Speedrunning

Speedrunning is the practice of playing a video game, or a defined section of one, with the goal of completing it as quickly as possible.¹³¹⁴ Runners follow carefully planned routes, apply precise movement and tricks, and exploit glitches and sequence breaks that let sections be skipped or finished faster than the developers intended.¹⁵ Completed attempts are typically recorded and uploaded to online leaderboards, where players compete against times posted by others around the world.¹⁶

Runs are organized into categories with specific objectives.⁸ The two most common are “Any%,” in which the runner simply reaches the game’s ending as fast as possible, and “100%,” which requires completing every level or task — collecting all items or defeating all enemies — before finishing.³¹⁶ Additional categories distinguish runs done with or without glitches, and games lacking a clear beginning and end are broken into their own bespoke categories.¹⁶ Two performance markers structure the pursuit: a “PB,” or personal best, is the fastest time a runner has achieved in a category, and a “WR,” or world record, is the fastest time by anyone.¹⁶

Not every game suits a speedrun.¹ A single-player experience with a definitive start and end point is generally needed, along with a measurable degree of player control — whether the controller acrobatics of a Mario game or the tactical move selection of Pokémon.¹ Excess randomness works against a good speed game, and newer titles are rarely run because their optimal paths have not yet been worked out.¹ Older mass-market titles of the 1990s and early 2000s remain the most popular, both for their familiarity and for their potential for exploitable glitches.¹

Origins

The earliest documented speedrunning competitions were conducted on Doom, the first-person shooter published by id Software in late 1993.³⁶ The game shipped with the ability to record and play back “demos” of gameplay, producing small files called LMPs that could be transferred easily even over the narrowband connections of the era.⁶ In January 1994, Christina “Strunoph” Norman created the LMP Hall of Fame, the first real attempt to collect players’ recordings for distribution, with a curated leaderboard that urged gamers to claim the top spot.³⁶ Later in 1994, Frank Stajano, a researcher at AT&T Laboratories in Cambridge, founded Doom Honorific Titles, which established a durable format for the pursuit; achievements such as “D1T6: DOOM Pacifist” required completing a level without dealing damage to any monster.³ In November 1994, Simon Widlake started COMPET-N, the oldest site dedicated to Doom speedruns, where the distinct “Any%” and “100%” styles were coined.³

The community expanded onto other titles beginning with Quake, also developed by id Software and released in June 1996.¹³ The website Nightmare Speed Demos was founded in April 1997 to organize and archive the fastest times, becoming Speed Demos Archive a year later after merging with another site.¹ Speed Demos Archive later added Nintendo’s Metroid Prime in November 2003 before opening to all games a year later; the space adventure gave rise to the concept of the “sequence break,” in which players obtain advanced weapons earlier than intended and blast through levels ahead of schedule.¹ In its early years recording was difficult — some administrators recall players still using VCRs — and some records turned out to be illegitimate.¹

Tool-assisted speedruns

A distinct subcategory, the tool-assisted speedrun or TAS, uses emulation software and additional tools to slow down the game or construct a precisely controlled sequence of inputs, producing runs beyond what a human can execute with two hands and a controller.¹⁶ In 1999, the Doom player and programmer Andy “Aurikan” Kempling released a modified version of the game’s source code that allowed players to record demos in slow motion, letting them optimize inputs frame by frame.³ A TAS is often described as demonstrating what a completely flawless run would look like, and is in most cases near-impossible for a person to reproduce live.¹⁶ The community around such runs is documented at TASVideos, which tracks a long line of emulators adapted for the purpose across systems from the NES to the 3DS.⁵

Routing and technique

Behind competitive times sits the work of “routers,” specialists who determine the fastest path through a game and uncover the tricks that turn a 70-hour role-playing game into a run measured in minutes.⁷ The router “chunkatuff,” responsible for exploits in Escape Goat 2 and Ori and the Blind Forest, described routing as “basically the puzzle game of speedrunning,” noting that in Escape Goat 2 falling blocks that were meant to squish enemies could instead be used to bump them sideways, saving crucial seconds.⁷ The process is heavily trial and error, and most routes never leave the drawing board; runner Adam “VB,” who ran Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and routed Mega Man V, said some routes he devised were too difficult to be realistic in a live run.⁷ Sometimes a game’s own code provides guidance: the router Eric “Jamacanbacn” discovered that Tron: Evolution was built on the Unreal engine and used its developer commands to locate invisible walls and skip entire fight scenes.⁷

Individual games generate their own celebrated tricks. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the hero Link can be sent across mountains by standing near bombs, returned from the dead, and teleported through space and time by exploiting coding flaws.¹ In Majora’s Mask, “bomb hovering” uses bombchus while the “infinite sword glitch” is active, combined with repeated backflips, to make Link float in midair; in Super Mario 64, the “backwards long jump” (BLJ) chains long jumps to build enough speed to pass through walls.¹⁵ Practitioners describe the discipline as a “chimera” of competition — against other players, against the game, and above all against oneself — in which mastering nerves and focus, the “mental game,” matters as much as technical precision.¹⁵

Community and events

Runners have long described the pursuit as collaborative rather than cutthroat: new tricks and glitches are shared openly so that everyone competes on an even footing, and the environment around games such as Ocarina of Time has been likened to a research laboratory.¹¹⁵ Live streaming, particularly on Twitch, brought new visibility, and the semiannual charity marathon Games Done Quick became something of an Olympics for the community.³⁸ Its tenth-anniversary Awesome Games Done Quick event, on February 23, 2020, featured 141 playthroughs and raised more than $3.1 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, including a roughly four-hour run of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a game whose main story averages some 32 hours.³ In 2019, Games Done Quick launched Frame Fatales, an all-female speedrunning showcase.³

The definitive leaderboard site Speedrun.com hosts the boards for thousands of games and links runners to game-specific Discord communities and timing programs.¹⁶ As of July 2021 it recorded more than two million runs across over 20,000 games.⁸ Practically anything with a willing community can be run, from full games such as Super Mario 64 and Minecraft to real-life tasks like baking and pencil sharpening.¹⁶ Beyond the community, the practice has drawn academic attention: a 2022 paper on automating speedrun routing framed the routing task as an optimization problem amenable to graph search, metaheuristics, and deep learning methods.²¹⁰