Speedrunning

A speedrun (IPA: [ˈspiːdɹʌn]) is a play-through of a computer or video game in which the whole game or a select part of it, such as a single level, is played with the intent of completing it as quickly as possible, optionally with certain prerequisites. The term is only used in the context of games that were not originally or primarily designed with time-squashing in mind; one generally does not "speedrun" a racing game (in those cases the game's standard setting for achieving and recording fast times is called a time attack or time trial mode). Both speedrunning and time attacking are often practiced competitively in Internet-based communities.

There are two big subgenres of speedruns: unassisted or regular speedruns and tool-assisted speedruns. Unassisted speedruns are done in real-time using only whatever features there were in the actual game on the original hardware, while tool-assisted speedruns also use features found outside the game in order to create the movie, such as the "save state" feature found in emulators (which is called re-recording in this context).

Among the subgenres, there are two major categories: minimalist or any%, and 100% speedruns. Minimalist runs involve the player aiming to complete the game as quickly as possible, skipping as much of the game as needed, while 100% runs require that as much of the game is played as possible, such as killing all enemies in the game or collecting every item available. Some runs fall into the low-percentage or low% category, where the fastest time is attempted while collecting only the bare minimum amount of items, power-ups or abilities required for completion. These are usually slower than the minimalist runs due to extra time spent killing enemies with lesser abilities or actively avoiding items.

The creation of a speedrun is usually done by one person, and sometimes by a whole team (a collaborative speedrun). By one person, it can be done in one play session (a single-segment speedrun) or multiple (a multi-segment or segmented speedrun; usually replaced by the number of segments: "in ten segments"). Segmented speedruns are done by defining what a game's divisions are in order to run them separately, in multiple sessions (usually separated by save points). This allows for a higher level of perfection because the entire game does not need to be run all at once; runners can redo small parts of a game as many times as they need to until they are satisfied with the result; it's for this reason that segmented speedruns are exclusively faster than their single-segment counterparts. It is normal, however, that the individual parts are done in order of appearance in the game, since those parts usually rely on data from previously played levels, such as the weapons that one has in a first-person shooter or the experience points in a role-playing game.

History

Doom developed what might have been the first online speedrunning fanbase, emerging in 1994 around newsgroups, FTPs and websites that collected demos (see Doom speedrunning). Speedrunning entered mainstream with the famous Quake done Quick demo for Quake created by the eponymous group. QdQ also produced Quake done Quicker, which was later made obsolete by Quake done Quick with a Vengeance, and Scourge done Slick, movies which in addition to top-notch speedrunning skills featured humorous plot and camerawork, making QdQ one of the pioneers of the machinima community.

It could be argued that all of the Metroid games were among the first to have major speedrun challenges. They have built-in rewards for speed in the form of earning better endings for beating the game faster.

Techniques

Route planning

File:Bombmanmap.png

Route planning sheet for the Bomb Man stage in Joel Yliluoma's Rockman tool-assisted speedrun

File:Bombmanmap2.png

A more definitive version of the above image; redundant routes have been scrapped and the most feasible one has been noted down in greater detail

An essential part of speedrunning is to find the shortest feasible route through the game. In highly non-linearly structured games there is often no obvious choice. For example, the shortest possible route might contain so many obstacles that it is virtually impossible to use; it is therefore often necessary to find a compromise between ease and distance. Depending on how the player's skill improves, faster but increasingly difficult routes may be chosen.

Additionally, depending on the structure of levels, there has to be constructed a route for them as well. Contrary to strictly linear levels which can only be finished using one predetermined route, there are games in which levels leave a lot of room for creativity in its playthrough.

Good examples of this can be found in Quake, where even years after the initial versions of its speedrun routes there are still additional shortcuts being discovered. One notable example of a level which has undergone a lot of route changes in this game is E4M3 (The Elder God Shrine). Originally, the route for this map was very long and involved going through the graveyard in addition to many other things. After the release of the first Quake done Quick video, in which this route was recorded as a 1:21 run by Yonathan Donner, it was found out that a large part of this route could be skipped by using a slope jump in the starting room, leading to Donner improving his run to 0:57. This was the basic foundation of the map's route, which is still being used today: do the slope jump, get the silver key, run back to the start room, jump to the other side, get the gold key, and exit. A variety of new shortcuts were found since then, constantly updating the optimal route. Following Donner's record, "DooMfienD" used an in-flight grenade jump from the back of a Fiend rather than one from balcony to balcony in order to get to the other side of the start room. He also added a grenade jump at the silver key and got 0:55 for Quake done Quicker. Markus Taipale later replaced this with a bunny hop. Evan Wagner ran 0:54 by adding a grenade jump from the Knights near the gold key and an additional boost in a long hallway. These additional grenade jumps became possible due to more efficient health usage attained by picking up the second large health upgrade when returning at the starting point rather than when starting. Ilkka Kurkela added bunny hops to get 0:50. The grenade jump at the silver key went through a few revisions (being replaced by a double grenade jump or a quad boost) but was eventually reverted to DooMfienD's original method because the health was needed for a much more important trick devised by Markus Taipale: a Fiend boost after the start, and a Quad Damage grenade jump at the gold key that carries the player at full speed nearly all the way to the exit. Combining all of these tricks, Markus was able to record 0:40 for Quake done Quick with a Vengeance, a run which he later improved to 0:37. Even so, the route was still not optimal, as proved by Peter Horvath, who added a grenade jump from a Spawn in the lava near the silver key, which gave him the currently fastest time of 0:33. This route is currently believed to be optimal. See the example videos paragraph for a video representation of this route development.

