I'm curious about what got you guy's started on speedrunning. Will you please tell me? I started speedrunning about 8 months ago because I wanted to try a different way of gaming and see how it would feel beating my favorite games very fast

I got into speedrunning originally because of DeadCore, which in and of itself is a speedrun game, has its own timer and everything and it was just a lot of fun with all the tricks you can do in it, I played the game somewhat casually until a GDQ I don't remember which got me wanting to run the game competitively, then that just spread from there. Made DeadCore, FEAR 3 and Kirby that much more fun to play

There's a twitch streamer I watch called LobosJR who does super-cas speedruns as like....5% of his streaming content :P But that was my first exposure to speedrunning, Dark Souls speedrunning in particular, and I fell in love with the concept right then and there. He also hosted an annual speedrunning event (not sure this year's is gonna happen) and I saw all kinds of cool runs there and thought "man, wish I could do that." Soon after, it occurred to me that I could!

My horizons have since broadened a great deal :D But I never watched my first GDQ until last year.

I got in speedrunning after seeing Sethbling run SMW. Before, I had beaten some games with every possible challenge, except trying to beat it as fast as possible. No hit challenge, no upgrades challenge, etc. Once you have done that several times, it is no longer a real challenge. I was looking for a way to keep a game challenging for me, and came upon speedrunning as a good way to keep some games relevant to me.

I started with World of Illusion. I always enjoyed the Donald levels more than Mickey, so it was naturally that I picked that category up. It has more unforgiving stages, and trying to beat it as fast as possible was a new experience. I do run some games on and off, since my lack of time at certain periods. This do make it so that when I and one friend of mine has time, we do a (blind) race of a retro game. Racing is fun, but at times I do have to remember not to reset.

As a Teenager i tried to complete Fable 1 on the Xbox as fast as possible without knowing of speedrunning, then i came across SGDQ in 2013 and got very interested in the topic of using games mechanics against itself to complete the game super fast. I finally started Jan 2017 with practicing Metal Slug 1 and soon i want to start Fable TLC so relive my youth :)

I saw and still mostly see playing through a video game with the objective of reaching some completion point as the highest demonstration of mastery of the game's mechanics and planning. Basically, being fast is an interesting challenge.

I started speedrunning about 2 years ago I think, it started with me playing Cave Story on my 3DS and I wanted to know how fast I could beat it, I think I beat it in 2 and a half hours or somewhere around that, after I finished the game I wondered if anyone else has tried beating the game as fast as possible and that's how I found this site, not long after I started running Portal 2.

After meeting a fistful of speedrunners at the 2015 Nintendo World Championships I decided I'd give it a try, plus I effing love Dr. Mario and puzzle games of most kinds..

Last summer, I was inspired to join the scene and create an account because someone did a speedrun of Cailou on the PBS Kids website. That one simple run made me think about all the speedrunning potential web games had. Postcards from Buster: Dream On sub 11 min. or get out Kappa

I remember finding the AGDQ 2016 stream last year on Twitch and got hooked on watching speedruns for the first time. I never was interested in doing speedruns myself until I saw LiquidWiFi do speedruns of The Simpsons Hit & Run, one of my favorite games from my childhood. I replayed the game to 100% completion because of him and realized how much potential I could have running the game. Now it's my main speedrun game for now :P

I did a Platinum% of Magus around a month ago, I didn't even know it was a Platinum% at the time, and I beat the game in around ~1:22:30, and I noted it when I continued my run.

Then I found out Magus was on here, and thought why not.

Now I brought the WR time all the way down from 59:14 to 40:32, found 3 skips, and a perfect route.

darb's WR SMB any% video is what hooked me. I still haven't run SMB yet (world 8 is hard :O), but maybe I will someday.

I've been watching AGDQ since I believe 2013. I'm mainly a game designer so the whole "let's break a game and play it" has always been an extremely fascinating topic to me, so I watch every speedrunning even I can and tend to follow people with really good commentary. Eventually, I decided to work on a video talking about the history of speedrunning. When I was working on the video, I decided that I probably should start to speedrun myself so I'm not having to ask for footage from everybody, so I picked up a couple of games that I really enjoy and was decently competent at and decided to do some casual speedruns, then found out that I enjoyed it.

Got into speedrunning because of SourceRuns's Half Life 2 Speedrun, was so interesting to try out.

I'm gonna be honest here for a sec- I have no idea how I got into speedrunning. I don't remember at all. Even looking back at my first submissions, I have no idea what inspired me to do them. Not a clue. It's weird.

Got in because of a friendly SMB warpless racing tournament that is still taking place. Discovered I had some potential at that thing. :)

About a year ago, hardly gotten anywhere with it. That's fine though. The only reason I started was to make friends and hopefully make a career out of it. By the look of things, I think I completed one of those goals. That is what's important to me.

I got into speedrunning by watching some of Sethbling's old Super Mario World 0-Exit runs, thus making me slowly get into the community.

I remember speedrunning on PC games back in the day, never picked up on it. Much more difficult to get into when I was a kid and we had MSDOS and hoped no one kicked off online because they needed to use the phone.

Came across AGDQ a couple years ago. Could easily kill time by watching that, over most movies and TV series. Had a good friend working on a book about it, and so started talking to him about it more and more often.

I like the meta-game of it. It's a game of games, in a way; and it completely recontextualizes so many games I've played in my life, and give it a vastly different perspective. I don't code games, but looking at some of the older replies, I can relate to being interested in testing the limits of a game engine. Thus, when I got a chance to get a computer necessary to do it, I went ahead and took the opportunity, and began working on games that I played as a kid.

I was big into Let's Plays a few years back, and I stumbled upon a Siglemic SM64 run (1:43ish iirc). I had never heard of speedrunning before, and I became an avid viewer after that. Finally decided to start trying to run myself a few months back, on Perfect Dark Zero specifically, to impress my kids. Running games helps with my depression and anxiety so I'm glad i finally gave it a try.