Demon's Souls modder climbs 762 rungs into the history books using a ladder the height of the real-life Empire State Building

Joshua Wolens
·2 min read
A knight plummets from the top of a ladder the size of the Empire State Building in Demon's Souls.
A knight plummets from the top of a ladder the size of the Empire State Building in Demon's Souls.

Penicillin. The Moon landing. Wireless telecommunications. These are just a few of the mad grasps for god's power that humanity has attempted in the last couple of centuries, and now their pantheon is joined by another ludicrous, transcendent venture. A heroic modder has slotted a ladder the height of the actual, genuine, real-life Empire State Building into FromSoft classic Demon's Souls. Then they climbed it. Then they died.

The achievement in question was spotted by GamesRadar and carried out by a player named Thens, who spent about nine minutes and four seconds scaling a ladder equal to the Empire State Building's 381 metres in height (sans tip). Marvel as Thens begins their ponderous climb to the top! Delight as the familiar sounds of the Snake Eater theme kick in! Delight again as it fades out because the climb lasts much longer than the track! And gasp in awe as Thens falls for a full 14 seconds to their death on reaching the top!

Like all the best ideas, the large Demon's Souls ladder began as an off-hand joke. A modder named King_Bore—who also helped make the mod—joked on Twitter that, "using some rough math," it would take a player around 11 minutes and 14 seconds to summit a ladder as tall as the Empire State Building. As a consequence, Thens set out to verify this assertion to the highest standards of empiricism, and, well, here we are.

If you're curious as to how difficult it is to make, like, a really big ladder in Demon's Souls, the answer is: weirdly difficult! In a tweet, King_Bore noted that ladder height in Demon's Souls "wasn't understood" as he, Thens, and a third modder named AdmiralWispy set about building their masterwork.

While you might expect that modders should simply be able to write down a height and have a ladder magically appear, Demon's Souls makes you work harder for it: you have to tell the game the exact number of rungs you want and it'll work out the height from there.

381 metres, if you're wondering, is equivalent to 762 rungs. Demon's Souls might (for now) be a PlayStation game, but I'm not sure anything has ever captured the PC gaming spirit quite as beautifully.