speed runs started all the way back at full arcade machines, as a way to track high scores for old racing games and it slowly blead into other genres of games -- so the first one was probably Gran Trak 10,Taito’s Speed Race or another racing game from around 1974
@violetlove: Yeah, but OP is talking about the first recorded speedrun. Probably it was Doom, because the game itself has a way to record your gameplay. I believe Karl Jobst made a video about it.
Here's an even better question. When was the term "speedrun" first coined?
SDA started in 1997 as Nightmare Speed Demos to showcase runs of Quake on the Nightmare difficulty. In 1998 Speed Demos Archive was created when that site and another site for Quake runs merged. So, I would say somewhere around there was when the term originated.
I think 1999 was when “tool assisted speedrun” was first used in relation to some DOOM runs that used a modified version of the game to slow it down and play in several sessions. So, yeah, late 90s is my best guess as to when it entered Internet vernacular as a whole, but it probably originated sometime before that within the DOOM or Quake scenes since they were two of the first to document stuff online with demo files.
(I read about some of this on a Wikipedia page years ago and also in some really old SDA threads on their forums).
Funny that you mention Quake Done Quicker, since there was a Quake Done Quick which preceded it (also in 1997). Those segmented speedruns (well, community sum of best runs) definitely helped popularize speedrunning. It's a shame I don't have Omnigamer's book on me right now, it has some historical details.
For the first "recorded" speedrun, it could have been Super Mario Kart, as the game released in 1992 and has a built in replay system (although not quite as good as dooms)
Edit: Heres a run from 1993-xx-xx
Edit 2: Kart 4 Life