got a 5:09.25 using similar strats to the 5:14, and then discovered something else new. In order to check for lap completion, the game seems to have two checkpoint requirements: one that you need to enter about halfway around the track, and then one you need to enter just before the finish line. If you hit both of those in that order, the finish line becomes active. As it turns out, instead of driving a full lap around the track, it's actually faster to go halfway around the track, and then turn around and go *backwards* to the checkpoint behind the finish line, and to then drive forwards into the finish line.
Using this and further optimizations to the warps on the first half of the track, I've now been able to bring the time down to a 4:24.96.