A speedrun is a play-through, or recording thereof, of a whole video game or a selected part of it (such as a single level) performed with the intent of completing it as fast as possible, optionally under certain prerequisites, mainly for the purposes of entertainment and competition. The term, a compound of the words speed and run (as in "running" through a game, referring to the playing of a game) is only used in the context of games that were not originally or primarily designed with fast completion 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).[1] Commonly, speedruns are recorded on either an analog media such as a video tape (predominantly when games on consoles are concerned), or as a digital file, by the people ("players") who make them, for entertainment, time refinement, or verifiability purposes.[2] Entertainment has traditionally been the reason for the creation of speedruns, as the phenomenon was originally devised by enthusiasts who began comparing each others' playing skills via movies exchanged over the Internet, while verifiability stems from the necessity to provide evidence that one's playthrough went by the typical or game-specific speedrun rules and thus counts as a valid attempt to beat the record.[3]
In order to attain the highest possible quality of play in a speedrun, the author usually has to look at and think about the game differently from the way that most casual gamers would. Generally, it is usually required that speedruns are planned out carefully before they are attempted; this need stems from the complexity of the separate areas in which the gameplay takes place. Additionally, games and their physics engines are not flawless and will allow the runner to do unexpected things that could save time. Despite their inherent differences, they seem to share a lot of common traits in this context, such as the ability to disjunct the common sequence of events in a game and thus skip entire parts of it—the act of sequence breaking—and the ability to use programming errors, or glitches, to one's advantage.
Some games are considered to be ideal specimen for fast completion purposes and have online communities dedicated to them, which provide (or have provided) a highly active platform for discussing the speedrunning of one or more of these particular games.
While speedrunning initially started out as a small project, initiated by a few enthusiasts who shared their demos online, it has since become a phenomenon that encompasses several active websites and an increasingly expansive assortment of speedrun videos that are freely and widely circulated on the Internet.[4][5]
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There are several important things that one needs to keep in mind during the making of a speedrun. These pertain to how good one is at playing the game, which primarily means that the player must be competent at using the gameplay mechanics, and must instinctively know the workings of the in-game physics[6] and any special techniques or tricks that can be used to one's advantage. Secondly, good knowledge of the game and the events that occur within it are crucial, as one needs to know exactly what to expect during a "run" through the game, and also realize the optimal method to do so. Additionally, runners require perseverance, as it is quite difficult to be able to do a run correctly during a single attempt. As it requires some degree of luck to be able to perform all important events to a satisfactory degree, runners will usually have to simply try again constantly until they are all done right in the same recording (although this differs per run type; different run types were briefly mentioned in the abstract and will be explained further down). The requirement to do this depends on whether the runner is trying to beat another record. When attempting to do so, making mistakes could annul one's chances of doing so (especially if the holder of the current record did not make that same mistake).[4] For some speedruns records, especially those of popular games such as Quake or some games from the Metroid series, years of intensive competition have brought about very high quality standards. Runners therefore practice intensively to attain the ability to play at such a high level of skill. In some cases, Internet communities that relate to speedrunning are able to keep active improvement on a particular speedrun going for years.
As mentioned, the actual recording of a run is preceded by a research phase. The things a runner can do during this phase pertain to finding out possible ways to save time, most of which are likely specific to the particular game under consideration. Naturally, it must be known beforehand that there is a certain route through the game that will yield a fast time. Such a route can describe various things, including a number of abilities that the game's character must obtain or avoid, which enemies to gain "experience points" from, or which levels to choose playing (in case there is a choice at all). The devised routes can be highly creative and may include doing things that are out of ordinary or intended play style. It is not uncommon for routes to even "skip" parts of regular gameplay in events known as "sequence breaking", sometimes through the use of programming errors (called "glitches" in this case) that can work to the runner's advantage. These things both pertain to the most important preparation work: route planning.
