Speedrun

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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 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).Although the term “time attack” is used to indicate a playthough of a game's dedicated mode for achieving fast completions, the term “” (“taimuatakku”) is the dominant terminology for both unassisted and tool-assisted speedruns in Japan. There is no commonly used loanword deriving from the term “speedrun”. Speedrunning is often seen as a display of skill and is practiced competitively in Internet-based communities, on which the resulting movies are released as rendered multimedia versions such as AVI files.Despite a large majority of speedruns being released in a video format, and this largely being the preferred format due to the number of players that can be used to open it, some (game-specific) communities utilize a game's native demo format due to these inherently being much more compact and thus easy to share; even such communities encode major releases in a more ubiquitous format.

This article will provide a general account of the ideological concepts and the historical conditions under which this competitive gaming phenomenon sprang up and evolved, of the initial stages from which it gradually reached its present form, and of the established standards that currently make up modern speedrun societies, and provide contextual narration regarding its accomplishments and recognition. As it is based on the fast completion of computer and video games, this article will occasionally list record times; these will be expressed as hour:minute:second in case the run is under three hours in length and the seconds are known, hour:minute in case the run is over three hours (except for tool-assisted speedruns), and minute:second for segments of speedruns in case the segments are always under one hour in length.

General description

Definition

There are two big genres in speedrunning: unassisted or regular speedruns and tool-assisted speedruns.The term “unassisted” or “regular” speedrun is a retronym, invented after tool-assisted speedruns came to be. 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).Even in non-collaborative speedruns, it is not always the case that just one person is the player; a game will sometimes permit multiple players to cooperate while playing the game. A collaborative speedrun, however, refers to players recording segments of a game until the full game has been completed rather than cooperation during gameplay. 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 the actions taken in one segment would affect later segments; such as the weapons that one obtains in a first-person shooter or the experience points that one attains 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. However, even earlier games like Super Mario Bros. would reward the player with points for completing levels quickly.

Common techniques

In order to attain the fastest possible time in a speedrun, the author usually has to look at and think about the game differently than most casual gamers would. Generally, games' physics engines are not flawless and will allow the runner to do unexpected things that could save time. Despite their inherent differences, game engines seem to share a lot of common traits in this context.

Route planning

An essential part of speedrunning is to find the shortest feasible route that leads to the completion of the game (or segment thereof). In highly non-linearly structured games there is often no obvious choice, as there might be many choices that the player can choose from that require extensive research to appraise. 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; record times for this reason mostly utilize the most highly yielding route.

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.

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.

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 [link] (The Elder God Shrine).Some first-person shooters, including many early Doom engine games such as Doom and HeXen, refer to its levels by their internal names rather than the actual titles given by their designers; for example, E2M4 refers to the fourth map of the second episode. 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.See Notable games for speedrunning, § Quake, § Techniques. 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, this 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.

Sequence breaking

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).See § Metroid series.

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).

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 [link] (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.See ''Notable games for speedrunning, § Doom, § Techniques. 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.

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 trick, called "zipping", 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. A good example is Tenchu, in which all cutscenes happen in the same environment as the gameplay. Since the state of the environment is carried over to the cutscene, it is possible to, for example, place a mine on the path of one of the acting characters; the character will walk over it, trigger it, get set on fire, and yet continue partaking in the scene as if nothing 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

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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. These tools are used to create theoretically “perfect” runs.

Tool-assisted speedruns are mostly done with emulators for old console systems. Emulators that currently feature the tools necessary to create these tool-assisted speedruns include the Nintendo emulators Famtasia, FCE Ultra [link], Nintendulator and VirtuaNES, the Super Nintendo emulators Snes9x [link] and ZSNES [link], the Genesis emulator Gens [link], the Game Boy Advance emulator Visual Boy Advance [link], and the Nintendo 64 emulator Mupen64 [link].

The tool-assisted speedruns try to avoid comparisons to the unassisted runs, as this would be unfair to the players. In unassisted runs, it would be unacceptable to use emulator's save-state features to take a shorter but more dangerous path, saving the game when passing an obstacle. Likewise, many unassisted speedrunners frown the glitch abuse in some tool-assisted movies, mainly due to the fact these glitches are usually impossible to reproduce without tool-assistance, while it is highly desirable in the tool-assisted community.

Tool-assisted speedruns are not created to show off one's playing skills, but rather to show off all kinds of techniques that are theoretically possible in the game but impossible to do in practice, and to try and establish an “optimal” playthrough of a game. Because of this, tool-assisted runs discern themselves by pushing the gameplay to the physical limits of the game's engine. This is extensively demonstrated in the Mega Man [link] and Rygar [link] runs.

While speed is desired in these runs, the focus is on entertainment. For example, there is a famous tool-assisted speedrun of Super Mario Bros. 3 by “もりもと” (“Morimoto”) that finishes the game in approximately 11 minutes; the fun is in the breathtaking speed and overall unfathomable method at which the game is being played, not the presumed skills of the runner.[link] The video has since been "obsoleted" by a faster tool-assisted speedrun, but this video is still the best-known example of its kind.

The controversy revolves around the similarity between the finished products. Websites exist dedicated to each side in the hopes that the movies will be considered separate. However, some individuals have allegedly tried to submit tool-assisted speedruns as unassisted speedruns. Without careful analysis, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the two, and this has been said to undermine the effort put into unassisted speedruns.

