Hey guys! I've recently started watching a lot of speedrunning, and I'm so impressed by the community. It has taught me a lot and inspired me to write an article online.

I want to make sure things are true to spirit and accurate. Would you guys mind giving me feedback to make sure I'm not misrepresenting anything? If I make errors, I didn't mean to--this is all in good spirit. I'll post my sources in the final article-couldn't add footnotes here.

All feedback welcome!

Article full text:

WHAT BEATING VIDEO GAMES QUICKLY TEACHES US ABOUT LIFE

The world record for beating Super Mario World is 41 seconds.

Wait, what? 41 seconds?

That's right. You can check the record book if you don't believe it. But how? If you're a gamer like me, you may have spent weeks trying to beat the game as a kid.

Welcome to the fascinating, innovative world of video game speedruns.

WHAT IS A SPEEDRUN?

According to Wikipedia, a speedrun is "a play-through of a video game or a selected part of it, performed with the intention of completing it as fast as possible."

It's not just about beating Super Mario World. It's how fast you can beat it. Players time themselves and compete on the fastest runs across a variety of games: from classics like Super Mario World and Zelda: Ocarina of Time to newer hits like Dark Souls. There are vibrant online communities, like speedrun.com, where 600K+ players post their best runs as proof for new records.

The concept dates back to the earliest home consoles in the 1980s, but the community has flourished with the internet and streaming platforms like Twitch. Tune into Twitch today and you'll find speedrunners practicing to live audiences of thousands. They often go by internet pseudonyms, like the famous Firedragon764 or "FiFi." You'll see them timing their runs, repeating and restarting - all the while interacting with fans and commenting on their strategy. If you're lucky enough to see them achieve a "personal best" or "PB", you'll see what all the excitement is about.

The speedrun community is unique in how it promotes inclusivity. Setting new records isn't zero sum. Instead, the community rallies around discoveries of new methods and routes (a chosen path through a game). The best speedrunners need to borrow tactics from one another to collectively achieve the best times. The credit and prestige comes in the discovery - not the hoarding - of new run strategies.

The biggest public showcase for speedruns isn't a tournament with trophies or grand prizes. It's a charity event. Games Done Quick is a semiannual, live-streamed showcase of speedruns across a variety of games and categories. The event has raised more than $31.3M to date, mostly from live donations of viewers on Twitch. The summer 2021 event drew 110K peak concurrent viewers and 17.5M total views. Among the most standout performances was speedrunner Bubzia, who completed Super Mario 64's to the first 70 stars - completely blindfolded. Yes, blindfolded.

HOW CAN SOMEONE BEAT SUPER MARIO WORLD IN 41 SECONDS?

To be fast, speedrunners have to reason about a game differently than normal players.

A classic example is in the game Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Although it's counterintuitive, you actually move faster in the game by skipping backwards rather than running forwards. If you watch OoT speedruns you'll see skilled players reversing the camera and skipping backwards to save time. Another major time suck in games is dialog scenes. These are where players have to scroll through dialog text, usually between in-game characters. To optimize for this, speedrunners often play with the Japanese version of games because written Japanese is more compact than English. This creates fewer dialog boxes to click through. Players combine a number of these tricks - in combination with optimal routing - to finish a game in as little time as possible.

But Super Mario World has 71 levels. Those clever tricks alone won't let you finish the game in 41 seconds. There's more to it.

It's important to understand that speedrun competitions have "categories", or rules that players have to stick to in their pursuit of the fastest times. Categories can impose restrictions on the level of game completion (e.g. the player must obtain all items), or they can be quite liberal. In some speedrun categories - like "Any %" - there are no rules to how players can approach or play the game. The only requirement is they reach the end. And it doesn't matter how they get there. 

You can think of speedrun categories like different strokes in competitive swimming: in a single event, swimmers must use the same technique, whether it's breast stroke, butterfly, etc. "Any %" is the equivalent of freestyle - anything goes. May the fastest player win.

THE USE OF GLITCHES

This leads players to use what game developers might call "cheats", but speedrunners lovingly refer to as glitches or exploits. Video games are software, and software inevitably has bugs. A glitch is an unintended game functionality that allows players to sidestep game rules - whether that's gravity, item attainment, or even the passage of time. But bugs are unintended. This means they're difficult to discover.

Discovering new glitches is thrilling for the speedrun community. Both because it contributes to step changes in world record times, but also because there's a sense of magic in seeing them work. Glitches range in complexity. For instance, Zelda OoT's "ground jump" involves some button finessing to jump higher than normal. More complex glitches, like OoT's "reverse bottle adventure", actually manipulate the game's memory to generate specific items at will. At the time it was discovered in 2007, it smashed the current world record by cutting it in half: from 3 to 1.5 hours.

As one might have guessed by now, the Any % record for Super Mario World uses an exploit to complete the game in 41 seconds. It uses perhaps the most effective glitch tactic in speeding up runs, called "warping" or "sequence breaking." These are techniques that allow players to skip to specific levels or points in the game, with the most effective being a warp to the end credits. In the record Super Mario World run, the player positions Mario at a precise game coordinate in order to cleverly manipulate the game memory, and in turn change the game state from "in level" to "end credits." Here's the full technical explanation if you want to get into it.

WHAT CAN SPEEDRUNS TEACH US ABOUT LIFE?

Speedrunning is a fascinating, niche, and ever growing community. And it has a lot to teach us. Here are some of the lessons I've learned from following it.

1. LOOK FOR GLITCHES IN REAL LIFE

In 2007, the best Zelda: Ocarina of Time speedrun stood unchanged at three hours. To improve it, speedrunners focused on perfecting their runs: pathing more perfectly through the levels and defeating enemies faster. This did produce new records, but only a few seconds better.

