Talk:Speedrunning/rewrite

A speedrun (IPA: /ˈspiːdˌɹʌn/) is a play-through, or recording thereof, of a computer- or video game performed with the intent of completing it as quickly as possible, optionally under certain prerequisites, mainly for the purposes of entertainment and competition. The term, a compound of the words speed and run (as in “running” through a game, referring to the playing of a game) is only used in the context of games that were not originally or primarily designed with fast completion in mind (one generally does not “speedrun” a racing game; in those cases the game's standard setting for achieving and recording fast times is called a time attack or time trial mode). Commonly, speedruns are recorded on either an analog media such as a video tape (predominantly when games on consoles are concerned), or as a digital file, by the people (“players”) who make them, for entertainment or verifiability purposes. Entertainment has traditionally been the reason for the creation of speedruns, as the phenomenon was originally devised by enthusiasts who began comparing each others' playing skills via movies exchanged over the Internet, while verifiability stems from the necessity to provide evidence that one's playthrough went by the typical or game-specific speedrunning rules and thus counts as a valid attempt to beat the record.

In order to attain the highest possible quality of play in a speedrun, the author usually has to look at and think about the game differently than most casual gamers would. Generally, it is usually required that speedruns are planned out carefully before they are attempted; this need stems from the complexity of the separate areas in which the gameplay takes place. Additionally, games and their physics engines are not flawless and will allow the runner to do unexpected things that could save time. Despite their inherent differences, they seem to share a lot of common traits in this context, such as the ability to disjunct the common sequence of events in a game and thus skip entire parts of it—the act of sequence breaking—and the ability to use programming errors, or glitches, to one's advantage.

Some games are considered to be ideal specimen for fast completion purposes and have online communities dedicated to them, which provide (or have provided) a highly active platform for the discussion and speedrunning of one or more of these particular games.

History

The roots of speedrunning can be traced back to a 1993 computer game by id Software called Doom.

Common procedures

The bare requirements for the creation of a speedrun pertain to one's ability to play the game; skillful playing is crucial, along with good knowledge of the game, as a player must know exactly what to expect during an intensive “run” through the game, and also realize the most optimal method to do so. Additionally, the making of a speedrun requires perseverance, as it relies heavily on luck in addition to skill, and thus requires persistence during the course of action, regardless of difficulties or obstacles. However, speedrunners will usually cease their attempt in case a mistake is made, depending on how it could affect the run's outcome; breaking previously set records is the goal for many runners, and one must keep in mind that even the slightest mistake could null one's chances of doing so, especially if the holder of the current record did not make that same mistake. For example, in Quake speedrunning, mistakes as small as missing a single shot could be reason enough to stop the current attempt and try again, as years of intensive competition have brought about very high quality standards, while there is a lower threshold for less popular games. Runners practice intensively to attain the ability to play at such a high level of skill, usually for months, but sometimes even for years (especially in the case of constantly updated speedruns or those for which entire Internet communities have been set up, such as Quake).

Route planning

It is of foremost significance that one finds the most optimal feasible route that leads to the completion of the game or a segment thereof. A route, in this context, is a course of action by which to get from one point in the game to another—it could cover only a single level, or the entire game in general. The need for determining such a route stems from the complexity of the separate areas in which the gameplay takes place. For example, extensive planning is required to find the best possible method for passing a level designed as a maze. Even in games in which the levels seem fairly straightforward, it is often required that a route is taken that ensures some kind of advantage; such as a certain degree of safety from enemy characters, or the possibility of picking up beneficial items along the way; an “optimal” route is designed not only to be fast, but also to take into account the effect it might have on other resources that might affect later levels.

Some games lend themselves to this better than others. Generally, non-linear games will have more branches of possibilities, as the lack of a fixed sequence of events causes there to be many choices that the player can make that require extensive research to appraise.

<insert Mega Man example here>

Sequence breaking

Eddie “kirbykarter” Taylor using a glitch to walk through a wall, performing a sequence break.

Main article: Sequence breaking

During the making of a route, it sometimes becomes apparent that some of the goals in the game do not need to be achieved for completion. While the route itself pertains mostly to the way levels or segments thereof are passed, additional elements of the game that may be seen as integral to its natural or artistic flow, or the continuity of its gameplay, may sometimes be avoided partially or entirely. Such elements include cutscenes that need to be watched before the player can progress, items that the player needs to possess in order to continue to a next stage, or even entire parts of the gameplay that may convey a part of the game's plot or subplot. Skipping a part of the game in such a fashion that it can be described as a disjunction with the game's intendment or common sequence of events, is referred to as sequence breaking.

