For me, I met speedrun first time when I checked tutorial for a kirby game I remembered. At that time, that is the first time I find that how wonderful is speedrunning is! Looking at the people playing a game is very exciting.
I started speedrunning 1 year ago when I saw a YouTuber I always watch speedrunning games which made me want to speedrun the games.
For me (at least in the time leading up to when I joined, and I'm still new - I can't request games yet), it was when I got good enough at the Sega Genesis game Columns III to hope to actually complete some sort of run of the game.
This is a "falling block" puzzle game whose original was Sega's answer to Tetris, where you have to navigate columns of three falling gems, which cannot be rotated, but you can "shuffle" the gems around in their column to change in which order they appear. You have to match three or more of the same color in a row horizontally, vertically or diagonally to make the gems disappear. Any other matches resulting from this will also clear and get you more points for them in the original version, and give you more attack power in Columns III, as well as Stack Columns and Hanagumi Taisen Columns which I have my eye on right now for first speedruns.
Well, that's not /technically/ when I first met speedrunning per se. I'd known about the practice for a while, and earlier, in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, I had been lucky enough to work for someone who was good at Super Mario Bros. 3 as well as a lot of other games, and he actually put together two speedrun tournaments of the first world in Mario 3! He's now also very good at Columns III as far as all players go, and he might possibly be able to pull out a time to put up here, though he seems too busy to actually try right now. He's actually the one who gave me the idea for attempting a run like this as my first ever speedrun that would be proven!
This Columns III action is definitely what has inspired me to join this site, in hopes of (and making room for!) setting such a record, and now I have this same idea for Stack Columns and Hanagumi Taisen Columns, though I haven't actually "beaten" them per se yet on one credit. Though since Stack Columns isn't on this site now, that actually opens up the door for me to actually moderate a game on this site, so I have to learn those rules quickly if that is to happen, for Stack Columns to appear. I would probably have to allow continues to be used to encourage some sorts of times on it, though I could still require video proof for it, unlike with Columns III, where the American record, and the only one in the USA, was set at 34:45 - a slow time compared to the three others in the world - without video proof, but with a witness. SegaJunkie approved it.
So now, since Stack Columns only gives you the "true" ending if you beat it on one credit, I would really like to beat it that way for my own run of the game if I actually moderate (or even get up on the site!!) this game.
I actually kind of wish I could use a game series specific handle like "Column1984" for any game in the Columns series! I picked "MadGamer" instead so it could branch out into other games more easily.
I wanted to play more odyssey and figured speedrunning would be a good way to do it (spoiler: it was). I also swear there was a recent thread on this, but I can't find it.
@Sizzyl There's the link your first run thread. This likely has a fair amount of overlap, but it is a bit different.
I found 2 related threads with the same question:
https://www.speedrun.com/talk/thread/aqvv0 https://www.speedrun.com/talk/thread/tuohw
@hahhah42 that was the one I was thinking of. The link your first run thread.
As @Oreo321 mentions though, The When and why you started speedrunning thread and What made you start speedrunning thread are completely identical to this one. I just happened to remember the link your first run thread.
Since I never answered those threads, here's my answer. My lil bro and I were playing Super Mario Bros from this knockoff gameboy device which has hundreds of games. Since we were both pretty bad at the game, I decided to watch speedruns of SMB1 on youtube since I thought that would be the best way to figure out how to beat the game.
The video I watched was the first 4:55 achieved by Kosmic, my mind was blown and that's the story of how I got into speedrunning
@Oreo321 & @Sizzyl I still think this thread is technically different from those, albeit not by much. For example, the first speedrun videos I ever watched were some Goldeneye runs back in 2008 or 2009 when I stumbled across the-elite.net. I made a few (unrecorded) attempts at matching what I saw there, but at the time, the style of play in those videos (looking at the floor constantly, damage boosting) didn't appeal to me, so I more or less forgot about speedrunning for the next decade.
So I "met" speedrunning long before I really started. ...And I'd actually heard of the concept a few years before that, from an acquaintance who claimed to be able to beat SMB1 in just over 5 minutes. But he was a noted teller of tall tales, so I just brushed that off entirely. (N.B. his name is not on the leaderboard here in that time period.)
But I expect most people here didn't have such a long gap between their first encounter with speedrunning & their first run.
If I remember correctly, I got into speedrunning because of Shift. His run of Battle for Bikini Bottom on AGDQ 2017 got into my Youtube recommendation, and I was hooked!
There was a thread that asked the exact same thing, but I can't find it. My first time watching a speedrun was @Greenalink 's former world record of New Super Mario Bros. 2. I don't exactly remember when I first heard of speedrunning, but this is the first time I sat down and watched a full run. I didn't actually make an account until several years later though.
iirc I my first encounter with speedrunning dates back to the time when we didn't have internet at my parents home, sometime around 2003-2005 I believe: So my brother & me were into the Thief series at that time. One day my brother showed me some speedrun-videos of Thief: Deadly Shadows. They were split into multiple videos - by level. Especially the Craddle was amazing to watch, cause casually that is the scariest part in the game. It took me hours to beat that level, for the runner mere minutes.
As what got me into speedrunning: I guess it was a matter of time after I discovered GDQ. Seeing some of my favorite games finished in incredible times has a certain charm.
the oldest thing that i can point out is this dk64 run from agdq 2013 but of course before finding this run i might have known about speedrunning
Racing games are basically just speedrun games. So I guess I started in the early 2010’s with Mario Kart Wii
monaco : What's yours is mine in-game-time leaderboards through the multiplayer lobby and ending up with the then speedrunners who let me tag along because they all thought I was someone's friend, but the 3 of them didn't ask whose friend it actually was.
I've been aware of speedrunning for many years, ever since discovering a snowboarding game from 2000 had its own leaderboard for times. But almost certainly the first time I considered actually speedrunning myself was after watching this GDQ run by DrTChops: I watched it again just now actually and it's still brilliant, discovering how broken and impressive these runs can get.
After some of you mentioned leaderboards: I remember competing against some people I knew from an assassins creed forum in Assassins Creed Brotherhood (i think?). The game has some parcour training levels with an in-game timer.