Speedrunning is the act of attempting to complete a videogame as quickly as possible. For something which seeks to shorten a game to its most optimised and minimal playtime, the process itself is a slow and arduous one based on practice and mastery of one’s chosen game. Often focussing on one game for months or even years, players grind away hoping to someday achieve the coveted world record. There are speedrunners for almost any game you can think of: from classics like the Legend of Zelda and Pokémon to not-so-classics like, eh, Panic Restaurant and Hello Kitty: Roller Rescue…
Competition has been prevalent in video games since the heady days of getting your initials next to the high-score down the local chipper, pub or fun-time emporium, as it were. And while time attack modes have been a staple of video games since the ’80s, the most likely catalyst for speedrunning as we know it today is id Software’s first-person shooter classic Doom, which took the world wide web by storm when its downloadable shareware demo hit in 1993. Designer John Romero decided to include his personal best times for each level, and thus spawned the craze of players hooking up their 56k modems to upload their own personal best runs as in-engine ‘.lmp’ demo files for bragging rights over their peers.
Originating as a Doom and Quake community, the Speed Demos Archives forums have since grown into a Mecca for speedrunning games of all kinds. Games are played on their original hardware as standard; for older games you’ll notice speedrunners opting for early Japanese cartridges as they feature less text to scroll through and are often riddled with exploitable bugs. Runs range from the absurdly short (Clue on the SNES clocks in at about 3 seconds) to slogging affairs lasting several hours, such as the Final Fantasy runs which require scheduled bathroom breaks during long cut-scenes.
There’s a new generation of children and teenagers who’ve grown up in front of Minecraft videos instead of Noddy, and they’re just as eager to be producers of that kind of content as they are to be consumers of it. Speedrunning’s growth in popularity has happened in the larger context of a massive video-game live-streaming boom. Last year Google lost a bidding war against Amazon over the purchase of video-game streaming website Twitch; the winning bid landed at $970 million. The Twitch model allows streamers to sell monthly subscriptions, but most streamer income is generated through incentivised donation systems which sometimes blur the line between user-patronage and user-exploitation.
The rising popularity of speedrunning makes sense as this audience, who are more interested in watching a game being played than playing it themselves, continues to grow. While some speedrunners have made the transfer from hobbyist streamer to career-orientated streamer, the majority of the speedrunning community considers it a purely fun, cathartic, challenging pastime. Speedrunning is competitive by nature but it’s also a wonderfully collaborative process. Runners share new glitches and exploits via message board threads, some of which span hundreds of pages charting years of discoveries.
The organisers of the Games Done Quick marathons have done well to marry the professionalism and production qualities of career-streamers with the enthusiasm and geeky charm of hobbyist streamers. Starting in 2010 as a humble charity marathon broadcast from someone’s living room, it has grown into a hugely successful institution of live-streaming, whose last marathon raised over $1.5 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Summer Games Done Quick is scheduled for seven days of non-stop speedrunning between Sunday 26th July and Thursday 2nd August. Proceeds will be going to Doctors Without Borders. Visit www.gamesdonequick.com for more info.
Words: Aidan Wall