The term sequence break was first used in 2003 in an online discussion forum thread concerning the Nintendo GameCube game Metroid Prime. This thread was called “Gravity Suit and Ice Beam before Thardus”; using the since then common “x before y” notation in the nomenclature of speedrunning. Thardus, a fictional creature in the Metroid series, was designed to be a mandatory boss before the Gravity Suit and Ice Beam could be obtained, hence the novelty of bypassing the boss while still obtaining the items. The author of the thread was Steven Banks, who reported to have successfully performed this sequence break on January 18, 2003, after the possibility of such an act was suggested by “kip”. Banks posted his findings about the act being possible on the Metroid Prime message board on GameFAQs in a thread which attracted a number of interested gamers. The gamers quickly became a separate community and strove to accomplish more and better feats in the game. It is currently assumed that the term, as used in this context, was first used by a person known online as “SolrFlare” in this thread on February 5, 2003. Since its initial discovery, sequence breaking has become an integral part of speedrunning and has been applied to many other games.

<explain glitches very briefly>

An example of sequence breaking as a result of a glitch can be found in the “16-star” run of Super Mario 64: in this game, the protagonist Mario normally needs to collect 70 stars before he is allowed to play the final level, but a glitch makes it possible for a runner to access that level with only 16 stars. More specifically, with the right kind of movement, the runner is able to pass through a wall by pushing into it in a certain way while holding MIPS, an NPC. Seen on the right is runner Eddie “kirbykarter” Taylor performing this trick in his 19:47 speedrun of the game.[2] See section “Media” for a video that demonstrates this trick.

While some speedrun rules require that the skipping of such events be avoided, it is often desirable—connate with the act of route planning—to make full use of such possibilities.

Glitch usage

foobar

Further information: [[:Glitch]]

Tool-assistance

Main article: Tool-assisted speedrun

While it is typical of generic speedruns, as described in the opening paragraph, to be recordings of skilled playing of the game, there is one particular branch of the phenomenon called tool-assistance (or tool-assisted speedrunning) removes the need for the recording to be devised by typical means (such as recording the speedrun on a VCR tape while it is being played on the original hardware) and instead allows authors to use “tools” to aid their playing. Essentially, these tools can be anything that eases the game-play and thus improves the final result; some prime examples, commonly provided by the use of an emulator, include the usage of save states that allow the author to “go back in time” and revise mistakes (in this context, this is called re-recording), as well as slowing down the (virtual) hardware that the game is running on so that the input resolution become higher (see section “Glossary” for an explanation of input resolution). One common requirement of tool-assisted speedrunning, stemming directly from the abilities that said tools provide, is the attainment of “perfection”; the knowledge that it is not possible, by current abilities, to record the speedrun in any way that would warrant a lower completion time. The practical result is that human limitations, such as skill and reflex, are no longer an issue in the creation of a run; tool-assisted runs have (sometimes significantly) lower completion times than their “unassisted” equivalents. A run created under such rules is called a tool-assisted speedrun (commonly abbreviated TAS).

It has been argued by members of TASVideos, a major tool-assisted speedrun community, that the runs produced by them could be considered a form of art, claiming that they significantly hold “creativity, variability, surprising outcomes, and speed”, which makes them “beautiful to watch”. Additionally, these members have outlined that entertainment in such runs should imply several qualities: they should be interesting (not slow or repetitive), they should be surprising (the runner must perform the unexpected), and they must be skillful (the runner must be able to handle awkward situations efficiently and creatively). It is, however, also stressed that these qualities do not necessarily pertain to unassisted runs, as these are made primarily with the goal of fast completion in mind.

The usage of tools to aid the player is mostly forbidden in regular speedrunning, and it is for this reason that tool-assistance is seen as controversial by some. One point of criticism is that a properly executed tool-assisted speedrun may disillusion runners from making an unassisted version. Runner Jacob Cannon, posting on the Speed Demos Archive Web site under the nickname “LeCoureur103”, said in October 2006 that he would not pursue an improvement of his 19-minute Mario 64 run, partially because of the tool-assisted run made by “Spezzafer”, stating, “anything I did would pale in comparison”. <insert claims of TAS authors being cheaters.> Joel Yliluoma, the webmaster of TASVideos, has been quoted as saying “Two years ago, I fought against claims of cheating and other bad-mouthing. Today, although I still see some people who hate the movies and consider them cheating, I see more people who recognize the value of both types of speedruns.”