The possibility to run through a game faster by using a superior course depends on the linearity of that game. The more linear the game is, the less able a player will be to alter the route of play. The amount of planning that can go in both the level sequence and the actual gameplay may vary a lot and be disproportionate; one might spend a lot of time planning out the route of an individual level while the general route in the game is relatively straightforward.

Sequence breaking

File:Sm64 mips.png

Eddie Taylor (aka. "kirbykarter") using MIPS to board Bowser's sub before the game, Super Mario 64, is supposed to allow the possibility

The best routes rarely rely upon the paths and progressions that were designated by the developers. Skilled players will usually discover ways to finish parts of the game in a different order than was intended, and they consequentially often find ways to skip parts of a game entirely. Using these shortcuts is called sequence breaking. They are often possible because their existence has been overlooked by the developers, although they are sometimes actually implemented intentionally; usually, only shortcuts that are believed to not be part of the gameplay as the designers had intended it are considered to be part of sequence breaking.

The first documented action in a video game to be called a sequence break occurred in the Nintendo GameCube game Metroid Prime. It was called "Gravity Suit and Ice Beam before Thardus"; using the since then common "X before Y" notation in the nomenclature of sequence breaking (as the disjunction of sequences is the essence of such events). Thardus was designed to be a mandatory boss before the Gravity Suit and Ice Beam could be obtained, hence the novelty of bypassing the boss while still obtaining the items. This was first achieved by Steven Banks on January 18, 2003, after the possibility of such an act was suggested by "kip", an online persona and important Metroid speedrunner whose real name is unknown. Banks posted his findings about the act being possible on the Metroid Prime message board on GameFAQs in a thread which attracted a number of interested gamers. The gamers quickly became a community and strove to accomplish more and better feats in the game. It is currently assumed that the term, as used in this context, was first coined by a person known online as "SolrFlare" in this thread on February 5, 2003. Thus, the term remains most often applied to the Metroid Prime series of games, as opposed even to other games in the Metroid series or games in general (in other contexts, it is also simply called a shortcut).

Since then, sequence breaking has been applied to many other games and is now always considered a possibility when planning a speedrun.

A well-known trick for sequence breaking in first-person shooters is the so called "rocket jump", which consists of intentionally jumping over a mine or shrapnel that is exploding, or while shooting the ground with a rocket launcher. The explosion allows the player to jump higher than normal, reaching nearby but otherwise unreachable places. Obviously, the player incurs significant damage from the explosion; one usually has access to a limited number of rocket jumps in one level before a next one would cause the character to die. For that reason, rocket jumps require extra planning to make the greatest usage of the health that is available in the level, both directly (through health packs that are found on route, for example), or indirectly (such as by taking a detour to get more health if the resulting rocket jump capabilities will make up for the time lost to obtain the health).

File:E3m2trigger.png

The "trigger" object on the foreground (highlighted in red) is bypassed in a creative way, allowing an unreachable key (not pictured) to be grabbed; if the player were to touch the trigger object, the key would be transported out of reach.

In another example (again, from the Quake done Quick speedruns), the runner jumps to an otherwise unreachable key (used to open up a door that leads to the exit) by deliberately getting hit by a gib that was fired at him by a nearby zombie at the beginning of E3M2 (Vaults of Zin). By getting hit by the gib, the runner gains additional upwards momentum, which, if done right, can carry one over the trigger that would activate a QuakeC script which would move the key out of reach when touched. This technique requires precise timing and practice, and ultimately also a lot of luck. Since the level is centered on finding an alternative way to reach the key, the sequence breaking permits the runner to skip almost the entire level.

One famous example of sequence breaking is a series of glitches which allow Super Mario 64 to be completed after collecting only 16 stars (as opposed to 70, which is the game-legitimate minimum); the game can be completed in less than twenty minutes by doing so. See the example videos paragraph for a video representation of this particular instance of sequence breaking.

