Very nice intro, voice is pleasant, editing is cool, text is synthetic yet well thought. I see Nier, so I subscribe :) When is the first episode ? What will be the duration ? Who will make the runs ? etc etc so many questions ! keep us posted :)

I love the "Route less Ran", it has a really nice sound :)

Otherwise..."Going nowhere fast"

@oddtom : thanks a lot for your insight. I pretty much have to agree with everything you said :) Although if I built a massive statut of liberty i'd certainly be interested in challenging my friends to do the same, and then compare results :D I think fundamentally, the speedrunning community is very creative in setting their own personal milestones, but specifically because lots of people are a bit lazy, giving them pointers might appeal to a certain population.

This is actually how low to middle-management is structured : people who can set themselves goals and reach them autonomously are usually promoted to management roles, and people who can't or won't are often quite happy to have that work done for them.

That's it, I've said it : speedrunners should lead the gaming community XD

@Capuno : that's a fair point we are discussing with the team. On the opposite of the spectrum, you have "official" sites which take achievement proof very seriously, such as twingalaxies.com or say youtube. This requires a sort of peer validation that is frankly quite difficult to organize and arbitrate. On the other hand, you have boards with no proof, which I agree with you bring little value. What we wanted was something "lighter" like a screenshot/photo if possible, video if not, and a description of the strategy employed. A full run of dark souls is clearly a pain in the ass to review in any case, so a screenshot seemed a good compromise, and a little text seemed also a nice way to encourage people to talk to each others. If we implement a sort of voting feature, this would enable a selection mecanism that could possible strike the right balance between validation and arbitration, using the community (everyone loves to give his opinion :D)

@oddtom : I agree, most players actually aren't looking for alternative ways to complete a game. Like most players don't care to complete the game as fast as possible. Like most people prefer crappy action movies. But today in industry the word "gamification" seems to be everywhere and, as a lover of videogames, I feel like pushing gaming mechanisms everywhere would be a nice move. You're probably familiar with the Bartle classification but different types of achievements cater to different types of gamers, and, in particular with sandboxes, lots of gamers are trying silly stuff just for the sake of beauty.

@MelonSlice : Yeah, games should ALWAYS include an online leaderboard with fastest completion time. With everything online this would be sooOOoo easy to do :(

@ShikenNuggets

• You are indeed correct. As in any software production cycle, once a product is shipped it's much more difficult, if possible at all, to add achievements. However on Steam it happens quite a lot. Also as video game industry is slowly moving as GaaS (Game as a Service) with longer development tails, we feel it would become more relevant.
• There are a few achievement websites out-there, but most of them are platform specific (trueachivements, retroachievements, etc.) and have limited UX or functionalities. We'd also like to put together a first version of the site that we have in mind. But yes, clearly we'll need to get feedback from those communities

@blueYOSHI

• Thanks a lot for the retroachievements site, I wasn't aware of it ! I'm still interested in this community's feedback, in particular because i don't want to restrict myself to old games, and I like it here :)
• Instagram is at that stage a prototype to measure interest of people in custom achievements. We are developing a platform but it's currently in beta-test, and we felt that Instagram, although limited for interactions, is good to push content to see which games or type of achievements work well (so far it's Fornite lol...stop it already seems like it's the only game out there :()

In any case, thank you all for your precious feedback !

Hi fellow speedrunners

With a couple of friends we've been fiddling around with the concept of achievements in gaming.

In theory, achievements should encourage people to play games differently by creating constraints, or incentives to sidetrack.

However, our observation is that achievements are often (1) missing (2) tacked-on as an afterthough (3) not fun, grindy or just used to track progress of a population of players.

Community of speedrunners typically create their own achievements. Using time as a constraint is powerful because it is incredibly skill intensive and also involves trial & error on level design, items combination or finding an optimal path. Often speedrunners are the gamers that have the deepest knowledge of games.

But alas, most gamers don't have the mindset, creativity and dedication of speedrunners.

What we had in mind was to create a community based on unofficial achievements, that could be created or voted by anyone. Our assumption is that with enough popularity we'd be able to "convince" developpers to add achievements in their games...and at the very least, provide every type of gamer a way to appreciate a good game the way speedrunner do it.

To test that, we have created an instagram account posting unofficial achievements every day : https://www.instagram.com/dsrupt.games/

What do you think of the concept ?

N64 mouse is mostly impossible to find these days :( I like the no strafe run idea though :)

Thank you for the warm welcome :)

Honestly NES is really old school for me...suffered too much when I was young lol, I'm too old for this shit :D. I prefer games that are specifically aimed at speedrunners with training tools such as Celeste or Shovel Knight.

Not so rare but quite a lot of them :D I was quite happy with the play arts kai of grey fox which is fetching quite a price those days. I also have a beautiful commissionned replica of grimoire-weiss from Nier. And of course the mandatory hama-beads sprites from my kids, a life size bust of iron man, and a few dozens of figures for my man cave :D

Hi everyone !

I'm a child of 12 in the body of a man of 40. I'm french, and was born during the best moment in humanity : the NES/SNES era and the fantastic growth of video games, which have basically taken over my life ? I'm also the proud father of 6 kids, 2 of them are lost to the cause and are spending my salary in Fornite VBucks. But 1 of them is building 16-bits sprites in hama-beads, collecting retro-consoles and speedrunning Shovel Knight in about an hour. He has something like 3000 hours of playtime on Terraria. He is THE chosen one...when I die needless to say : he gets my collection of rare video game figures. We've been watching documentaries about video games for a while now : King of Kong, Halfcoordinated, the youtube channel Summoning Salt, lots of stuff about esport and video game culture in general (noclip and from bedrooms to billions are some of our favorites), and although my speedrunning days are long gone -used to clear megaman & sonic quite fast, though- I always found that the speedrunning was the quintessence of video games : whereas most esport athletes are in for the money and glory, speedrunners are in for the beauty, making speedrunning a form of art. I am currently in charge of esport in one of the main european investment bank, which, under the impulsion of my team, was the first to sponsor a european League of Legends team. Mainstream esport may have the spotlights and investments, but speedrunning is my first love, and with a couple of friends, we are experimenting something around non-official achievements. This is a bit of an early stage, but my intuition is that speedrunning communities have long been creating their own non-official challenges, and I feel that feedback of the community here might be valuable when we have something to show. Hence my introduction :) My favorite games on the scene are any Zelda & Megaman, Spelunky, while more recent titles would be Cuphead and Celeste.

Glad to be among you !