Speedrunning
Gaming
12 rabbit holes · 5 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why do Super Mario Bros. speedrunners talk about 'framerules'?
- How is Ocarina of Time any% so short?
- Why does bunny hopping make you go faster?
- How do speedrunners manipulate randomness?
- Where did speedrunning come from?
Rabbit holes
- the longest-standing video game record turned out to be impossible
A 5.51-second run on Activision's Dragster for the Atari 2600, claimed in 1982 and recognized for decades as the longest-standing record in video games. Then a TAS maker analyzed the game's code and found the best possible time is 5.57. Twin Galaxies removed the record in 2018, and 5.57 is now the record, hit by several people.
Ethan Cole · 5 sources
- SMB1 world records move in 21-frame chunks
The game only checks whether to start the next level every 21 frames. So saving a few frames in a stage usually does nothing unless it gets you onto an earlier window, and records mostly improve in chunks of about a third of a second.
Sol Herrera · 5 sources
- speedrunners reprogram Super Mario World with a controller
Line up the right sprites in the right slots and the game jumps into memory it shouldn't and runs whatever is there as code. TASBot has injected Pong and Snake into SMW live at a GDQ, and SethBling entered Flappy Bird into it by hand on a real console. A TAS is just button presses, nothing about the cartridge gets modified.
Ethan Cole · 6 sources
- Ocarina of Time any% barely involves playing Ocarina of Time
First came wrong warps: interrupt a scene transition at the right moment and the game loads somewhere it shouldn't, way later in the game. Then runners found a way to set up memory so the game executes their own instructions and jumps straight to the credits.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- finally watched the 'parallel universes' video
The A Button Challenge: collect stars pressing A as few times as possible. The explanation for one 'half an A press' route involves building up speed for hours so Mario can reach copies of the level that only exist because of how positions get stored. Understood maybe 60% of it and loved all of it.
Callie Sutherland · 5 sources
- bunny hopping is a physics bug that became a skill
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- people finally 'beat' NES Tetris by crashing it
For decades level 29 was treated as the end, because pieces fall too fast to move across the board with normal tapping. Then came hypertapping, then 'rolling' (drumming your fingers against the back of the controller), and suddenly players were reaching levels the game was never tested for. At the end of 2023 a 13-year-old became the first person to make it crash.
Sol Herrera · 5 sources
- how speedrunners make their own luck
Pablo Serrano · 5 sources
- Super Metroid basically wants you to break it
Wall jumps, bomb jumps, shinesparks, mockballs. The game lets you skip big chunks of the intended order, and the ending changes depending on how fast you finish. More than 30 years later it's still one of the classic speedrun games.
Sol Herrera · 6 sources
- Games Done Quick started at someone's mom's house
The first one in 2010 was meant to run at MAGFest, but the hotel internet was so bad the organizer moved it to his mother's house. Now it's two week-long marathons a year (AGDQ usually for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, SGDQ for Doctors Without Borders) that have raised tens of millions. The name is a nod to Quake Done Quick.
Ethan Cole · 6 sources
- a cosmic ray might have helped a Mario 64 speedrunner
A runner got teleported upward in Tick Tock Clock in 2013 and nobody could reproduce it. The leading explanation is a single bit flip in Mario's height value. Same thing that happens to satellites and that ECC memory protects servers from.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- speedrunning as a community started with Doom demo files
Sol Herrera · 5 sources