From the archive
Canabalt Scores
Canabalt's iPhone version sent every run's distance to an official leaderboard, with daily, weekly, monthly and global lists. Boing Boing's list of the best indie and iPhone games of 2009 linked it when it praised the iPhone version for adding an official leaderboard.
Semi Secret is an independent publication, not the studio that made these games; this page is an unofficial account written from the public record.
The best runs on Earth
That was the board's own heading. In the January 2013 copy the Internet Archive kept, the top five global runs all belong to one name and sit between 299,890 and 299,999 meters, just under 300,000, and the hundredth place is 53,635 meters. We read 300,000 as a limit of the board; the studio never said so in what survives.
Why distance is hard
Canabalt's runner starts at 100 pixels a second and gains speed more slowly the faster he goes, up to 800 pixels a second, which the designer put at about 80 meters a second. Every crate cuts speed by 30 percent, and the gaps between rooftops grow with your speed, so a long run is a long string of clean jumps, with about half a second to react at top speed. Our page on tuning Canabalt has every number.
What happened to the board
The scores ran on the studio's own backend, which it chose not to publish when it opened the game's source in 2010. The last archived copy of the board is from 2013; a 2013 update on Android, made with the partner Kittehface, brought new leaderboards for eight new game modes.