I'm Matt from 1UPX ESports. I love speed runs. Especially Super Metroid. Actually posted a tournament thread but won't spam it here. I wanted to tell you guys how awesome this community is and how skilled I think you guys are. When I get time I really want to start speed running. Keep up the awesomeness guys!
https://www.speedrun.com/games
Sorting by active players shows the currently most popular games, player count shows all-time stats.
usually a lot of your classics on the n64. popularity tends to focus on your usual gaming companies. nintendo, sega, playstation. the bigshots.
of course, speedrunning targets 90s kids or so. which is why the most popular games to run are from the 90s. why? well back in the day you only had a few household games. so, once you beat them, there was only one thing to do. new game+ or do it faster. thus, speedrunning was born.
super mario 64 is a huge factor as well. the first ever truly 3d game. (ignore the spirtes), it had many bugs because of this. which of course is another thing that runners usually look for. the code is long and complicated making it easy to find exploits of some kind. even with that nintendo polish. because lets keep in mind, this was a huge step in gaming and technology. it will have things that can easily break. not to mention the game introducing many concepts and elements along with its bright colors memoriable soundtrack of nostalgia, and its flexible movement choices. this was nintedos biggest seller back in the day. thus making it debatably the biggest game to run. dont believe me? i think the leaderboard and mods and hacks speaks for itself. not to mention the community aint dying out anytime soon!
well that was a long explanation for something you probably didn't care about.