Before one begins creating a speedrun, it is of importance that the most feasible route that leads to the completion of the game is determined. A route, in this context, is a course of action by which to get from one point in the game to another—it could cover only a single level, or the entire game in general.[7]
The need for determining such a route stems from the complexity of the separate areas in which the gameplay takes place; runners must ensure that, in order to be as fast as possible, they know which actions to take in which order to avoid having to do unnecessary things. If one does not take the game's flow of events into proper consideration, the resulting speedrun may be tainted by requirements such as having to pass through more levels, having to use less effective means of fighting enemy characters, or having to "level up" more.[7] The amount of planning per section of a game differs. For example, extensive planning is required to find the best possible method for passing a level that contains a lot of traps or enemy characters, more so than levels in which most such obstacles are optional and can be easily avoided. Even in games in which the levels seem fairly straightforward, it is often required that a route is taken that ensures some kind of advantage, such as a certain degree of safety or the possibility of picking up beneficial items or weapons along the way; an "optimal" route is designed not only to be fast, but also to take into account the effect it might have on other resources that might affect later levels.
Some games lend themselves to this better than others. Generally, non-linear games will have more branches of possibilities, as the lack of a fixed sequence of events causes there to be many choices that the player can make that require extensive research to appraise.[7]
During the making of a route, it sometimes becomes apparent that some of the goals in the game do not need to be achieved for completion. While the route itself pertains mostly to the way levels or their segments are passed, additional elements of the game that may be seen as integral to its natural or artistic flow, or the continuity of its gameplay, may sometimes be avoided partially or entirely. Such elements include cutscenes that need to be watched before the player can progress, items that the player needs to possess in order to continue to a next stage, or even entire parts of the gameplay that may convey a part of the game's plot or subplot. Skipping a part of the game in such a fashion that it can be described as a disjunction with the game's intent or common sequence of events, is referred to as sequence breaking.
The term sequence break was first used in 2003 in an online discussion forum thread concerning the Nintendo GameCube game Metroid Prime.[8] This thread was called "Gravity Suit and Ice Beam before Thardus"; using the since then common "x before y" notation in the nomenclature of speedrunning. Thardus, a fictional creature in the Metroid series, 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. The author of the thread was Steven Banks, who reported to have successfully performed this sequence break on January 18, 2003, after the possibility of such an act was suggested by "kip".[9] 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.[8] The gamers fast became a separate 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 used by a person known online as "SolrFlare" in this thread on February 5, 2003.[10] Since its initial discovery, sequence breaking has become an integral part of speedrunning and has been applied to many other games.
An example of sequence breaking as a result of a glitch can be found in the "16-star" run of Super Mario 64: in this game, the protagonist, Mario, normally needs to collect at least 70 of the 120 power stars before he is allowed to play the final level, but a glitch makes it possible for a runner to access that level with only 16 stars. More specifically, with the right kind of movement, the runner is able to pass through a wall by pushing into it in a certain way while holding MIPS, an NPC.[11] Seen in the image is runner Eddie "kirbykarter" Taylor performing this trick in his 19:47 speedrun of the game.[12] See section "Media" for an excerpt of this video in which the trick is demonstrated. Since then, ways have been found to complete the game with 1 star, or even none.
While some speedrun rules require that the skipping of such events be avoided, it is often desirable—connate with the act of route planning—to make full use of such possibilities.
