“Whoever has the world record gets to hold that glory and get that publicity, but it’s always going to be more about the community effort.” “Everybody wants to see the game beat as fast as possible,” he said. Top speedrunners embrace the competition, but every record is a victory for the sport, O’Brien said. World records for popular games are built on the backs of dozens of contributions from glitch hunters and speedrunners, shared on YouTube, the r/speedrun subreddit, the speedrunning Discord server or other online watering holes. “Lots of glitch hunters don’t even speedrun,” O’Brien said. Still others poke around levels with a viewer displaying the game’s coding, looking for any anomalies that could lead to a glitch discovery. A key to SM64 runs is executing backward long jumps that trick the game into speeding the character past its normal limits. They seek spots to clip (pass) through walls to access areas early or wrong warp to later stages in the game. Instead of attempting runs, they spend countless hours poking around levels. The 100% speedrun record, set by glitchymon, stands at 3 hours, 51 minutes, 34 seconds – just five seconds ahead of the second place speedrunner, zfg. The world-record speedrun, meaning the runner doesn’t have to meet any objectives other than beating the game, is under 10 minutes by Lozoots, at least until a 9:09 run by Narcissa is verified. The average playthrough of the 1998 classic takes around 26 hours for the main story and 39 hours to complete every objective. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is another speedrunning favorite. For example, the world record for Super Mario 64 considered by many to be the greatest speedrunning game of all time, is more than 20 hours faster than it takes the average player to beat the game while collecting all 120 stars, according to. The resulting runs barely resemble the original game. Some runners invest hundreds of hours exploring levels and developing or practicing routes, employing as many skips or glitches as possible to shave the most time. People like to play games really, really fast, and people – lots and lots of people – tune in to watch. In total, the event raised more than $3.1 million in donations to the Prevent Cancer Foundation, bringing the donation total over the years to more than $25 million.
Speedrun viewership of the event on Twitch reached the hundreds of thousands. Known as GDQ, the week-long 10th anniversary charity event drew more than 200 speedrunners to Orlando in January, along with a live audience and more than 100,000 concurrent Twitch viewers.
More on the contest and why Mario 64 is considered the greatest speedrunning game later.)Ĭonsider, also, the wild success of Games Done Quick. (Crucial kicked in $5,000, becoming the first of several corporate sponsors to fund the contest. That prize pool snowballed into a $10,000 purse divvied among top finishers after a runner beat the game in under one hour, 39 minutes, referred to in the community as “138.” A Spanish speedrunner named “cheese” won the contest in dramatic fashion in front of live and stream audiences at the ESA Marathon, collecting $17,000 between the bounty and event prizes. He even committed $1,000 for a bounty for a Super Mario 64 speedrunning contest. He’s become a figure within the speedrunning scene thanks to his YouTube channel, which has 282,000 followers and features such videos as “ Top 10 Accidental Skip Discoveries in Speedrunning,” generating 5.2 million views. O’Brien, a cyber security major at the University of Akron, is a good but sub-elite speedrunner. Which begs the questions: How did speedrunning get so popular?Ĭonsider O’Brien, now known in the community as EZScape on Twitter, YouTube, and beyond.
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