Glitches

Sometimes a glitch will allow for an interesting speedrunning opportunity. When running a game, it is sometimes possible to use the physics of the game to do things that would normally seem unorthodox. The classic example is being able to walk through an enemy due to an inferior "close approach" collision detection; games don't do pixel-perfect collision checks, which sometimes makes it possible to touch and even go partially inside the enemies without getting hurt. Additionally, if one is moving very fast, it's sometimes possible to go through objects because the game does not render a frame in which one is inside the object. Combined with the close approach collision abuse, the speed may not even need to be very high.

As such, by various means (such as pushing into corners in strange ways or getting pushed by an enemy), one may sometimes get inside the floor, walls, or ceiling. While it might be that the player just gets stuck and ruins his game because he now can now no longer continue, it might also allow the usage of new routes that did not exist before. For example, one might be able to jump out of the clipping zone very easily, allowing the complete passing through it. Because of close approach collision detection being so simple to most games, it is made to look accurate by "ejecting" the object if it ends up partially inside a wall or other impassable zone. It also ensures the character can't get stuck inside a wall because of simple programming. Visually, this appears as scrolling: the game automatically moves the object that's inside the wall, usually horizontally and to the right, until it finds a place where it can exit the wall. When this happens, sometimes the game will even push the player further into the wall. This feature can be used to take radical shortcuts in games, but are usually too difficult to pull off consistently in most unassisted speedruns.

Another commonly used technique is the usage of temporary invulnerability given to the player by the game, usually straight after getting hit by an enemy. Most games visualize this invulnerability by making the player character flicker. This is to prevent the player from immediately getting hit again, but can sometimes also protect him from instant death hazards, such as deadly spikes or lava. It can also be used to pass through monsters that would otherwise take more time to destroy, or to pass through other nearby monsters that would do more damage. Temporary invulnerability is also usually given to the player during a cutscene that cannot be interrupted, such as a story dialogue or the animation for finishing a level. If the player touches something lethal during this state of game, the game may very well ignore it and let him continue like nothing at all has happened.

Many polished and acclaimed speedruns are filled with glitch abuse, but the usage of several inconspicuous glitches may be left unnoticed by casual gamers.

Tool assistance

Main article: Tool-assisted speedrun

Tool-assisted speedruns make use of tools such as slow motion and re-recording. The basic premise of these runs is that a "tool" (like an emulator that provides the author with slow motion and re-recording functionality) is used in order to overcome human limitations such as skill and reflex.

Notable games for speedrunning

Quake

Peter Horvath doing a grenade jump on a Spawn in E4M3 (The Elder God Shrine) in order to jump over a large lava pit

Quake is arguably the only game to rival Doom as the most popular game to speedrun ever. People first started recording demos of Quake playthroughs when it was released in June 1996 and sharing them with others on the demos/e directory in cdrom.com's Quake file hierarchy. There were two distinct kinds of demos: those in which the player killed all monsters and found all secrets on the map (called 100% demos) and those in which the player ignored these goals in order to finish the level as fast as possible (called runs). All levels were, at that time, recorded solely on the "Nightmare" difficulty level, the highest in the game.

In April 1997, Nolan Pflug (aka. "Radix") first started the Nightmare Speed Demos web site to keep track of the fastest demos. The first Quake done Quick [1] project was finalized in June that same year. Quake done Quick, unlike the conventional record demos, featured a full playthrough of the game, carrying over one level's finishing statistics to the next. The run ended up finishing the entire game on Nightmare difficulty in 19:49 [2]; an astonishment at that time. It received widespread attention from gaming magazines, being distributed with free CDs that usually came with them. This popularized speedrunning for a much larger audience than before and attracted many newcomers. Not all of those newcomers agreed with the old-timers's dogma that runs should be made on the hardest possible skill level. Thus, in August 1997 Muad'Dib's Quake Page came to be, run by Gunnar Andre Mo (aka. "Muad'Dib") and specializing in "Easy" difficulty runs.

In April 1998, Nolan and Gunnar merged their pages, thus creating Speed Demos Archive, which today is still the central repository for Quake speed demos of any kind.

As of March 2006, Speed Demos Archive contains a total amount of 8481 demos (on both official and custom maps), accounting for a total time of 253 hours, 44 minutes and 39 seconds.

Further information: [[:Speed Demos Archive]]

Techniques

The reason why Quake became so popular to speedrun is mainly due to the buggy physics engine which creative players can use to their advantage. This has caused many unconventional techniques to be invented, most notably the rocket jump (or similarly, the grenade jump), which is a jump combined with a rocket fired at a surface near the player's position. The rocket's explosion can then be used to propel the player to large heights that are normally unreachable by normal jumping, or to attain very high travelling speed.