While it is typical of generic speedruns, as described in the opening paragraph, to be recordings of skilled playing of the game, there is one particular branch of the phenomenon called tool-assisted speedrunning (commonly abbreviated TAS) which removes the need for the recording to be devised by typical means (such as recording the speedrun on a VCR tape while it is being played on the original hardware) and instead allows authors to use "tools" to aid their playing. Essentially, these tools can be anything that eases the game-play and thus improves the final result; some prime examples, commonly provided by the use of an emulator, include the usage of save states that allow the author to "go back in time" and revise mistakes (in this context, this is called re-recording), as well as slowing down the (virtual) hardware that the game is running on so that the runner can play the game much more accurately than would otherwise be viable. One common requirement of tool-assisted speedrunning, stemming directly from the abilities that said tools provide, is the attainment of "perfection"; the knowledge that it is not possible, by current abilities, to record the speedrun in any way that would warrant a lower completion time. The practical result is that human limitations, such as skill and reflex, are no longer an issue in the creation of a run; tool-assisted runs have (sometimes significantly) lower completion times than their "unassisted" equivalents.[13]
It has been argued by members of TASVideos, a major tool-assisted speedrun community, that the runs produced by them could be considered a form of art, claiming that they significantly hold "creativity, variability, surprising outcomes, and speed", which makes them "beautiful to watch".[13] Additionally, these members have outlined the qualities that, according to them, make a tool-assisted run entertaining: they should be interesting to watch (the play should not be slow or repetitive), they should surprise the viewer (the runner must perform the unexpected), and they must depict a very high level of play (the runner must be able to handle awkward situations efficiently and creatively).[13] When a new run is submitted to the site, it first gets voted on by the site's members to assess whether it is suitable for publication; in case a run is found to be substandard, it is rejected.
The usage of tools to aid the player is mostly forbidden in regular speedrunning, and it is for this reason that tool-assistance is seen as controversial by some.[5] When a tool-assisted speedrun of Super Mario Bros. 3 was released in mid-2003 by an anonymous speedrunner using the nickname "Morimoto" (originally "もりもと"), its incredible quality of play became a phenomenon; since few people knew how the video was made, it was widely believed that it was played in real-time by an extremely skilled player. When Morimoto detailed the making of the run on his website,[14] many felt deceived and turned to criticizing the video's "illegitimacy" instead. In 2006, Joel Yliluoma, the webmaster of TASVideos, had been quoted as saying "Two years ago, I fought against claims of cheating and other bad-mouthing. Today, although I still see some people who hate the movies and consider them cheating, I see more people who recognize the value of both types of speedruns."[5] Another point of criticism is that a properly executed tool-assisted speedrun may disillusion runners from making an unassisted version.
Historically, speedruns have been performed by members of online communities pertaining to video games in general, primarily through discussion forums. When the activity became popular enough to accede to subculture, the first sites dedicated to speedrunning started appearing—usually specializing in just one or a few games. Some of these sites have sustained activity for a long time, sometimes even up to today, providing coverage of its members' achievements and serving as a platform for related discussions.
December 1993 saw the release of id Software's Doom.[15] Among some of its major features, like at that time very sophisticated 3D graphics, LAN- and Internet-based multiplayer support, and user modification possibilities, it also gave the players the ability to record demo files of their play-through. This particular feature was first picked up by Christina "Strunoph" Norman in January 1994 when she launched the LMP Hall of Fame website.[16]
This site was, however, fast followed up by the DOOM Honorific Titles (also known as the "DHT"),[17] launched in May 1994 by Frank Stajano, which introduced the first serious competition between players.[4] This site, designed around a notion of earning titles by successfully recording a particular type of demo on one of the pre-determined maps in the "IWADs", would create the basis for all Doom demo sites that would follow.[16] These so-called "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: Hell on Earth was released in October 1994,[18] 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.[16] For example, playing with only the in-game 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. As an authentication method to prevent players from submitting demos made by other people, it was required that they performed a distinct "dance" during their demo (often at the very beginning). With such varied categories, the DHT was appealing to a diverse group of players.[16] However, the DHT had trouble retaining a permanent Internet location. This, combined with the constantly changing rules and the diminished importance of most of the titles, caused public interest to wane as the years went by.
In November 1994, the definitive installment Doom speedrunning scene, in the form of the COMPET-N website, was launched.[16] Its creator, Simon Widlake, intended the site to be a record scoreboard for a variety of Doom-related achievements, but unlike its predecessors, they were all based on the idea of fast completion, thus making it the first actual speedrunning site. 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, leading to demo material gradually amounting to hundreds of hours of recorded gameplay.[19]
Like the DOOM Honorific Titles, this site experienced multiple location changes over time; it was hosted on the Simtel servers for a while, before Istvan Pataki took over as maintainer and moved the site to a now defunct FTP server of the Technical University of Budapest. From there on, since early 1998, it has been administered by Adam Hegyi, who is still the maintainer of the site as of 2007.[20] It is currently located at Doom2.net.