Notable speedrunning communities

Traditionally, speedruns have been performed by members of online communities about games in general, usually through discussion forums, using strategies devised by members of such forums. When the activity became popular enough to acede to subculture, the first sites dedicated to speedrunning started appearing—usually specializing in just one or a few games. These sites have sustained activity for a long time, sometimes even up to today, providing coverage of the members' achievements and serving as a platform for related discussions.

The most noteworthy of these communities have been listed here (chronologically, based on their creation date), along with a short description on their respective histories. Additionally, other much-competed games that do not have large or active Web sites dedicated to them will not be listed here, as this list exclusively contains communities rather than individual games.

COMPET-N (Doom)

Main article: COMPET-N

December 1993 saw the release of id Software's Doom. Among some of its major features, like at that time very sophisticated 3D graphics, LAN- and Internet-based multiplayer support, and user modification possibilities, it also gave the players the ability to record demo files of their play-through. This particular feature was first picked up by Christina “Strunoph” Norman in January 1994 when she launched the LMP Hall of Fame Web site.

This site was, however, quickly followed up by the DOOM Honorific Titles (also known as the “DHT”) [3], launched in May 1994 by Frank Stajano, which introduced the first serious competition between players. This site, designed around a notion of earning titles by successfully recording a particular type of demo on one of the pre-determined maps in the “IWADs”, would create the basis for all Doom demo sites that would follow. These so-called “exams” became very popular as the player had to earn each title by sending in a demo of the feat to one of the site's judges to justify his application. Doom II: Hell on Earth was released in October 1994, and the DHT conformed to the new additions as well as the new Doom version releases. At the height of its popularity, the DHT had many different categories and playing styles. For example, playing with only the in-game fists and pistol, while killing all monsters on a map, became known as “Tyson” mode, named after the heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson. “Pacifist mode” was playing without intentionally harming any monsters. Each category had “easy”, “medium”, and “hard” difficulty maps for players to get randomly chosen for. As an authentication method to prevent players from submitting demos made by other people, it was required that they performed a distinct “dance” during their demo (often at the very beginning). With such varied categories, the DHT was appealing to a diverse group of players. However, the DHT had trouble retaining a permanent Internet location. This, combined with the constantly changing rules and the diminished importance of most of the titles, caused public interest to wane as the years went by.

In November 1994, the definitive installment Doom speedrunning scene, in the form of the COMPET-N [4] Web site, was launched. Its creator, Simon Widlake, intended the site to be a record scoreboard for a variety of Doom-related achievements, but unlike its predecessors, they were all based on the idea of fast completion. Players were required to run through Doom's levels as quickly as humanly possible in order to attain a spot on the constantly-updated COMPET-N scoreboards which eventually made Doom one of the most popular games for speedrunning, with demo material gradually amounting to hundreds of hours of recorded gameplay. Like the DOOM Honorific Titles, this site experienced multiple location changes over time; it was even at the Simtel servers for a while before Istvan Pataki took over as maintainer and moved the site to a now defunct FTP server of the Technical University of Budapest [5]. From there on, since early 1998, it has been administered by Adam Hegyi, who has been the maintainer of the site ever since. It is currently located at the Doom2.net [6] domain, at the Web address http://www.doom2.net/~compet-n/.

As of March 2006, COMPET-N contains a total amount of 6072 demos (on both official and custom maps), accounting for a total time of 462 hours, 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

Speed Demos Archive

Main article: Speed Demos Archive

Peter Horvath doing a “grenade jump” on a “Spawn” in the E4M3 [1] (The Elder God Shrine) level in order to jump over a large lava pit without having to wait for a bridge to appear.

Quake is arguably the only game to rival Doom as the most popular game for speedrunning (as of 2007). People first started recording demos of Quake playthroughs when it was released in June 1996 and sharing them with others on the demos/e directory in Simtel's (http://www.cdrom.com/) Quake file hierarchy. There were two distinct kinds of demos: those in which the player killed all monsters and found all secrets on the map (called “100% demos”) and those in which the player ignored these goals in order to finish the level as quickly as possible (called “runs”). All levels were, at that time, recorded solely on the “Nightmare” difficulty level, the highest in the game.

