Speedrunning facts for kids
Speedrunning is when you play a video game and try to finish it as fast as you possibly can. People who speedrun often plan out the best paths to take in a game. They might even skip parts of the game or use small mistakes in the game, called glitches, to go faster. There's also a special type called tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS). This uses special computer programs to play the game perfectly and super fast.
Many online communities form around speedrunning specific games. These groups often have leaderboards that show who finished a game the fastest. Competing in races against other speedrunners is also a fun way to play. Speedrunners share videos and live streams of their runs online on sites like YouTube and Twitch. Sometimes, speedruns are shown at big events called marathons, where many people play different games quickly for an audience.
Contents
How Speedrunning Works
Game Strategies
Planning your path, or routing, is a key part of speedrunning. This means figuring out the best order of actions and levels to complete a game quickly. A route might involve skipping important items or sections.
Skipping a part of a game that you normally need to play is called sequence breaking. This term first became popular with the game Metroid Prime. Game glitches are often used to skip parts or to do other things like skip movies in the game (cutscenes). Glitches can also make your character faster or stronger. Some people, called glitch-hunters, look for new glitches that speedrunners can use.
Sometimes, players can even use very advanced glitches to put their own code into the game's memory. This is called arbitrary code execution. Some speedruns use a "credits warp" glitch. This makes the game's ending credits play early, which can sometimes involve arbitrary code execution. In the past, glitches and sequence breaks were not allowed in speedruns. But as speedrunning grew online, using them became very common.
Tool-Assisted Speedruns
A tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) is a speedrun made using special computer programs called emulators. These tools help create a "perfect playthrough" of a game. For example, players can slow the game down to play frame by frame. They can also retry parts of the run using "savestates" or change game data directly. These tools help players get around human limits like slow reflexes.
A TAS run is recorded as a series of button presses. These presses can then be played back to the game. Even though TAS runs are usually made on an emulator, they can sometimes be played on a real game console. Regular speedruns, played by a human in real time, are sometimes called real-time attack (RTA) speedruns. TAS runs are not seen as competing with RTA runs because a human isn't playing them live.
Categories and Rankings
Speedruns are split into different groups called categories. These categories add rules or goals for the player. Each game might have its own speedrun categories. But some categories are popular for almost all games:
- Any% means finishing the game as fast as possible, with no other rules.
- 100% means completing everything in the game. This might mean getting all items or reaching every goal.
- Low% is the opposite of 100%. Here, players try to beat the game while doing the least amount of things possible.
- Glitchless means the player cannot use any glitches during the speedrun.
Speedrunners compete by posting their times on online leaderboards. The main website for speedrun leaderboards is Speedrun.com. As of 2021, this site has leaderboards for over 20,000 video games. Runners usually record their speedruns to prove their time and for others to check. They often show a timer in their videos. These timers can also track "splits," which are times for completing different sections of the run. Moderators on the leaderboards check these videos to make sure the speedruns are real.
The Speedrunning Community
Many speedrunners say that the community is a very important part of their hobby. People in the community often help each other. They share tips and work together to find new ways to play games faster. This teamwork helps players improve their skills and routes.
Speedrunners use websites like YouTube and Twitch to share videos and live streams of their runs. The speedrunning community is made up of many smaller groups. Each group focuses on speedrunning a specific game. These smaller groups might have their own leaderboards and talk to each other using apps like Discord. Many communities have used the main leaderboard site Speedrun.com since it started in 2014.
Speedrun Marathons
Speedrunning marathons are like big gaming events. Many different speedrunners play games one after another. The biggest event is Games Done Quick (GDQ), which happens twice a year in the United States. As of 2022, GDQ has raised over $37 million for charity since 2010. The largest marathon in Europe is the European Speedrunner Assembly, held in Sweden. Both events stream the speedruns on Twitch and raise money for different charities. Speedruns at marathons are done in one try and often have people talking over them, explaining what's happening. Many people feel these marathons are important for both the players and the viewers.
Speedrun Races
Races between two or more speedrunners are a popular way to compete. In a race, players need to be good at fixing mistakes quickly because they can't just start over. Sometimes, races are part of marathons. For example, a 4-person race of Super Metroid is a common event at Games Done Quick.
Organizations like the Global Speedrun Association (GSA) have held tournaments for games like Celeste, Super Mario 64, and Super Mario Odyssey. In 2019, GSA held a live speedrun race event called PACE. Some speedrunners have criticized these events. They worry that cash prizes might make players less likely to work together.
Video game randomizers are also popular for speedrun races. These are special versions of games where things like item locations are randomly mixed up. Tournaments and events have been held for randomizer races, and they have also been shown at speedrun marathons.
Cheating in Speedrunning
Like in any competition, some players try to cheat to get an unfair advantage in speedrunning.
Cheating Methods
Splicing
Splicing is a common way to cheat. This is when a speedrun is not recorded all at once. Instead, it's made from many short video clips recorded at different times. Sometimes, parts of the video are even taken from other players' runs.
For example, at a big event in 2019, a speedrunner named "ConnorAce" used a spliced run. He claimed a world record for Clustertruck, which meant the real record holder didn't get invited to the event. Later, a video showed that ConnorAce's run was fake. Splicing lets players repeat hard parts until they are perfect. Then, they edit these perfect attempts together to make one smooth, fast run. However, if a run is openly announced as being made from multiple parts, it is not considered cheating.