As of November 2007, 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.[19]
Following the success of the Doom speedrunning community, 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 Simtel's Quake file hierarchy.[22] 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.[22]
In April 1997, Nolan "Radix" Pflug first started the Nightmare Speed Demos website to keep track of the fastest demos.[22] In June that same year, the first Quake done Quick [23] project was finalized; 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.[22] The project members ended up making a movie in which the entire game is finished on Nightmare difficulty in 0:19:49;[24] it was a collection of the best runs that the members of the site had been made thus far, and at that time, there was no other run that came close.[25] The run was "recammed", reconstructed so that it could be also viewed from a third-person perspective, which gained it its machinima status.[26] It received widespread attention from gaming magazines, being distributed as part of the free CDs that they came with.[27] This popularized speedrunning for a much larger audience than before and attracted many newcomers. Not all of those newcomers agreed with the old-timers' 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 "Muad'Dib" Andre Mo and specializing in "Easy" difficulty runs.[22] One month after that, the Quake done Quick movie was superseded by a new movie called Quake done Quicker, on September 14, 1997, which shortened the game's fastest playthrough to 0:16:35.[27]
In April 1998, Pflug and Mo merged their pages, thus creating the Speed Demos Archive, which, as of 2007, is still the dominant community for Quake speedrunning and also acts as repository for demos, maps, statistics and software pertaining to the practice.[22] Ever since its creation, a large variety of tricks have been discovered in Quake's physics. Despite being released as early as 1996, Quake has steadily remained popular with its players, who subsequently released the Quake done Quick with a Vengeance movie on September 13, 2000, which featured a complete run through Quake in 0:12:23.[28] Primarily tricks that had not been used in both its predecessors allowed for this improvement, as the run's manual states that it "[makes] use of every known trick, including unrestricted bunny-hopping, to represent the state-of-the-art in Nightmare running".[29]
As of March 2006, Speed Demos Archive can be found at the web address http://speeddemosarchive.com/ and 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.[30] Although no new installment of the Quake done Quick series has been released yet, a new version called Quake done Quickest is in the making. The improvements that have been made as of November 2007 would result in a time of 0:11:30 for the entire game, an improvement over its predecessor of 53 seconds.[31]
Released in August 1986, Metroid was one of the earliest games to introduce special rewards for fast completion times. As is the case for the rest of the games in the series, highly non-linear gameplay makes it possible for runners to search extensively for different routes towards the end of the game. In particular, the ability to perform sequence breaking has been researched thoroughly, leading to the discovery of ways to complete the games while obtaining only a small percentage of items. Prior to the inception of Metroid speedrunning there were special websites which documented these so-called "low-percentage" completion possibilities.
The first game to be exceedingly popular with the speedrunning audience was Super Metroid, released in 1994, which proved to lend itself to fast completion purposes very well.[4] 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 they can perform these tricks in contextual situations. Additionally, it had the same non-linear gameplay as its predecessors. Due to the way the game was laid out, several different run types or tiers that incorporate different completion percentages have been performed.[32] One type of run is the maximum or 100% run, in which as many items as possible are obtained. Speedruns which focus solely on finishing the game as fast as possible with no other prerequisites are described as any% runs.
Runs in which as few items as possible are obtained, slowing down the player's progress due to the need to avoid as much items as possible, have also been made.
