I feel like I've always inclined towards speedrunning, I used to play SMW as fast as possible to show off to friends irl, I'd always be trying to complete RPGs as quickly as possible etc.
I'm not sure what the first proper speedrun video I watched was. Probably one of the really old school Quake videos or a SMB1 world record, but I didn't really get 'hooked' until I saw my first GDQ video which was probably one of the Super Metroid races. The whole "save/kill" the animals donation dynamic really added a lot to it for me.
Since then, I went back and rewatched all the GDQs from the start, then any other marathon I could find (ESA, Calithon, Games Done Adequately, even the "speedrun" marathons featuring like 11 hour RPGs). Once I exhausted that I began watching the speedrun race tournaments - Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, anything I could find.
Then finally, when the quarantine hit, Streets Of Rage 4 was released and I was really enjoying playing the game. I had been following Barb for SMW content and saw him run the game as Floyd before I ever played it, and when I played it; knowing I had a lot of free time; knowing that at least one speedrunner I knew ran the game; I began actually speedrunning the game, and here we are now.
So.... long story short if I hadn't enjoyed "speedrunning" SMW irl before I even knew speedrunning was a thing, I probably would have never followed Barb and probably never have begun myself.
I suppose to answer the question as briefly as possible, I could just say GDQ and that's that, but at least a little more went on behind the scenes I reckon. It's still pretty much how I discovered the existence of speedrunning though, on a lazy afternoon looking up glitch videos and eventually finding a speedrun of, oddly enough for me, Oblivion. I don't think it was even a GDQ run or anything, but I inevitably found it not too long after and it kinda just became a staple of what I watched over the years.
Speedrunning originally did hook me because of glitches and such, and the high skill performances kept watching, but oddly, the routing is what eventually got me doing it myself.
I've always liked when I can find "puzzles" that have many factors and where there's a defined end goal, but the means to reach this end isn't so clearly defined. Chess, tactical RPGs, optimizing daily routines in Harvest Moon games, randomizer runs, those kinds of things. Eventually, I realized the routing aspect of speedruns was this same kind of "puzzle" that I liked with the end goal just being beating the game as fast as possible and you needing to figure out how to do just that. Realizing this finally pushed me to start trying it myself to see if I could have some fun with games I'd already kind of exhausted.
Rune Factory 1 just happened to be one of those games, and I just happened to pick it up just in time to both contribute to the runs as well as see the time for it be utterly demolished over the two years.
(I'd originally tried to get into speedrunning with Sword Master, a NES favorite of mine, but never could get a particularly competitive time due to both skill and simply how physically exhausting it was to run. Changing course to runs where routing played a major role instead of being wholly skill and execution has really suited me far better.)
imma represent 300000000000 people by saying this, but https://www.youtube.com/c/SummoningSalt im addicted to good content, ok?
I wanted to get a Achievment in Pikmin 3 Deluxe where you Had to Play the Game in Hard Mode AND Ultra-spicy Mode. Because I didnt wanted to Play the whole Game which costed me 12 Hours again, I thought of Speedruns. I was already watching Speedruns of icecube and I was super motivated learning it. So I became a Speedrunner
I've told this story before but I always like to share it again. Across mid to late 2016, Super Mario Bros was in the push through low 4:57 and high 4:56. For some reason, I got advertisements on Facebook for articles about the record being broken. I believe the first one was Darbian's 4:57.244, then Kosmic's next record, than the 4:56. These got me over to SRC to watch the records, and I checked out a few other games as well. Then in summer of 2017, I was bored. So I started finding web games on src that I'd played when I was younger, and started speedrunning them. Then, by sheer luck. I learned from one of my college friends about a speedrun club at my college, which is a subsidiary of our EGS group. So I went there, made friends, and started running more games. And here we are about 3.5 years later.
I came across Cant Even run Portal 2 on a GDQ event two years ago. From there my interest in speedrunning gradually became greater, and now, here I am!
Watching mini-documentaries on speedruns piqued my interest enough to start attempting speedrunning myself.
I think the first speedrun I ever watched was Greenalink's NMSB2 speedrun back in like 2015/2016. Ever since then I was aware of speedrunning, and would often times search up runs of games I played, and I watched Bismuth's smb1 videos when they came out as well. Eventually just decided to try doing a run of a game myself, had fun doing it, so I made an account.