TASbotting
TASbotting is when a player uses a device to play back a tool-assisted run on a real game console. The device sends the perfect button presses to the console. Like splicing, this can combine perfect segments. It can also make very precise, frame-by-frame inputs. If the inputs look like a human could do them, it's very hard to spot this kind of cheating in the video.
Changing the Timer or Speed
Changing game timers, especially in computer games, is another way to cheat. However, this is usually easy to spot. Other players often check the times of top speedruns very carefully. They compare the recorded time to how long the run should actually take. This often shows if the timer was changed. Another method is speeding up cutscenes or black loading screens. Again, speedrun moderators can usually detect these changes.
Changing Game Files
Players can sometimes use traditional cheats like a GameShark to make their character faster or stronger. But experienced moderators can usually spot these cheats easily. However, changing internal game files to get better luck with random events can be much harder to detect.
A famous example involved the speedrunner Dream in 2020. His luck in some Minecraft speedruns was so extreme that it seemed almost impossible without cheating. Moderators at Speedrun.com and many YouTubers looked into it. They estimated the chance of his luck happening naturally was incredibly small. Dream later admitted that the runs were cheated, saying he didn't know he was using a changed version of the game.
Lying About Times The simplest way to cheat is just to lie about your time. A well-known case involves Todd Rogers. Many of his old records were questioned because they seemed impossible or lacked proof. For example, his record in Barnstorming was removed because other players showed that his time of 32.04 seconds was not possible, even if the game was hacked.
Another record of his was for the game Dragster from 1982, with a time of 5.51 seconds. In 2012, Todd even got a Guinness World Record for this. But in 2017, a speedrunner looked at the game's code. They found that the fastest possible time was 5.57 seconds. This meant Todd's claimed record was faster than what the game's code allowed.
How Cheats Are Detected
To stop cheating, some games require players to record their hands on the controller or keyboard. This is called a "handcam." It helps moderators make sure a human is really making the inputs. Other methods include checking the audio for signs of video splicing. This is why games without good audio are sometimes not accepted on speedrun leaderboards.
Math can also be used to detect cheats, like in the Dream case. Human moderators also watch for suspicious inputs in games that record them. For example, special software for the game TrackMania analyzed many replays. It found hundreds of world records that were cheated using slowdown tools.
History of Speedrunning
Speedrunning has always been a part of video games, like trying to get high scores. But it became much more popular when the internet became widely available around 1993. This allowed players to share their speedruns with online communities. Websites for speedrunning started appearing, helping to create a whole new group of players. These sites were used to share runs and also to work together and share tips to improve times. This led to people working together to constantly break speed records on certain games.
Earliest Examples
The first widely shared speedruns were for games that had a timer built into them. Examples include Dragster, Excitebike, and Super Mario Kart. One early way to share scores was through a newsletter in 1981. Speedrunners would take a picture of their screen and send it in. These publications often put speedruns in sections with high scores.
Because updates were only in the newsletter, records could stand for months. Also, taking pictures of old TV screens could make times hard to read. There was no way for the community to check if a run was real. Information on how these runs were done was rarely shared.
Doom and Quake Communities
Even though speedruns happened before the 1990s, the speedrunning community really started with the computer game Doom in 1993. The game had a feature that let players record and play back their gameplay. These recordings were called demos. Demos were small files that were easy to share online.
In 1994, a student named Christina Norman created a server to collect Doom demos. This inspired others to create lists of challenges for Doom players. The Doom speedrunning community grew in November 1994 when Simon Widlake created COMPET-N. This website had leaderboards for Doom single-player levels.
In 1996, id Software released Quake, which was similar to Doom. Quake also had a demo recording feature and attracted speedrunners. In 1997, Nolan "Radix" Pflug created Nightmare Speed Demos (NSD), a website for tracking Quake speedruns. Later that year, Pflug released a full-game speedrun demo of Quake called Quake done Quick. This video showed speedrunning to many more people. Quake speedruns were known for cool movement tricks like "bunny hopping," which made players go faster. In 1998, NSD joined with another website to create Speed Demos Archive.
Speed Demos Archive and Video Sharing
For five years, Speed Demos Archive (SDA) only had Quake speedruns. But in 2003, it added a 100% speedrun of Metroid Prime. Six months later, SDA started accepting runs from all games. Unlike earlier websites, SDA didn't have leaderboards for all games. It only showed the fastest speedrun for each game. Before SDA expanded, speedrun videos were mostly sent to an older record-keeping site called Twin Galaxies. These videos were often not shared publicly, which made it hard to check if they were real. SDA wanted to fix this.
In 2003, a video showing a TAS of Super Mario Bros. 3 became very popular online. Many speedrunners say this video was their first introduction to the hobby. The video didn't say it was a TAS, so many people thought a human had played it. When the creator later explained how he made the video, some viewers felt cheated. In December 2003, after seeing this TAS, a user created TASVideos. This site was made to show tool-assisted speedruns.
The creation of video sharing and streaming websites in the late 2000s and early 2010s made speedrunning much more popular and easier to access. In 2005, YouTube allowed speedrunners to upload and share videos. Twitch, a live streaming website for video games, started in 2011. Live streaming made it easier to check and save speedruns. Some speedrunners believe it also led to more teamwork in the community.
In 2014, Speedrun.com was created. It had easier rules for submitting runs than SDA. It aimed to bring all speedrun leaderboards for many different games into one place. Speedrunners started using Speedrun.com and social media like Skype and Discord. This caused SDA to become less popular in the 2010s.
See also
In Spanish: Speedrun para niños
- Donkey Kong high score competition
- List of video games notable for speedrunning
- Time attack
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