That was, of course, until a speedrunner called Acryte stopped trying to work harder, and instead worked smarter. He discovered the "Reverse Bottle Adventure" glitch, stunning the community. The glitch produced a run twice as fast as the previous record - down to an hour and a half.

The Reverse Bottle Adventure glitch is clever and complex. It exploits how the game stores and validates the items a player has in inventory. With a bit of manipulation, players could give themselves any item in the game. This meant they didn't need to spend time earning those items the normal way. The discovery was legendary and has since motivated others to dig for even juicier glitches.

"Glitches" exist all around us. They're usually hiding in plain sight because we're so focused on our current way of doing things. If you want step-change improvement, the answer isn't doing something better. It's doing something new. History is speckled with examples of glitches. For instance: the history of flight. In the early 1900s, the US Army invested heavily to improve airplane engines. They hoped that faster speeds would be the key to successful flight. But as the Wright brothers figured out, it wasn't speed that was holding them back. It was airframe resilience and wing control. They developed their three axis control system, which mimicked torsional movement of bird wings, and achieved flight in 1903. Their plane cost 1/50th of the Army's and achieved flight with 1/4 the speed.

When improvement has slowed, it's a good exercise to ask yourself: am I just trying to run the game faster? Or is there something I'm missing that would change how I run it?

2. THERE ARE STILL SECRETS OUT THERE (EVEN IF IT SEEMS THEY'VE ALL BEEN FOUND)

Zelda: Ocarina of time is a fairly long game. It takes a casual player 25 hours to complete. Early on, it didn't seem suitable for Any % speedruns. But to the community's amazement, proof of the first sub seven hour run emerged in 2003. This ignited the community, and soon new glitches were discovered to shave off time.

First came out of bounds tricks and inventory manipulation to bypass game checkpoints. This brought the time to under an hour by 2011. The game felt like it couldn't get any faster. But it did.

In 2012, "warping" was discovered. This allowed players to trick the game into loading specific levels into memory and instantly "warp" them to that degree of game completion. Combining these tricks, the record time stood at 17:55 by 2015. The reigning speedrunner - Jodenstone - was actually featured in the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records. Again, it didn't feel like the game could get any faster. But by the time the book was in print, Jodenstone's record had already been broken.

New glitches continue to be discovered in a game that's over 23 years old. The current best time stands at just under seven minutes. And that surely won't be the end.

We often assume "a good way" is "the best way." It's hard to anticipate how things could be better. It's a foolish mistake to think they can't be.

Pursuit of secrets can come with great rewards, whether that's a world record speedrun, a world-changing new business, or revolutionary new ideas. 

3. COLLECTIVE EFFORT BEATS INDIVIDUAL TALENT

While speedrunning dates back to the earliest game consoles of the '80s, it wasn't until the advent of the internet that it really exploded. Why?

Collaboration was hard when players were grinding runs alone without a way to communicate. A world record might be set by a single player, but the strategies they use are built on layers and layers of community knowledge. Whenever someone discovers a new glitch or optimal route, it's usually adopted by the rest of the community and folded into future runs and records.

The earliest sharing communities came in the early 90s, with internet forums like Compet-n Twin Galaxies. Some of the first shared speedruns were for the game Doom. Internet bandwidth was bad, so video sharing was still a challenge. Doom uniquely allowed players to save "demo" files. Demo files were not video. They were a recording of all button presses a player made in a specific run, which made for significantly smaller file sizes than raw video. This made them easy to share and download. Players could then load the demo files into their own Doom client on their computer and watch other players' runs.

From that point, the speedrunning community exploded. In 1997, perhaps the most famous speedrun was "Quake Done Quick," a run of Quake in 19:47. The run was a "segmented", whereby different levels were completed individually for time and then stitched together. The levels were a mashup of record runs from a variety of players. It's particularly fitting that even the earliest famed runs were a group effort.

Some researchers have even observed a correlation between the rise of streaming technology and improvement in speedrun record times. In other words, the more we can share, the better we all get. It's fascinating to see how speedrunners almost exclusively use the first person plural when referring to in game activity and accomplishments (e.g. "our last run was a failure," "we just got world record!"). Even the verification of speedruns is a group effort. Once a new video is submitted to a forum, the community jointly reviews it to ensure it's not fake. Consensus wins.

Speedrunning reminds us that to accomplish big things, we need to do it together.

4. NO SUCH THING AS A "PERFECT RUN"

Record times don't mean perfect times.

When you're running a game for 20 minutes, you're going to make some missteps: miss a jump, stumble on an enemy, or get caught on a corner. Even world record runs still have their idiosyncrasies and small flaws.

When pushing for a record, there's a temptation to "reset" at every mistake. This means starting your run over and reseting the clock. Speedrunners may do this when they make a grave misplay that adds on lots of time. But in general, you'll see many players continue with their runs despite smaller missteps - all in hopes of making up time later. It's also up to individual players to decide what "best" means for them. Some may be going for world records ("WRs"), but many are pushing for "personal bests" ("PBs"), which are their own personal records. You have the freedom to decide your own challenges and what's considered improvement for yourself. 

Speedrunning is a great reminder that our focus should be on getting better, not being perfect.

IN CONCLUSION

Speedrunning is a fascinating, inclusive community that has a lot to each us - even us non-gamers. Founded on inclusivity, it's a lasting example of how to think and act differently in the pursuit of getting better at things. Even if I can't beat Super Mario World in 41 seconds myself, I've found the appreciation for the years of community contributions and hard work that make it possible.