Another technique, bunny hopping, was pioneered by Ilkka Kurkela (aka. "Mineral") in May 1998 after being discovered in Deathmatch play. Bunny hopping is essentially a technique that involves jumping and strafing in order to accelerate to speeds up to around 60% higher than when normally running. It has since been virtually impossible to beat records without using this technique.

Records

The records listed here are continuous runs through all of Quake that are recorded in one playing session. This kind of run, done on either a full episode or the entire game, is called a Marathon. Such runs are categorized in two types and difficulty levels; 100% runs, in which it is required that the player kills all monsters and finds all secrets on every level, and runs without this requirement.

The most noteworthy Marathons are listed below. Many more have been created, however; for a full list, see Speed Demos Archive: Marathons.

Category	Time	Date	Player
Easy difficulty (run)	13:46	June 29, 2005	Connor Fitzgerald
Easy difficulty (100% run)	46:02	March 07, 2004	Marlo Galinski
Nightmare difficulty (run)	19:50	July 19, 2005	Connor Fitzgerald
Nightmare difficulty (100% run)	69:33	October 18, 2005	Justin Fleck

Quake done Quick

Another very important aspect of the Quake speedrunning community is Quake done Quick, a collection of movies in which the game is finished as fast as possible with special rules and aims. Unlike the normal records listed above, these movies are created one level at a time rather than in one continuous play session; as such, it is possible for multiple people to help create the movie by sending in demos of individual levels, and much higher times can be aimed for as the segmentation allows one to easily try again upon committing an error. It also allows runners to only have to focus on a small portion of the game rather than all of it.

These movies are by far more popular than the conventional records, both in the community itself and outside of it. Some of them, most notably the movies that feature a fast playthrough of the game on the Nightmare difficulty level without additional voluntary challenges, have even been distributed with gaming magazines and posted on news sites. Slashdot has published an announcement of the then newly created Quake done Quick with a Vengeance movie on its front page.[3] Out of all the series' movies, this one is also the most popular. In it, the entire game is finished in 12:23 on "Nightmare" difficulty, the hardest in the game.[4] This run succeeded Quake done Quicker and the original Quake done Quick movie, in which the game was finished in respectively 16:35 and 19:49. The main reason for the latest installment being over 4 minutes faster, an improvement that surpassed the initial expectations of the runners, is the discovery of bunny hopping, which allowed runners to attain a much higher speed in most levels and even made it possible to save rockets or grenades for jumps that could now be done without them. This movie is currently being improved by new and old runners for a production called Quake done Quick with a Vengeance Part II.[5] Currently, the improvements that have been made thus far would result in a time of 11:32 for the entire game, an improvement of 51 seconds.

Some of the productions have been turned into Machinima movies, using so-called "recams" (showing the run from preset camera perspectives rather than the first-person view) and sometimes even custom skins, models, and a script to turn them into films rather than speedrun videos.

For a full list of the movies that have been created, see the Quake done Quick Web site. Unlike the conventional records, the individual players that worked on these movies are not listed; there are always many different players working on these projects, and as such, they are usually attributed to the "Quake done Quick team", while details on who made which portion of the run can be found in the description text files that come with them.

Doom

December 1993 saw the release of id Software's Doom. Among some of its major features, like at that time unparallelled graphics, LAN- and Internet-based multiplayer support, and user modification possibilities, it also gave the players the ability to record demo files of their playthrough. This particular feature was first picked up by Christina Norman (aka. "Strunoph") in January 1994 when she launched the LMP Hall of Fame website.

This site was, however, quickly obsoleted by the DOOM Honorific Titles, launched in May 1994 by Frank Stajano, which introduced the first serious competition between players.[6] This site would create the basis for all DOOM demosites that would follow. The DHT were designed around a notion of earning titles by successfully recording a particular type of demo on pre-determined maps in the IWADs. These 'exams' became very popular as the player had to earn each title by sending in a demo of the feat to one of the site's judges to justify his application. Doom II was released in October 1994, and the DHT conformed to the new additions as well as the new Doom version releases. At the height of its popularity, the DHT had many different categories and playing styles. For example, playing with only the fists and pistol while killing all monsters on a map became known as Tyson mode, named after the heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson. Pacifist-mode was playing without intentionally harming any monsters. Each category had easy, medium, and hard difficulty maps for players to get randomly chosen for. Many legends in the Doom speedrunning scene started out in the DHT, including George Bell (Tyson), Steffen Udluft (Pacifist), Kai-Uwe "Gazelle" Humpert, Frank "Jesus" Siebers (Nightmare), Thomas "Panter" Pilger (Reality), and Yonatan Donner. Unfortunately, the DHT always had trouble retaining a permanent Internet location. This, combined with the changing rules and the diminished importance of most of the titles, made public interest wane as the years rolled on.

