Speedrunning

Speedrunning is the practice of playing a video game, or a distinct section of one, with the primary objective of completing it as rapidly as possible. Rather than experiencing a game at a casual pace or exploring all of its side content, speedrunners focus heavily on efficiency, memorization, and motor skills. Accomplishing world-class times often requires adhering to meticulously planned routes, mastering precise movement mechanics, and occasionally exploiting programming oversights—commonly referred to as glitches—to bypass sections or entire levels that the developers intended players to navigate traditionally.

While traditional speedrunning relies purely on human reflexes and execution, the hobby also encompasses specialized subgenres, most notably tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS). A TAS involves using emulation software, frame-by-frame advancement, and scripted input sequences to achieve theoretically optimal gameplay that is generally impossible for a human player to perform in real time.

History and Evolution

Although players have competed for fast completion times since the earliest days of electronic gaming, modern speedrunning developed largely through the evolution of computer gaming culture in the 1990s. Early titles like Metroid (1986) and Prince of Persia (1989) encouraged swift completion by displaying the player's final time upon finishing the game. However, id Software's Wolfenstein 3D (1992) introduced the concept of official "par times" based on the developer's personal records, establishing an explicit benchmark for players to challenge.

The release of Doom in 1993 marked a watershed moment for the community. The game featured a built-in demo-recording system that saved lightweight playback files (with the extension .lmp) rather than bulky video recordings. These files could be easily shared across early Internet bulletin board systems. This technical capability led to the creation of dedicated score-tracking communities, such as the LMP Hall of Fame and the COMPET-N leaderboard website founded by Simon Widlake in 1994, which ranked single-player completion times on a global scale.

When id Software released Quake in 1996, it expanded upon Doom's foundation by introducing fully realized 3D environments and physics engines that fostered new movement mechanics, such as "bunny hopping." Nolan "Radix" Pflug released the pioneering full-game demo Quake Done Quick in 1997, demonstrating that entire games could be completed at breathtaking speeds. In 1998, early tracking sites merged to form the Speed Demos Archive (SDA), which eventually expanded from hosting only Quake runs to accepting speedruns across a wide variety of platforms and titles.

Communities and Competition

As video-sharing platforms and live-streaming websites emerged in the late 2000s and 2010s, speedrunning transitioned from a niche forum-based hobby into a major spectator phenomenon. Communities coalesced around individual titles, collaborating via Discord, forums, and wikis to discover new routes, analyze game code, and refine strategies down to single frames.

Competitive metrics primarily revolve around verified leaderboard submissions categorized by specific rulesets, such as Any% (finishing the game as fast as possible using any means, including glitches) and 100% (completing all required objectives or collecting all items). In addition to asynchronous leaderboard competition, head-to-head racing has become immensely popular, both at local gatherings and during large charity marathon events such as Games Done Quick, where speedrunners showcase their skills live to global audiences.