From 50 hour, 100 percent completions of Breath of the Wild,
to this weeks record breaking sub-100 minute 120 star speedrun of supermario 64,
speedrunning has become all the rage in the videogame community.
We've now got entire events dedicated to watching people finish games as fast as possible
with thousands of viewers on hand to witness each historic moment.
Given all that popularity, and this weeks legendary Super Mario 64 accomplishment,
we thought we'd take a very, very brief look at the history of speedruns and just how this entire craze got started
in the first place. For those unaware, speedrunning is, well, it basically what it sounds like;
the act of getting through a game as quickly as possible, just about anybody can perform a speed run
in any game they want, but according to speedrun.com the most popular games to speedrun
in terms of players are Super Mario 64 followed closely by Ocarina of Time with Super Mario Sunshine,
A Link to the Past, and Super Metroid rounding out the top five. Lots of Nintendo stuff.
That list changes just a little bit when you look at the most popular games by the number of runs completed
Super Mario 64 is STILL at the top followed by Super Mario Sunshine, Ocarina of Time, DDKong Racing,
and Super Mario World. Interestingly enough there are actually a variety of reasons
why these particular games are popular for speedrunner, sometimes games become popular to hundred percent
because there are a variety of paths you can take
through to get to the end making the most efficient route more challenging to find
other times, it's because there are glitches or exploits discovered that allow players to,
uh, break sequences of the game and skip major portions to get it done as quickly as possible
and quite often, games become popular to speedrun because they're just hard as hell to do fast
relying on the players to save milliseconds at a time
with super precise movements, in general these speedruns tend to come in a few flavors:
Any percentage, where it doesn't matter how much players complete before finishing
100 percent, which requires completing everything in a small amount of time
and Low percentage, which calls for at least a minimum amount of the game to be done before completing it.
So, alright, that covers the basics on what speedrunning has become,
but how did it get started? Well, that credit lies with two particular companies
Nintendo and id software. Most specifically for the games Metroid, Doom, and Quake.
Metroid is partially responsible for the idea of speedrunning because it was the first game
to incentivize finishing the game as quickly as possible
considering the game was a bit nonlinear compared to other games of its time
it became popular for players to try different routes to finish it fast
shaving of minutes at a time.
The 1994 sequel, Super Metroid, took things a step further by incentivizing completion percentages
which challenged players to 100 percent the game.
So, while Metroid is partially responsible for creating the groundswell around finishing games fast,
id software's doom and quake gave players the tools to record and thus share those accomplishments for the first time
Doom made it possible for gamers to record a gameplay demo of their level playthroughs
with a simple command line, and because the files created were compilations of gameplay code called wads
rather than actual videos, they were only a few kilobytes in size and easy to host or share
on a newfangled thing called the internet.
This made it also easy for other players to download them and view them
which just required loading the demos into Doom itself
Out of those wads came one of the first sites to record these demos for posterity,
the LMP hall of fame website which was created in 1994
from there, recording Doom demos grew in popularity in certain usenet groups
which resulted in the creation of another site, Doom Honorific Titles
DHT was notable because it had a board of examiners who reviewed your submitted demo
and then give you an honorific title based on certain achievements
and all that led to the founding of Compete End
a similar website that had one sepecific goal in mind: finishing the levels in the shortest amount of time.
So, in essence it became the first speedrunning site.
The popularity for completing speedruns continued in a future id software game, Quake
which was released in 1996 and Quake sort of led to the organization of speedruns in two different categories
Demos either became focused on completing levels  quickly, or completing levels quickly with a completion percentage.
The following year, a number of important things happened
Nightmare speed demos was founded featuring fast playthroughs of the game in nightmare mode
and then later in 1997, Quake Done Quick, that might sound familiar
that also came about then, what separated Quake Done Quick was that it wasn't just singular levels of Quake
but rather full playthroughs with one master playthrough compiled of all the fastest submitted levels
That master playthrough got tinkered with by users enough to get a third person camera
and basically became the earliest forms of machinima, which some of you might have heard of.
Anyway the Quake scene soon split into factions
who thought that the hardest difficulty shouldn't be a requirement for speedrunning
so, a new movie was created by another community called Quake Done Quicker
which was a few minutes shorter and feature the games levels completed on easy difficulty.
Eventually the communities fused back together and became Speed Demos Archive
Which you'll know still exists today if you're at all into the speedrunning scene.
Speed Demos Archive is still home to a massive library of speedruns from over 12 hundred games.
So that brings us into the late 90s and the early 2000s which popularized the speedrunning
of two other important games, Ocarina of Time and Metroid Prime.
Ocarina of Time in particular became a haven for speedrunners because of its semi open world nature
which was really impressive at the time, and its wealth of glitches and exploits.
It would be impossible to document all of them in this brief timeline,
but let's just say that there are hundreds of pages written online about the history of Ocarina of Time
and the people who were important in breaking down its speedrunning legacy.
Metroid Prime, similar to its predecessors
was also popular with the speedrunning community for some of the same reasons as Metroid and Super Metroid
and became the first game where the term "sequence breaking" was used in discussion about speed runs.
From there, it get a little bit more tricky to pinpoint exactly how and why speedrunning grew to the point that it has today,
there are a number of factors that contributed in the following decade,
For one, emulators and roms with demo recording capabilities became available on PC
giving people greater access to record and share playthroughs of the ole games of yore.
This also allowed for fans to come together and discuss exploits or brainstorm the best possible routes for competion.
Achievements and trophies also contributed to the mania in newer games,
challenging players to try wacky things to trigger that sweet achievement sound.
There are of course other games that came along in the intervening years as well
like the Dark Souls series which inspired players to finish it as quickly as they could
because of its reputation for being insanely difficult.
Plus, the advent of webstreams on sites like Twitch made it possible for these communities to become
more central and watch each other live reinvigorating the scene and making it more accessible
to a wider audience then ever before,
and now speedrunning has become something of a fixture in gaming.
It's led to gigantic communities, and even bigger events like Games Done Quick
named after Quake Done Quick.
Many of those events raise money for charity with millions donated so far.
Awesome Games Done Quick, for instance raised over two million dollars this year for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
So, that's just a really quick basic breakdown of how speedrunning got where it is today,
some of the games that were very important in its development.
We didn't include some of the other things we could have discussed like Tasbot and and tool assisted runs,
what the heck saving the animals is all about in Metroid,
and some of the most exciting and notable speedruns of all time,
but we can save all that for another occasion, this shit is just a quick primer on how speedrunning became a thing.
So what do you guys think of the history of speedrunning, any speedruns you'd reccomend
for people to watch to really get into it? Let us know in the comments.
[Epic Zelda Battle Music]
