I'm going to do a documentary on speedrunning, so this is my first question.

Which game do you think was the first speedrunning game?

[please don't look up the answer, give me your opinion]

Thanks!

...Mayonnaise?

[spoiler]Pong?[/spoiler]

Pretty sure it was Doom or Goldeneye- something in that generation.

Interesting... [but i still wanna see some other answers ;)]

The earliest known websites dedicated to speedrunning that I personally know of were Doom Honorific Titles which was launched in 1994 (it obsoleted the previous website LMP Hall of Fame) and the original use of Speed Demos Archive (SDA) was for Quake runs. The original site by Radix (which was dedicated to runs on the Nightmare difficulty) was launched in 1997 I believe and in 1998 it was merged with another site to form SDA which then slowly began branching off into games other than Quake.

Granted those are just the earliest sites I know of that had speedrunning brought to a more "formal" light. There are plenty of stories of kids in the 80s racing their friends to see who could complete various NES games the fastest and I'm sure there are people even before that seeing who could beat high scores on arcade games or whatever other home game they could get their hands on.

touche [read the the first post]

[Quote]touche [read the the first post][/Quote] ?????

You asked for what we think was the first speedrunning game was and I answered with Doom and Quake as well as the sites used to track those early runs. What did I miss lmao

I really have no idea, but I'm a little confused why would you want people's opinions on what the first speedrunning game, as opposed to someone looking for the answer? Presumably a documentary would feature the actual first game of speedrunning, not the opinions of people on what the first game was.

i thought you looked it up 🤦 sorry

it looked like you copied it from wiki lol

You clearly didn't read it closely. A wiki would not include the phrase "I believe"

:embarrassed:

I've had more time to consider this, and IMHO, the actual first game to be speedrun was running itself. Of course, they didn't have stopwatches back then, so the only way to tell who was actually the fastest was to have all the people race at the same time. Then simple running races likely turned into other races (first to climb a mountain, first to collect 5 sponges sea-diving, first to split 10 logs with an axe). The rest is history.

This obviously brought some philosophical implications with it. Is it really fair if people are racing? They can't follow the exact same footsteps. If they have to cross a river, it's not like you can cross the same river twice. And obviously, the speedrunner's paradox: if a speedrunner is continuously finishing half the remainder of his speedrun, how does he ever cross the finish line?

At first I thought this was a joke, but that actually makes sense. Wouldn't the first games to be raced be racing games? Something like ExciteBike or Dragster?

The first game I was personally aware of that encouraged fast times was Goldeneye, but, as mentioned before, I am aware that Doom was very competetive before that.