This is just something I'm curious about, that I'd love to hear about from you guys.

To speedrunners of retro games: What draws you to running retro games, and why are you turned away from running modern games?

To speedrunners of modern games: What draws you to running modern games, and why are you turned away from retro games?

I enjoy speedrunning games from any era, so I'd like to hear why some runners prefer one over the other. Thanks!

What makes you think someone who runs retro games is turned away from running modern games or vice versa? I know plenty of people who run games considered retro and modern, so idk where you’re getting the assumption that people can’t, or don’t, run both.

People run games that they are familiar with, and that usually equates to games played a lot when someone was younger. For someone in their late 20s, 30s, etc, these games are ones that could be considered “retro”. For someone in their early 20s or teenage years, that would probably be games considered “modern”. It’s not that either of those people are turned off from older/newer games, it’s just that they haven’t played them - or haven’t played them enough to warrant speedrunning them.

@Timmiluvs I'm not assuming anything. This is simply directed at people who do run a specific era of games and might have an interesting reason for it. It was just out of innocent curiosity. I apologize that it came off as divisive.

I don't think it's divisive, I just found it strange. My apologies if my reply sounded more aggressive than intended.

In that case, the second part of my response is probably the reason for it - it's mostly related to the games that someone played when they were growing up, rather than games they have played recently, that draw people into speedrunning. Obviously that's not the case for everyone, but that is a common thing - people are drawn to games and consoles from their childhood more often than not.

@Timmiluvs Yeah, that generally seems to be the case. I was just wondering if some runners had cool reasons for it, like maybe they run older games because they enjoy the subpixel tricks that you don't find as often newer games. Stuff like that. I know I lean more into retro games for pixel-specific tricks, and how they can often have so many places and ways to get OoB, like Donkey Kong 64 and Ocarina of Time. When I do run newer games, I find it's because there's a lot of fast and complex menu-ing the runner can do, which is a lot of fun to me.