Speedrunning

Speedrunning is the act of playing a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible. Speedrunning often involves following planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking and exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended. Tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) is a subcategory of speedrunning that uses emulation software or additional tools to create a precisely controlled sequence of inputs.

Many online communities revolve around speedrunning specific games; community leaderboard rankings for individual games form the primary competitive metric for speedrunning. Racing between two or more speedrunners is also a popular form of competition. Videos and livestreams of speedruns are shared via the internet on media sites such as YouTube and Twitch. Speedruns are sometimes showcased at marathon events, which are gaming conventions that feature multiple people performing speedruns in a variety of games.

Speedrunning has been a part of video games since the early days of the medium, similar to the chasing of high scores, though it did not achieve broad interest until 1993. Some groundwork for what would become modern speedrunning was established by id Software during the development for Wolfenstein 3D (1992), although prior games such as Metroid (1986) and Prince of Persia (1989) encouraged speedrunning by noting a player's time upon meeting certain metrics, including completion of the game. Wolfenstein 3D recorded a "par time" statistic which was based on John Romero's personal records for each level. Romero's best level times were also printed in the official hint book, which was available via the same mail-order system used to distribute the game at the time. His intention was that players would attempt to beat his times.

The development of a strong speedrunning community is considered to have originated with the 1993 computer game Doom. The game retained the "par time" mechanic from Wolfenstein and included a feature that allowed players to record and play back gameplay using files called demos (also known as game replays). Demos were lightweight files that could be shared more easily than video files on Internet bulletin board systems at the time. Internally, in January 1994, University of Waterloo student Christina Norman created a File Transfer Protocol server dedicated to compiling demos, named the LMP Hall of Fame (after the .lmp file extension used by Doom demos). The LMP Hall of Fame inspired the creation of the Doom Honorific Titles by Frank Stajano, a catalogue of titles that a player could obtain by beating certain challenges in the game. The Doom speedrunning community emerged in November 1994, when Simon Widlake created COMPET-N, a website hosting leaderboards dedicated to ranking completion times of Doom's single-player levels.

In 1996, id Software released Quake as a successor to the Doom series. Like its predecessor, Quake had a demo-recording feature and drew attention from speedrunners. In April 1997, Nolan "Radix" Pflug created Nightmare Speed Demos (NSD), a website for tracking Quake speedruns. In June 1997, Pflug released a full-game speedrun demo of Quake called Quake Done Quick, which introduced speedrunning to a broader audience. Quake speedruns were notable for their breadth of movement techniques, including "bunny hopping," a method of gaining speed also present in future shooting games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. In April 1998, NSD merged with another demo-hosting website to create Speed Demos Archive.

For five years, Speed Demos Archive hosted exclusively Quake speedruns, but in 2003 it published a 100% speedrun of Metroid Prime done by Pflug. Six months later, SDA began accepting runs from all games. Unlike its predecessor websites, SDA did not compile leaderboards for their games; they displayed only the fastest speedrun of each game. Until SDA's expansion into games other than Quake in 2004, speedrun video submissions were primarily sent to early video game record-keeper Twin Galaxies. The videos were often never publicly released, creating verifiability concerns that SDA aimed to address. It was often impossible to determine what strategies had gone into setting these records, hindering the development of speedrunning techniques. Sites dedicated to speedrunning, including game-specific sites, began to establish the subculture around speedrunning. These sites were not only used for sharing runs but also to collaborate and share tips to improve times, leading to collaborative efforts to continuously improve speedrunning records on certain games.

In 2003, a video demonstrating a TAS of Super Mario Bros. 3 garnered widespread attention on the internet; many speedrunners cite this as their first introduction to the hobby. It was performed and published by a Japanese user named Morimoto. The video was lacking context to indicate that it was a TAS, so many people believed it to be an actual human performance. It drew criticism from viewers who felt "cheated" when Morimoto later explained the process by which he created the video and apologized for the confusion. In December 2003, after seeing Morimoto's TAS, a user named Bisqwit created TASVideos (initially named NESVideos), a site dedicated to displaying tool-assisted speedruns.

The creation of video-sharing and streaming websites in the late 2000s and early 2010s contributed to an increase in the accessibility and popularity of speedrunning. In 2005, the creation of YouTube enabled speedrunners to upload and share videos of speedruns and discuss strategies on the SDA forums. Twitch, a livestreaming website centered around video gaming, was launched in 2011. The advent of livestreaming made for easier verification and preservation of speedruns, and some speedrunners believe it is responsible for a shift towards collaboration among members of the community. In 2014, Speedrun.com was created, which had less stringent submission guidelines than SDA and was intended to centralize speedrun leaderboards for many different games. Speedrunners' move towards using Speedrun.com and social media platforms like Skype and Discord contributed to SDA's relevance waning in the 2010s.