You cannot trust the leaderboards for Resident Evil. Within days of release, players had started digging into the game's code, looking for ways to finish it faster and faster by aggressively cheating. It's probably not possible to beat it faster than a second, but I'm sure people will try.
It's deeply funny, however, to realize this "world record" was achieved by a Resident Evil speedrunner named Carcinogen. His channel is full of legitimately impressive achievements, and he's finished the game (as Chris) in one hour, 29 minutes, and 11 seconds. Holy crap!
(UPDATE: Carcinogen told me he recently bested this time by several minutes. A video is forthcoming.)
Here's the cheating speedrun in question:
As you play Resident Evil, the game tracks your progress and uploads it at the end. Pretty standard. Sadly, too many others in the world are probably doing whatever they can to jack the leaderboards. Some people aren't interested in setting records, they're interested in disruption.
Carginogen is technically one of them, though he's interested in making a larger point:
The fastest legitimate REmake speedruns clocks in around 90 minutes. That's 5,400 seconds.
Saying Carcinogen beat REmake in a single second isn't even true, either. If you watch his playthrough, it obviously takes several minutes for him to trigger the ending, but he's altered enough values in the background to make the game think it's happening in a single second.
This isn't unique to Resident Evil, of course. Every game is ripped apart, explaining why speedruns are recorded on video. If anything weird is up, the video is there to help prove it.
It's possible Capcom could build a leaderboard system to ensure the times listed were legitimate and fair, but it would require extensive development and community resources the company probably doesn't want to dish out for an update to a remake to video game released in 1996.
Still, it sucks. If you want to play by the rules, you can't. The leaderboards are beyond repair.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.