The World of Speedrunning
Speedrunning is the practice of completing a video game as quickly as possible, often exploiting glitches, sequence breaks, and optimized movement to shave seconds or even frames off a completion time. What began as an informal hobby among dedicated gamers has grown into a vibrant global community with its own culture, celebrities, and charity events that raise millions of dollars.
What Is Speedrunning?
At its core, speedrunning transforms the experience of playing a video game. Instead of exploring at leisure or following the intended narrative, speedrunners treat games as optimization problems. They dissect every mechanic, map every collision boundary, and rehearse every input sequence until their execution approaches perfection. The appeal lies in the intersection of deep game knowledge, mechanical skill, and creative problem-solving. A speedrunner does not merely play a game; they reverse-engineer it, discovering possibilities that the original developers never intended.
Categories and Rules
Speedruns are organized into categories that define what constitutes a valid completion. The most common categories include:
- Any%: Complete the game as fast as possible by any means necessary, including major glitches and sequence breaks that skip large portions of content.
- 100%: Complete the game while collecting all items, finishing all objectives, or meeting a community-defined completion standard.
- Glitchless: Complete the game without exploiting any bugs or unintended mechanics, testing pure optimization and execution.
- Low%: Complete the game while collecting as few items or upgrades as possible, maximizing difficulty.
- Category extensions: Community-created challenges like blindfolded runs, randomizers, or specific challenge conditions.
Leaderboards on sites like Speedrun.com track world records for each game and category, with video proof required for verification.
Famous Runs and Legendary Runners
Certain speedruns have achieved legendary status within the community. The ongoing competition for the Super Mario 64 120-star world record, fought between runners like Cheese and Suigi, has pushed the human limit below 1 hour 37 minutes through thousands of hours of practice. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time any% run, once thought to require around four hours, has been optimized to under four minutes through a staggering chain of glitch discoveries. Minecraft speedrunning exploded in popularity after 2020, with runners racing to defeat the Ender Dragon using randomized seeds, introducing a luck element that makes each attempt unique. Dream's controversial run and the subsequent statistical analysis became one of the most discussed events in speedrunning history.
Community, Events, and Techniques
The speedrunning community thrives on collaboration. Runners share discoveries, route optimizations, and tools through forums, Discord servers, and video tutorials. The biggest community events are Games Done Quick (GDQ) marathons, held twice yearly as Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) in January and Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) in July. These week-long streaming events feature runners showcasing their skills while raising money for charities like Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation, collectively raising over $50 million since 2010.
The technical side of speedrunning involves a rich toolkit of techniques: frame-perfect inputs, sub-pixel positioning, memory manipulation through glitches, and tool-assisted speedruns (TAS) where programmers create theoretically perfect runs frame by frame using emulator tools. TAS runs serve as a benchmark, showing the community what is technically possible and inspiring human runners to push closer to mechanical perfection.