I am new to officially speedrunning games but it has always been fun to try to beat games as fast as possible. A friend introduced me to speedrunning and I have dipped my feet in a couple of different areas.

I am waiting for my runs to be verified for Zombie Army 4: Dead War, which all 10 submissions (1 for the game, 9 for individual levels) will be world records when they are finally verified. If you visit the game category, you will see the game is very inactive.

What is your opinion on running lesser-ran games and having the world record? It feels cool to know that I have world record for every aspect of the game but is it really that cool if no one is speedrunning it and submitting on speedrun.com?

I mean, someone's gotta be the first runner, might as well be you :)

You really shouldn't care about whether it's "cool" to others, speedrunning is between you and the game first and foremost, so if your runs are cool to you then that's all there is to it, if you feel they aren't then just improve them, if you don't enjoy doing that anymore then run something else.

Eh... It can get lonely sometimes. But that doesn't diminish your love for the game like I have for all the game I've run / participate in their community. Even if that community is little to non-existant.

Basically everything I run is quiet beyond belief, my dude. It's so quiet that I drop basically every other run I'm working on to help prospective runners. It's fine if there's not much competition, just run the game because you like running it and pushing that time down.

Sure, I've got a few WR's, but I don't really care. I already had it once for real in the game I wanted it in, so I'm good.

If nobody ran small games, then there would be no runners at all. Every game starts small and the community grows over time. Some games start small and stay small for a long time before they get popular.

If you start optimizing the runs on your own, it feels cool when new people eventually show up, especially if they ask for help :)

It's cool when it's a small game that is popular in other ways (eg a cult classic) it's cool but if it's a game that is small because it's bad I feel bad about it, especially if people DO join in later and you have to introduce the "to a whole new dimension of uglyiness" like I did with Star Control 3.

Speedrunning is speedrunning no matter what you play or how obscure it is. Be proud of your WR and be proud of the gains and optimizations you've made.

I speedrun obscure stuff all the time, even though I also run in some of the more actively played games. I am equally proud of all of them.

I'm proud of you!