This is my Rocket Knight Adventures speedrun in 31 minutes and 18 seconds, timed from starting the game to the fade to white after the escape sequence.
A deathless run of Hard mode has been a long-held goal of mine - back in 2010 I went so far as to put a $100 bounty on its successful completion. (Consider this me claiming my own bounty!) However, I don't believe anyone has done it until now, at least not at any sort of speed. The fact that this run turned out to be quite fast (my sum of best splits was 30:52, and over half the time I lost to that was on stage 7) was the icing on the cake.
I don't suspect I'll try to beat this even if it does get beaten by someone else. I achieved my goal, my work here is done. :)