As the Internet became more available to the general public, groups of players started collaborating on message boards to discuss these tricks with 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 "Zell" Dubois.[33] Rather than being a site that focused on speedrunning, it was dedicated to documenting the possibilities of sequence breaking in the game Metroid Prime. When the interest arose to begin the documentation of other games in the series, however, the new site Metroid 2002 was created by Nathan Jahnke in August 2003.[1] 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 after the proposition and came to be in November.[34] 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.[35] Since it was featured in the games section of Slashdot, it gained widespread attention.[36] 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.[37] The Metroid 2002 IRC channel was flooded with people who had heard about the run and wanted to know more about it, fast 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.[37]
As of July 2010, the best completion time for the North American version of Metroid Prime is 1:01 by Paul "Bartendorsparky" Evans, and the best 100% time was reduced to 1:24 by Besmir "Zoid" Sheqi, making Nolan's once popular run obsolete.[38]
It was in early 1999 that the term "tool-assisted speedrun" was first coined, during the early days of Doom speedrunning, although they were also called "built demos", in accordance with the "demo" terminology. Players first started recording these special demos when Andy "Aurican" Kempling released a modified version of the Doom source code that made it possible to record demos in slow motion and in several sessions. A couple of months afterwards, in June 1999, the first site made for the purpose of sharing these demos, aptly called "Tools-Assisted Speedruns", was opened by Esko Koskimaa, Peo Sjoblom and Yonatan Donner.[16][39]
Like other such communities, the maintainers of the site stressed the fact that their demos were for entertainment purposes rather than skill competitions, although the attempt to have the fastest time possible with tools itself became a competition as well.[40] The site became a success, updating usually several times a week with demos recorded by its maintainers and submitted by its readers. The site was active until August 10, 2001, at which point a news message was posted to state that the site would cease its regular updates and act as archive from then on.[41] The popularity of Doom tool-assisted speedrunning has dwindled since then.
In mid-2003, an anonymous speedrunner using the nickname "Morimoto" (originally "もりもと") released a video in which he played through Super Mario Bros. 3 with an unprecedented level of skill: he beat the entire game in just over 11 minutes without making a single mistake, and managed to score 99 lives while in a level during which he had to wait.[4] In addition, he put himself in dangerous situations over and over, only to escape them without sustaining any damage. Although it was widely believed that the video was made by an extremely skilled player, it was actually the first tool-assisted speedrun made with a special emulator to generate widespread interest.[42] When Morimoto detailed the making of the run on his website,[14] many felt deceived and turned to criticizing the video's "illegitimacy" instead. The knowledge that the video was constructed through tedious and careful selective replaying also raised some questions about the authenticity of video game replays; after all, if it is practically impossible to tell the videos of both kinds apart, one cannot possibly know whether a run was made with or without the use of a special emulator. It was even feared that this fact would cause the downfall of competitive speedrunning.[4] Neither the Speed Demos Archive nor Metroid 2002 have ever published runs that were known to be made with a special emulator. Nolan Pflug, the webmaster of Speed Demos Archive, has been quoted as saying "My basic thought is 'don't like them, haven't made them, don't watch them,'" when asked for his opinion on the subject.[5]
Thus, in late late 2003, the first public website that served tool-assisted speedrun videos from multiple authors, TASVideos (then known as NESVideos), was created. It was originally created by Joel "Bisqwit" Yliluoma for the purpose of showcasing, sharing and discussing speedruns made with special emulators—at first, the site only held videos of Nintendo (NES) games, in part due to the fact that the only emulator suitable for this specialist purpose was, at that time, the Famtasia NES emulator. Besides just serving the speedrun recordings in the emulator's original format (which, much like Doom and Quake demos, required both the emulator and the game in order to be played back), the site also held AVI files, which were made available using the BitTorrent protocol. As of January 2011, it holds 1698 complete speedruns, of which 817 are the fastest of their kind.[43]
These external resources are generally web links that lead to sites that specialize in speedrunning, and are therefore reliable locations for further research on the subject. Among the listed sites are also communities that have been created so that players of video games may compete against each other for fast times and high scores. For reasons of practicality, sites which only give a brief description or passing remark about speedruns, of which there are many, are not included.