In November 1994, the Doom speedrunning scene, in the form of the COMPET-N website, took off.[7] Its creator, Simon Widlake, intended the site to be a record scoreboard for a variety of Doom-related achievements, but unlike its predecessors, they all centered around one key idea: speed. Players were required to run through Doom's levels as fast as humanly possible in order to attain a spot on the constantly-updated COMPET-N scoreboards which eventually made Doom one of the most popular games for speedrunning.

Like the DOOM Honorific Titles, this site experienced multiple location changes over time; it was even at cdrom.com for a while before Istvan Pataki took over as maintainer and moved the site to the now defunct ftp.sch.bme.hu. From there on, since early 1998, it was in the hands of Adam Hegyi, who has been the maintainer ever since. It is currently located at doom2.net.

As of March 2006, COMPET-N contains a total amount of 6072 demos (on both official and custom maps), accounting for a total time of 462 hours, 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

Further information: [[:Doom competitive play and COMPET-N]]

Techniques

Due to speed being the only prerequisite, the runners began developing repertoires of tricks that enabled them to attain speeds that are otherwise impossible to achieve with conventional gameplay. For example, it was discovered that due to a mathematical error in the game's physics, it was possible to go approximately 41% faster by running diagonally rather than straight forward. Even greater speeds could be achieved by rubbing or "wall hugging" against a north-south wall. It was also discovered that a great speed boost could be attained by using the attacks of enemies to one's advantage, such as using the Arch-Vile's nasty pyrotechnic attack as a free boost across gaps and up onto ledges.

Like in Quake, a lot of these techniques rely on luck as well as skill; after the runner had honed his abilities to a point where he could begin to attempt the tricks, he still had to have a lot of luck for the circumstances to be absolutely perfect, something which is often beyond a runner's immediate reach. This is acknowledged by Kay Berntsen, a Quake speedrunner, who states in the accompanying text file with his 00:24 run of E1M1 (The Slipgate Complex) that "skills made it possible, but luck got it done".

Metroid series

File:Radix137.jpg

Metroid Prime completion screen after Nolan Pflug (aka. "Radix")'s famous 100% speedrun

Released in August 1986, Metroid was the first game to introduce special rewards for fast completion times. Featuring highly non-linear gameplay, it was possible for a player to extensively search for faster routes towards the end of the game. This has been researched thoroughly since the game was created, and it has since been concluded that only a few items are necessary to complete the game.

The release of Super Metroid in 1994 greatly increased the quality of Metroid speedrunning. It featured a physics system that allowed for a wide array of skills for mobility, like wall jumping or the Shinespark, allowing players to skip over large areas of the game, or play through the game in different manners based on how well the they could perform these tricks in contextual situations. Additionally, it had the same non-linear gameplay the fans had come to expect from the series. Due to the way the game is laid out, several different run types or tiers that incorporate different completion percentages have been done. The most popular type, which focuses solely on finishing the game as fast as possible with no other prerequisites, is aptly named the any% run. Besides it, speedrunners also attempt runs in which all items are obtained, called the 100% run.[8] The tool-assisted community has also made a run in which as few items as possible are obtained, accounting for a completion percentage of 14%; this is called a low% run, the "low" usually being substituted for the actual completion percentage attained in the run. Even though much fewer items are taken in this run, it's slower than the route in the any% run because of how long it takes to kill Ridley and Mother Brain with only the Ice Beam.[9]

Following Super Metroid there was an 8 year gap during which no new Metroid games were released. During this time, the first games in the series were played intensively by dedicated gamers, and many tricks were discovered that allowed players to achieve incredibly short completion times. As the Internet became more available to the general public, runners began to find each other online. Groups of players started collaborating on message boards and sent tricks back and forth to one another, in what became a community based on playing the games speedily.

The first Metroid community that was created for the purpose of fast completion was Metroid Prime Discoveries, created and led by Jean-Sebastien Dubois (aka. "Zell").[10] Rather than being a site that focussed on speedrunning, it was dedicated to documenting the possibilities of sequence breaking in the game Metroid Prime. When the interest arised to begin the documentation of other games in the series, however, the new site Metroid 2002 was created by Nathan Jahnke in August 2003.[11] Initially, the only incentive was to document the two Metroid games released in 2002 — Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion — but this changed when Nathan was asked to take all content of Metroid Online, another site that had been developed at that time and contained sequence breaking documentation, a message board, and a 1% Metroid Fusion run, and relaunch Metroid 2002 as "the one resource for Metroid Prime sequence breaking info." This relaunch happened less than two weeks later than the proposition and came to be in November. Ever since, it has been the central repository for everything related to speedrunning the Metroid series.