“Official” recordkeeping, which aims to document the top times that players have been able to achieve, only considers unassisted speedruns. Some believe this is the only real way to do a speedrun, even going so far as to describe tool-assisted speedruns as “fake” or “cheating”.

Notable games for speedrunning

Traditionally, speedruns have been performed by members of online communities about games in general, usually through discussion forums, using strategies devised by members of such forums. When the activity became popular enough to acede 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, due to the large potential its games have for speedrunning.

Only the most noteworthy games that have been proven to be idyllic for speedrunning purposes have been listed here with a short description on the histories of the communities that surround it. There are other games which have been fought over actively by many runners but don't have large or active collaboration websites dedicated to it (and haven't in the past); information on these games may be found in Notable games for speedrunning.

Quake

Quake is arguably the only game to rival Doom as the most popular game to speedrun ever.This statement is based on both the amount of demos and the total amount of recorded demo time, which far exceed those of other games that are popular with speedrunners. 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 “Radix” Pflug first started the Nightmare Speed Demos web site to keep track of the fastest demos. The first Quake done Quick [link] 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 0:19:49 [link]; 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' 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. One month after that, the famous Quake done Quick movie was superseded by a new movie called Quake done Quicker, on September 14, 1997, which improved the game's fastest playthrough time to 0:16:35.[link]

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. Ever since its creation, a large variety of tricks have been discovered in the Quake physics, which kept players interested even up to today, almost ten years after Quake's release. Subsequently, Quake done Quick with a Vengeance was released on September 13, 2000, which featured a complete run through Quake in the hugely improved time of 0:12:23.[link].

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. The fastest minimalist single-segment completion times that have been recorded thus far, as of June 10, 2006, are 0:13:46 [link] for the easy difficulty run and 0:19:50 [link] for the nightmare difficulty run, both by long-time Quake runner Connor Fitzgerald. The 100% single-segment completion times are 0:46:02 [link] for the easy difficulty run and 0:69:33 [link] for the nightmare difficulty run, by respectively Marlo Galinski and Justin Fleck.Note that Quake demos are usually stored in the Dzip compression algorithm, which was specially developed for these files by Nolan Pflug and Stefan Schwoon. It is available for free download at the [Dzip Online] Web site. Additionally, a new Quake done Quick movie with the working title Quake done Quick with a Vengeance Part II is in the making. The improvements that have been made thus far would result in a time of 0:11:32 for the entire game, an improvement of 51 seconds.

Further information: Speed Demos Archive and Quake done Quick

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 “Strunoph” Norman 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.[link] 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.[link] 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 server [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.[link]

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

Metroid series

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.[link] 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.[link]

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 “Zell” Dubois.[link] 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.[link] 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.This speedrun has since been replaced with an improved version, and as such, its original host, Speed Demos Archive, no longer makes mention of it. The original announcement, however, may still be found using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine at [http://web.archive.org/web/20031202174746/http://planetquake.com/sda/mp/]. Since it was featured in the games section of Slashdot, it gained widespread attention.[link] 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 “Bartendorsparky” Evans, obsoleting Nolan's hugely popular run.[link]

See also

• Tool-assisted speedrun — a speedrun in which one uses tools such as slow motion and re-recording.
• Notable games for speedrunning — an extensively documented list of noteworthy games for speedrunning purposes.
• 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.

Appendices

In the writing and research of this article, a variety of sources have been used.

Due to the nature of the subject matter, usage of what would otherwise be considered inaccurate sources is inevitable. It is common for many online communities to use collaborative content management systems and discussion boards to convey their news and information; such sources have been used mainly in order to refer to recordkeeping databases and treatises that directly concern the sites in question. It is rebuttably presumed that in such cases, accuracy is proven by the certainty that people who have been cited in such instances are who they claim to be. In addition, references have been given a usage rationale.

The external links generally lead to sites that specialize in speedrunning, and are often hosted by knowledgeable and well-respected speedrunners. They are therefore very reliable and good 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.

References

Journal, newspaper and magazine articles

Very extensive article about speedrunning, both tool-assisted and unassisted, in general.

Generally informative article about sequence breaking.

Very well-informed article on the differences between unassisted and tool-assisted speedrunners and the reason why this causes controvery between the two camps.

Article that provides a general introduction to the speedrunning phenomenon.

Posting of a tool-assisted speedrun on Slashdot, a news website and Internet forum.

Interview of a tool-assisted speedrunner about speedrunning in general.

Interview of Joel Yliluoma, webmaster of TASVideos, currently the largest tool-assisted speedrunning website.

Another interview of Joel Yliluoma, conducted in 2005, about speedrunning in general.

Posting of Henru Wang's original 100% speedrun of Metroid Prime.

Posting of Nolan Pflug's famous Metroid Prime 100% speedrun on Slashdot.

General informative sources

Documentation on the history of Speed Demos Archive.

Documentation on the history of Doom speedrunning and its communities.

Extensive guide to Metroid sequence breaking.

Documentation on commonly used tricks in tool-assisted speedruns.

Footnotes and citations

External links

General speedrun, time attack and high-score sites

• [Speed Demos Archive] - The largest repository and community of speedrunning
• [Tool-assisted console game movies] - 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
• [Twin Galaxies] - The closest thing to an official video game world record authority
• [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
• [Speedrun Wiki] - a wiki dedicated to speedrun documentation
• [Recorded Amiga Games] - Amiga speedrun videos

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] -
• *[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] - and Halo 2

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

 

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