I knew about SRL in 2010 from Cosmo and Peaches. Super Meat Boy are what got me running at first and got me involved in races.
I watched a french podcast called "Speed Game" that present speedruns and TAS. Then, they started to invite french runner to play live (that was A-M on Resident Evil 4), and I realized
"Hey, but that's a real person, I mean this isn't a robot or whatever alien from another planet. So I can do this too !"
And I started to do speedrun ^^ (Then Speed Game called me to play in their podcast xD)
My friend used to be a pretty good KH2 runner, and I watched him stream. Then after watching AGDQ last year I decided to give it a shot myself.
AGDQ 2014 introduced me to the idea. Seeing MLSTRM's run of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger at ESA showed me that running the game was an actual thing. Then I just learned the tricks and started doing it!
Word of mouth, in a way. I've always been very active with both DidYouKnowGaming and VGFacts and somebody posted a link to a Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly speedrun on those forums sometime around early 2013.
Then I thought: I want to do this with my favorite childhood games. Here I am.
When I was six or so my dad had Castlevania IV and I loved that game. For years I didn't touch it. March this year started watching CV4 runs on Twitch, most likely the runs from Furious Paul, Joe Damillio, Hanage and DK. In June I did a Lets Play of my beloved game and since than ... I was totally infected with it again. I watched more runs and was talking lot to people who also love the game. Now I ask myself: How could I not play that game for years? :D
Cocaine. And lots of it.
Okay, it was scrolling through Twitch, finding Blkyoshi in 2013 - who was playing Yoshi's Island at the time - and furthering my interest from there.
I think it was back in year 2003 or so. I was reading an article in PC games magazine called "Top 100 games of all times" and each game had "interesting moment" comment on top of why that game deserved its place. One of those comments was that "Some people are able to finish this game in 12 minutes". It was a comment linked with Quake, of course. I looked it up and found it very interesting. Later I found out about SDA, back when there were only like 10 games on the games list and that's where my new hobby started.
I heard of speedrunning before, but I never really got into it, because I did not get why there is such a passion for it. Then I found GDQ and this made me understand somehow.
My favourite run was Yoshi 100% by Trihex and this made me think that this speedrunning thing must be the most fun thing yet competitive one can do with games. I continued watching Fire Red any% by MBM and I liked it a lot. I also discovered werster and how he destroyed nearly every Pokemon game. I got a huge fan instantly.
Then I decided that I wanted to get started with speedrunning and searched for a game I might be capable of running. I remembered Pokemon Fire Red by MBM..
This is how it all began.
Hard to remember, I used to speedrun Zelda 1 back in like 2003 when the only speedruns board was gamefaqs. Then it went away for a long time, and ...I guess it was SGDQ 2011 that really brought back the inspiration? Idk. At some point I picked up Wing Commander, realized nobody was running it and the one guy routing it thought it was a 40 minute game, dropped a 13:48 and got discouraged when SDA wouldn't accept dosbox captures at that point (they do now, largely because of me, but the footage was lost!).
Now I have time and inspiration to run again, and I have a few new strats.