It was also in November 2003 that Metroid speedrunning reached its peak, after Nolan Pflug released his 100% run of Metroid Prime, in which he finished the entire game in 1:37. Since it was featured in the games section of Slashdot, it gained widespread attention.[12] Publications in numerous different languages ran stories on the run, and topics about the run were made on gaming message boards around the world. The first segment of his run was being downloaded over five thousand times a day at the peak of its popularity. The Metroid 2002 IRC channel was flooded with people who had heard about the run and wanted to know more about it, quickly dwarfing the original population, and its message board saw its member count double in size the month following the run's release. As a result of the popularity of this run, it was decided that in order to best serve the growing bandwidth consumption, Metroid 2002 would have to merge its array of videos with Speed Demos Archive, which was at that time being provided nearly limitless server capacity for their runs on the Internet Archive.

As of January 2006, the best completion time for Metroid Prime stands at 1:04 by "kip", and the best 100% time was reduced to 1:28 by Paul Evans (aka. "Bartendorsparky"), obsoleting Nolan's hugely popular run.[13]

Super Mario series

File:SMB3speedrun.jpg

Richard Ureta running at full speed in the third level of his Super Mario Bros. 3 speedrun, in which he finishes the game in 0:11:11

As games, the Super Mario series features some of the most defining games to the platformer genre. Due to their popularity and simple yet challenging physics and gameplay mechanics, every instance of the series is well-suited for speedrunning. As such, there has always been a lot of competition for the top times for these games.

The first platformer game to feature Mario as protagonist was Super Mario Bros., for which Trevor Seguin recorded the world record time of 0:05:06 in November 2004.[14] This is only 6 seconds slower than the fastest tool-assisted speedrun, which stands at 0:05:00, created by R. Yoshizawa (aka. "Pom") in July 2005.[15] Despite the fact that tool-assisted speedruns are usually much faster than their unassisted counterparts, due to the way they are created (for example, many game engines have bugs that allow the player to pass through walls, but these glitches are usually so difficult to exploit that they are only considered to be a viable strategy in tool-assisted speedrunning, where one can get the necessary precision required to do so), the difference between the two runs in time is very small. This is because the gameplay of Super Mario Bros. leaves much less room for impressive speed tactics than its successors, most notably due to the relatively slow and easily maintainable running speed. Since its creation, Andrew Gardikis and Carlos Krueger have managed to equal Trevor's record. Gardikis has the fastest time of the three by a split second — not enough to warrant the official recognition, since speedruns must be one second faster than the old version to count as record breaker.

Another incredibly popular speedrun in the series is Richard Ureta's Super Mario Bros. 3 run. He runs through the entire game and uses warp whistles to skip worlds 2 through 7 entirely, bringing the final time to 0:11:11.[16]

Interestingly, the tool-assisted speedrun of this game, made by "もりもと" ("Morimoto") in November 2003, was also very popular outside of the speedrun community as it was the first published run of this famous game, ending after 0:11:04 of input. As such, there was little knowledge of how and why tool-assisted speedruns were made, which spawned a lot of controversy over his run; after it was mass-posted on forums all over the Internet, the users of those forums would call it a hoax after finding out that it was created using an emulator, citing that Morimoto himself "admitted" to creating the movie "frame by frame" and that it took him two years to do it. These claims came to be after a page was found on Morimoto's now defunct site in which he explains how he created the run with the Famtasia emulator, using conventional tool-assisted speedrunning methods; however, when it was posted, a machine translation was used instead of the original text, causing it to be severely different than intended, which spawned the misunderstandings.[17] His run has, however, since been obsoleted a few times by faster versions. The current fastest tool-assisted speedrun for Super Mario Bros. 3 stands at 0:10:35, created by Jean-François Durocher (aka. "Genisto").[18]

Mega Man series

The Mega Man series, featuring partially non-linear gameplay, is interesting for speedrunners mainly due to extensive route planning possibilities that exist in most of its games. The player is allowed to choose in which order he'll finish the main stages or levels of the game, which all consist of a platformer-style gameplay and a boss fight with its Robot Master. After defeating the Robot Master, Mega Man will acquire its power, which he can then use for the rest of the game; it's for this reason that a lot of thought must be put in finding the fastest order in which one can complete the game, as the weapons that can be obtained in certain stages could save time later on in the game.

