For most players, finishing a video game is a journey. It’s about soaking in the atmosphere, reading every line of dialogue, and exploring every nook and cranny the developers designed. But for a select group of dedicated gamers, the credits rolling isn’t the end—it’s just the benchmark. This is the world of speedrunning, a mesmerizing subculture where the goal isn’t just to beat the game, but to dismantle it.
Speedrunning transforms familiar titles into high-octane puzzles. It takes the games we played in our childhood bedrooms—Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda, Doom—and reimagines them as racetracks. Here, a glitch isn’t a bug; it’s a tool. A wall isn’t a barrier; it’s a suggestion. It is a pursuit that demands an intoxicating blend of reflexive precision, deep technical knowledge, and an endless reservoir of patience.
But how do they do it? How does a 40-hour RPG turn into a 3-hour sprint? The answer lies in a complex web of strategies, community collaboration, and a refusal to accept the rules of the game as written. In this deep dive, we will explore the fascinating mechanics of speedrunning, uncover the techniques that shatter world records, and look at the community that keeps this digital sport alive.
What is Speedrunning?
At its most basic level, speedrunning is the act of completing a video game, or a specific section of one, as fast as possible. However, describing it simply as “playing fast” does a disservice to the depth involved. Speedrunning is arguably more akin to a science experiment or a musical performance than casual gaming.
It involves deconstructing a game’s code, physics, and logic to find the most efficient path from start to finish. Runners don’t just react to what’s on screen; they anticipate, manipulate, and control the game environment. This practice has evolved from friends comparing times on stopwatch timers to a global phenomenon with professional organizations, massive charity events, and a competitive leaderboard system hosted on sites like Speedrun.com.
The Categories of Speedrunning
To understand speedrunning, you must understand the rules of engagement. Because games are complex, runners have established specific categories to standardize competition:
- Any%: The most popular category. The goal is to reach the end credits by any means necessary. Glitches, skips, and game-breaking bugs are all fair game.
- 100%: The completionist’s nightmare. The runner must complete the game and collect every item, upgrade, or achievement defined by the community rules.
- Low%: Completing the game with the absolute minimum number of items or upgrades possible. This is often harder than Any% because the player character remains weak throughout the run.
- Glitchless: For purists who want to see the game played fast, but within the intended mechanics designed by the developers.
Key Speedrunning Techniques
The magic of speedrunning lies in the techniques used to shave off seconds—or even hours—from a playthrough. These strategies range from high-level planning to frame-perfect button inputs. Let’s explore the specific methods that allow runners to achieve the impossible.
Glitch Exploitation
If you watch a high-level speedrun, you might see a character walk through a solid wall, float into the sky, or suddenly teleport across the map. This is glitch exploitation, and it is the bread and butter of the Any% category.
Glitches occur when the game’s code handles an interaction incorrectly. Speedrunners hunt for these errors relentlessly. Common examples include:
- Clipping: By moving a character into a corner at a specific velocity or angle, the game’s collision detection may fail, pushing the character through the wall and into the next level.
- Wrong Warping: This involves manipulating the game’s memory to confuse it about where the player should go next. Instead of walking through a door and entering a house, a runner might trigger a warp that sends them directly to the final boss.
- Infinite Jumping/Hovering: Exploiting physics engines to gain unlimited height or distance, bypassing platforming challenges entirely.
Sequence Breaking
Games are usually designed linearly: you get the key, you open the door, you fight the boss. Sequence breaking is the art of ignoring that order. It involves obtaining items or reaching areas earlier than the developers intended.
For example, in Metroid games, players often use advanced movement tech to reach high ledges, allowing them to skip entire sections of the map and acquire powerful weapons hours before they are supposed to. This creates a domino effect; with the powerful weapon early, subsequent bosses melt away in seconds, drastically reducing the overall time.
RNG Manipulation
In gaming, RNG stands for “Random Number Generation.” It’s the code that decides if an enemy drops a health potion, which attack a boss uses, or what number shows up on a dice roll. For a casual player, RNG adds variety. For a speedrunner, bad RNG is a run-killer.
To combat this, runners use RNG manipulation. This is the practice of performing specific actions to force the game to give a desired outcome. In some classic RPGs, runners have discovered that the RNG seed is determined by player input. By walking in a specific pattern or navigating menus at a precise speed, they can guarantee a “random” critical hit or ensure a rare item drops 100% of the time. It turns luck into a controllable variable.
