The Gold Split Newsletter - Week #18

The Gold Split offers a free, weekly digest of news from the world of speedrunning and beyond.

This Story of the Week is all about an introduction to the world of tool assisted speedruns and superplays and was featured in this week's issue. The full post includes more news, briefly, as well as this week's top times and a fun fact. Check it out HERE.

Story of the Week

Two weeks ago I teased the introduction of a new section reserved for TAS movies, and today you’re getting at least the first part of that: a simple introduction to the world of tool-assisted speedruns (or superplays).

As we learn, I’ll adopt as much of the common TASVideos nomenclature and conventions as possible. TASVideos is the #1 resource and gathering point for creating and watching tool-assisted speedruns and superplays. First off, “movie” is simply the term for any one speedrun or superplay on the website. You’ll pretty much never hear the term used to describe Real Time Attack (RTA) speedruns, so it helps in telling the two apart. Movies are first submitted to the website, and then verified and published if they meet certain criteria.

What’s a TAS anyway?

I’m glad you asked. TAS is short for tool-assisted speedrun or superplay. And the use of tools is not just allowed, it’s necessary. While creating a real time speedrun takes exactly as long as the run itself, creating a TAS can take weeks, months or even years of meticulous planning and careful execution. The one tool that’s used for all movies is the emulator, but there’s no limit to how many one might use. Emulators can pause the game at any time and come with other handy features such as save states, frame advance, memory watch, and the ability to record the TAS file.

• Save States: At any point, a game can be saved or loaded again from a previous save state. This can be used to right mistakes or minimise the randomness of certain outcomes.
• Frame Advance: By advancing the game one frame at a time, TAS authors are able to choose exactly which buttons should be pressed and which direction the analogue stick(s) should be pointing at for every single frame. Games may run at 60 frames per second. That’s a lot of possibilties!
• Memory Watch: Watching the game’s memory provides a closer look into the effect an action might have. It’s very common for TAS authors to program actions that modify the game’s memory in ways that don’t affect what you would see on the screen at all.
• Recording: The result of a recording in the world of real time speedrunning is usually a video file, because the output is recorded. But for a TAS, it’s the input that’s more relevant: the dataset of which buttons are pressed at every frame until the end. The result is an input file that others can download and replay in an emulator. If they get the same result as the person who created the input file, the TAS is called sync-verified, an important step.

A Culture Shift

Leaderboards don’t exist on TASVideos. When a faster movie for any combination of game and category gets submitted and becomes verified and published, the older and slower version will become obsolete. That doesn’t mean that its page is deleted, it’s just no longer being featured the same way as before.

Each TAS movie on the website comes with its own page, where anybody can read up on the history and detailed explanations, download video and emulator replay files or access links to the movie’s forum thread, similar movies and more. Especially the author’s notes help the judges tremendously when deciding whether or not a movie should be published.

Every movie submitted to TASVideos has to undergo a verification process. It begins with checking whether or not the provided input file can be sync-verified and ends in a possible publication on the website. As TAS tools have become more sophisticated, lowering the barrier to entry and allowing the creation of movies for games that were previously impossible to TAS, the amount of submissions have increased. But the manual process is still the best way to maintain the impressive quality standards of the site.

Movies can be categorised in many different ways. In the following section, I’ll try to boil it down to three somewhat arbitrary classes and give you some examples.

The Tool-Assisted Speedrun

Exactly what you might expect: tool-assisted speedruns achieve superhuman speed due to every single input being frame-perfect. They reach times and use strategies that are impossible to pull off in real time. They mark the theoretical limit of how fast a game can be completed… at least until new discoveries are made. Besides simply completing the games as fast as possible, categories like 100% or All Bosses exist here just as in real time speedrunning.

A good first example for a superhuman TAS that still preserves the original gameplay is the movie for Celeste.

Others use so many glitches that very little of the intended gameplay remains. In this movie, beating Super Mario 64 with only one key, some of it is at least still recognisable:

There’s something for everyone, between movies without many glitches, and those that rely heavily on them. Few movies simply fall into either category.

The Tool-Assisted Superplay

I would categorise movies that don’t conform to the more standard speedrunning categories but still have a clear goal as superplays. The goals may just be arbitrary and chosen to only showcase a certain part of the game. For example, in a movie of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the author completes all dungeon with the restriction of never opening a door.

High score attacks also fall under this category, and Star Fox 64 is a great example:

The Art Form

I won’t say that the movies for the other categories are not also expressing the author’s creativity through controller inputs, but some do go further. They’ll go as far as the game’s engine and the system its played on will allow. These showcases often have no clear goal and aim mostly to entertain. Arbitrary code execution in Pokémon: Yellow is a great example:

It’s difficult to comprehend, but everything you see would be possible on a GameBoy Colour. Every frame is crafted through button inputs. This is my favourite category and includes many of the TASBot showcases we saw at various speedrunning marathons over the years, so I will recommend a few more:

• Family Feud "playaround"** by Heisanevilgenius
• International Superstar Soccer Deluxe "playaround" by Markokarty
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time "Triforce% ACE Showcase” by Sauraen, dwangoAC, Savestate & more

Go forth and immerse yourself

Now you should be equipped to head over to TASVideos.org. There’s an incredible amount of good content, with a comprehensive search function, tags and filters that help you find what you’re looking for. There is a rating system and each year, the team gives out awards to the best movies and authors in many different categories.

Good places to start are their Welcome page, significantly expanding on my short article,**** and the Newcomer Corner. Alternatively, jump straight to the Movies page, use the filters and find something that inspires you. Enjoy!

Thank you for reading! If you're curious about more of this week's news or would even consider subscribing to the newsletter, you'll find the full post over HERE.

Finding new stories to cover can be challenging. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should be taking a look at, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