In one of the tool-assisted speedruns for Mega Man, known as Rockman in Japan, the game is completed after 16:10 of input. The speedrun is the result of iterative refinement of techniques and routes over two years of time, and exploits many glitches in the game. Joel Yliluoma, the co-author and submitter of the run says in the submission comments, "It has became increasingly difficult for even an expert player to comprehend what is going on in this movie." As an example of the ever-growing "toolbox" available to tool-assisted speedrunners, the latest version of this run used a custom emulator extension to display various internal game data including the position and velocity of the main character at sub-pixel accuracy, and a machine player to try thousands of different combinations of actions to get particular items to drop or manipulate the behavior of an enemy.

The Legend of Zelda series

The games in the Legend of Zelda series generally take a large amount of effort to speedrun due to them being very long, even when played as quickly as possible, and because a lot of different techniques can be used in addition to extensive route planning. None the less, they have been fought over by many speedrunners due to their high popularity, and have thus been improved frequently.

Perhaps the most respected Zelda speedrunner is Mike Damiani (aka. "TSA"), him having recorded the best times for various popular games in the genre. Arguably his most well-known record, judging by the number of downloads, is his completion of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 4:57, a game which was long thought to be impossible to beat in under five hours.

Interestingly, the tool-assistance community has been able to reach the end of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in only 03:48 (3 minutes, 48 seconds) due to a glitch that allows Link to travel through walls. Since the levels in the game are connected by the edges of one screen, the player is able to walk through walls, passing entire levels as he goes, and eventually reach the Triforce room. This glitch, which requires that the player presses the "up" and "down" keys at the same time, can theoretically be reproduced on a real console, although it is practically impossible to perform by a human player: pressing "up" and "down" at the same time is impossible with most controllers, which feature a D-pad that can't be depressed in opposite directions at the same time. The run also features a trick that makes Link run faster by alternating "up" and "down" button presses every other frame; this is also not practically possible to perform by a human player due to the high speed at which one would have to give this input. This makes the run a very clear example of the difference between human and physical limitations.

Besides a very short completion of this game, another version that does not use the aforementioned glitch was also produced, resulting in a much longer run of 1:20:16 [19].

The fastest unassisted speedrun available for download completes the game in a time of 1:39:47 [20]. The player is Mike 'TSA' Damiani, who has also completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 4 hours and 57 minutes [21]. The Ocarina of Time speedrun is generally regarded to have a very high level of quality even compared to much shorter speedruns. This level of play and the length make it one of the most respected runs on Speed Demos Archive.

Other Zelda game speedruns include The Legend of Zelda in 0:33:34 by Mike 'TSA' Damiani [22], Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in 1:12:10 by Scott Kessler [23], The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask in 3:37 by Peter "pyh189" Yeh [24], and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening in 1:30:36 by John "Maur" De Sousa [25], all hosted on the Speed Demos Archive.

Halo series

Halo was released alongside the launch of Microsoft's Xbox console in 2001. Nearly a year later, after many fragmented attempts by individual gamers to speedrun through the game, halo.bungie.org began the first major speedrun contest, titled Going Nowhere Fast, requesting speedruns for individual levels on "Legendary" difficulty, the hardest difficulty level in the game.[26]

Since then, Halo has been one of the most popular speedrunning games for the Xbox. A multitude of speedrunning sites have opened, most notably High Speed Halo.[27]

The most important glitches in Halo speedrunning are grenade jumping and creative usage of vehicles (including getting them into spaces that would normally be inaccessible). Circumventing loading zones is also a common tactic — due to dynamic loading in the game, skipping a loading zone would load the environment data, but not the enemies.

When Halo 2 was released in 2004, many speedrunners were disappointed at how Bungie, its developer, had attempted to patch up many of the holes that the original game had, which included the addition of instant-kill zones to prevent the player from leaving the level and thus breaking the sequence of the game. None the less, there were still some notable glitches that speedrunners use in Halo 2 — grenade jumping, loading-zone circumvention, and sword-glitching. The latter is facilitated by the addition of the Covenant Energy Sword, which has a one-hit kill lunge attack at close range (when the reticule turns red). It was soon discovered that the lunge could be "cancelled" by pressing the X button after the lunge begins; the player would begin moving forward at a rapid speed, but the attack would not connect, and the player would continue to possess the velocity of the lunge until a barrier was hit.