Route Optimization
Before a runner even picks up the controller, the run is won or lost in the planning phase. Route optimization is the strategic mapping of the entire game. It answers questions like:
- Is it faster to fight this enemy for experience points or run past them?
- Should I detour to grab these running shoes, or will the time lost grabbing them outweigh the speed boost?
- Which quest order minimizes backtracking?
Runners and community members spend years analyzing maps and data to construct the “optimal route.” When a new trick is discovered, the entire route often has to be recalculated to accommodate the time save.
Frame-Perfect Execution
Knowledge is power, but execution is king. All the routing in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t pull off the moves. High-level speedrunning requires inputs that are often “frame-perfect.”
Most games run at 60 frames per second (FPS). A frame-perfect trick requires the player to press a button within a window of 1/60th of a second (roughly 16 milliseconds). Miss that window, and the glitch fails, or the character falls into a pit. This level of consistency requires thousands of hours of muscle memory training.
The Speedrunning Community: Collaboration Over Competition
While the leaderboards suggest a solitary, competitive pursuit, the reality of the speedrunning community is surprisingly collaborative. It is a massive, decentralized research team working toward a common goal: pushing a game to its absolute limit.
collaborative Discovery
When a runner discovers a new glitch exploitation method or a theory for sequence breaking, they rarely keep it to themselves. They post it on Discord, Reddit, or YouTube. The community then crowdsources the testing. One person might find the glitch, another might figure out a consistent setup to trigger it, and a third might integrate it into the current route.
This “hive mind” approach means that the world record holder isn’t necessarily the person who found the tricks—they are just the person who executed the community’s collective knowledge the best.
Games Done Quick (GDQ)
The pinnacle of this community spirit is Games Done Quick. Twice a year, the world’s best runners gather for a week-long marathon to speedrun games 24 hours a day, raising money for charities like the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders.
These events highlight the joy of the sport. The runners aren’t just silently playing; they are commentating, explaining the history of the game, the logic behind the RNG manipulation, and the difficulty of the route optimization. It transforms a technical display of skill into an educational and entertaining spectacle, raising millions of dollars in the process.
Tool-Assisted Speedruns (TAS)
There is also a sub-community dedicated to Tool-Assisted Speedruns (TAS). These aren’t performed by humans in real-time. Instead, creators use emulator tools to input commands frame-by-frame. This allows them to create a “theoretical perfect run” that no human could physically execute.
While TAS runs don’t compete on standard leaderboards, they are vital for research. They show human runners what is theoretically possible, often inspiring new strategies that players eventually learn to perform manually.
Why We Watch: The Psychology of Speed
Why do millions of people watch others play games fast? It taps into the same appeal as the Olympics. We are watching humans perform at the very edge of their capabilities. There is a inherent tension in watching a runner 50 minutes into a world-record pace run, knowing that a single missed jump could ruin everything.
Furthermore, speedrunning offers a nostalgic lens. Seeing a game from your childhood broken wide open is a mix of sacrilege and revelation. It peels back the curtain of the software, showing the wires and code that held our favorite memories together. It validates the immense complexity of game design while simultaneously subverting it.
The Future of Speedrunning
As gaming technology evolves, so does speedrunning. Modern games are massive, open-world experiences with complex physics engines, offering new playgrounds for glitch exploitation. Simultaneously, the retro community continues to find secrets in 30-year-old games that everyone assumed were fully solved.
We are also seeing the rise of AI in speedrunning. Machine learning programs are now being trained to play games, finding routes and strategies that human minds might never have conceived. Rather than replacing humans, these AI developments are providing new data for runners to study and adapt.
The Enduring Appeal of Speedrunning
Speedrunning is a testament to human dedication and curiosity. It is the ultimate expression of mastering a tool. Whether it’s through meticulous route optimization, the thrill of sequence breaking, or the technical wizardry of RNG manipulation, speedrunners force us to look at video games differently.
They remind us that rules are made to be broken, that limits are often self-imposed, and that with enough practice, patience, and community support, we can achieve perfection—one frame at a time.
For those looking to dive in, the barrier to entry has never been lower. Pick a game you love, look up a guide, and start the timer. You might not break a world record today, but you will almost certainly discover a whole new way to play.