Half-Life series

Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter game with lots of scripted scenes, which under normal conditions would cause the player to have to wait for them to end. However, in speedruns, these are bypassed. For example, in one section of the game, the player would normally use a dune buggy to navigate the coastline, but instead, the speedrunners simply walk the same route because it allows them to bypass most of the scripted sequences, saving a large amount of time. Due to a number of large shortcuts such as this one, as well as exploitation of the game's complex physics to skip some sections, the game, which usually takes around 12 hours or so to finish, has been finished in as low as 1:36:57 in a collaborative speedrun by the Half-Life 2 Done Quick team.[28]

Even in scripted sequences when there seems to be no way to continue other than to wait, it's possible to save time. For example, when a non-player character (NPC) is moving from one location to another to open up a door for the player to pass through, it's possible to stand in that NPC's path, barring his way. The game detects the collision, finds that it cannot move the NPC as it is supposed to, and then "teleports" the NPC directly to its destination in order to still be able to complete the scripted scene, saving valuable seconds.

Similarly, speedruns exist for the original Half-Life, the fastest of which completes the game in 45:45 by David "RandomEngy" Rickard.

NetHack

NetHack, as a turn-based game, is not played in real time, but has a turn counter. Although the game is extremely difficult to finish (or "ascend"), the scoring system means advanced players have no problem accumulating very large scores, and so a secondary challenge has been to finish the game in the fewest possible turns. All conventional real-time speedrunning techniques have analogues in NetHack, from skipping large sections of the game (thus giving up the extra items they offer) to optimising movement tactics.

The fastest known ascension is 6480 turns, played on October 2005 by "Rast". It is roughly ten times faster than a conventional ascension, and one of only 3 known ascensions under 10,000 turns in the 19-year history of the game.

See also

• Tool-assisted speedrun — a speedrun in which one uses tools such as slow motion and re-recording
• Time attack — a mode which allows the player to finish a game (or a part of it) as fast as possible, saving record times
• Score attack — the attempt to reach a record logged point value in a game
• Sequence breaking — the act of performing actions or obtaining items in a video game out of the intended order, or of skipping said actions or items entirely while still successfully completing the game
• Electronic sports — a general term used to describe computer and video games which are played as competitive sports
• Speed Demos Archive — the largest speedrunning community on the Internet

Footnotes

Uncited references

• Turner, B. (2005). "Smashing the Clock". 1UP.com. Retrieved August 13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Choudhury, R. (2004). "Beating them at their own game". Gamingredients. Retrieved October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Pflug, N. (2004). "History of Quake speed-running". Speed Demos Archive. Retrieved October 16. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Merrill, D. (2003). "A Brief DOOM Demo History". Doomworld. Retrieved October 16. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Mills, A. (2005). "Metroid Sequence Breaking". Samus.co.uk. Retrieved December 21. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• NESVideos contributors (2006). "Common Tricks". NESVideos. Retrieved October 16. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Totilo, S. (2006). "Gamers Divided Over Freakish Feats Achieved With Tool-Assisted Speed Runs". MTV News. Retrieved April 29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Totilo, S. (2005). "For Some Gamers, Merely Finishing A Game Isn't Enough". MTV News. Retrieved April 29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

External links

Many websites have been created so that players of video games can compete against each other for fast times and high scores. Some of these are listed below.

General speedrun, time attack and high-score sites

• Speed Demos Archive - The largest repository and community of speedrunning
• NESVideos - Speedruns through various NES/Famicom, Super NES/SFC, Mega Drive/Genesis, Game Boy/Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 64 games, made with emulation and by slowing down the gameplay
• Collection of speedrun videos at the Internet Archive
• わいわい芸夢館 - Japanese collection of speedruns
• Video Game Ownage - Speedruns and other game videos
• Cyberscore - High score and time attack competition
• Twin Galaxies - The closest thing to an official video game world record authority
• Speedrun Wiki - a wiki dedicated to speedrun documentation

Game-specific sites

• COMPET-N - Doom series (excluding Doom 3)
• F-Zero Climax - F-Zero series
• The Elite - GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark
• Mario Kart series
  • Super Mario Kart Time Trial - Super Mario Kart
  • Mario Kart 64 Players - Mario Kart 64
  • The Mario Kart Double Dash Players' Page - Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
  • MKDS Players' Page - Mario Kart DS
• Metal Gear series
  • Collection of Metal Gear Solid speedruns on わいわい芸夢館
  • Metal Gear Speedrunning - speedruns of the Metal Gear Solid games
• Metroid 2002 - Metroid series
• Quake series
  • Quake done Quick - Home of the famous Quake collaborative speedruns, including the Nightmare difficulty run in 12:23
  • Speed Demos Archive - Quake - Individual level runs of Quake, including runs on hundreds of home-made maps
• The Sonic Center - Sonic the Hedgehog series
• HL2DQ - Home of the Half-Life 2: Done Quick video
• HighSpeedHalo - Halo and Halo 2

Machinima archives

• Collection of Machinima videos at the Internet Archive
• own-age.com - Community dedicated to the production and discussion of machinima and frag videos