In April 1997, Nolan “Radix” Pflug first started the Nightmare Speed Demos Web site to keep track of the fastest demos. In June that same year, the first Quake done Quick [7] project was finalized; Quake done Quick, unlike the conventional record demos, featured a full playthrough of the game, carrying over one level's finishing statistics to the next. The project members ended up making a movie in which the entire game is finished on Nightmare difficulty in 0:19:49 [8]; it was a collection of the best runs that the members of the site had been made thus far, and at that time, there was no other run that came close. The run was “recammed”, reconstructed so that it could be also viewed from a third-person perspective, which gained it its machinima status and arguably had made it more comprehensible and entertaining for a wider audience. It received widespread attention from gaming magazines, being distributed as part of the free CDs that they came with. This popularized speedrunning for a much larger audience than before and attracted many newcomers. Not all of those newcomers agreed with the old-timers' dogma that runs should be made on the hardest possible skill level. Thus, in August 1997 Muad'Dib's Quake Page came to be, run by Gunnar “Muad'Dib” Andre Mo and specializing in “Easy” difficulty runs. One month after that, the Quake done Quick movie was superseded by a new movie called Quake done Quicker, on September 14, 1997, which shortened the game's fastest playthrough to 0:16:35.[9]

In April 1998, Pflug and Mo merged their pages, thus creating the Speed Demos Archive, which, as of 2007, is still the dominant community for Quake speedrunning and also acts as repository for demos, maps, statistics and software pertaining to the practice. Ever since its creation, a large variety of tricks have been discovered in Quake's physics. Despite being released as early as 1996, Quake has steadily remained popular with its players, who subsequently released the Quake done Quick with a Vengeance movie on September 13, 2000, which featured a complete run through Quake in 0:12:23.[10]. Primarily tricks that had not been used in both its predecessors allowed for this improvement, as the run's manual states that it “[makes] use of every known trick, including unrestricted bunny-hopping, to represent the state-of-the-art in Nightmare running”.

As of March 2006, Speed Demos Archive can be found at the Web address http://speeddemosarchive.com/ and contains a total amount of 8481 demos (on both official and custom maps), accounting for a total time of 253 hours, 44 minutes and 39 seconds. The fastest any% single-segment completion times that have been recorded thus far, as of June 10, 2006, are 0:13:46 [11] for the Easy difficulty run and 0:19:50 [12] for the Nightmare difficulty run, both by Connor Fitzgerald. The 100% single-segment completion times are 0:46:02 [13] for the Easy difficulty run and 0:69:33 [14] for the Nightmare difficulty run, by respectively Marlo Galinski and Justin Fleck. Additionally, a new Quake done Quick movie with the working title Quake done Quick with a Vengeance Part II is in the making. The improvements that have been made as of 2007 would result in a time of 0:11:30 for the entire game, an improvement over its predecessor of 53 seconds.

Metroid 2002 (Metroid series)

Metroid Prime completion screen after Nolan “Radix” Pflug's famous 100% speedrun, now made obsolete by an even faster version.

Released in August 1986, Metroid was one of the earliest games to introduce special rewards for fast completion times. As is the case for the rest of the games in the series, highly non-linear gameplay makes it was possible for runners to extensively search for faster routes towards the end of the game. In doing so, it was found that many parts of the games could be skipped entirely. In particular, the ability to perform sequence breaking has been researched thoroughly, and it has since been concluded that the possibility of completing the games with only a small percentage of obtainable items is possible. The ineption of Metroid speedrunning followed predecessor Web sites which documented “low-percentage” completion possibilities.

Its direct successor, Super Metroid, released in 1994, proved to lend itself very well to fast completion purposes. It featured a physics system that allowed for a wide array of skills for mobility, like “wall jumping” or the “Shinespark”, allowing players to skip over large areas of the game, or play through the game in different manners based on how well they could perform these tricks in contextual situations. Additionally, it had the same non-linear gameplay as its predecessors. Due to the way the game is laid out, several different run types or tiers that incorporate different completion percentages have been performed. The most popular type is the maximum or 100% run, in which as many items as possible are obtained. Besides it, speedrunners also attempt any% runs, which focus solely on finishing the game as quickly as possible with no other prerequisites.[15] Runs in which as few items as possible are obtained, accounting for a completion percentage of 14%, have also been made. Even though much fewer items are taken in these runs, they are slower than the any% runs due to the extra time spent killing Ridley and Mother Brain, two fictional enemies in the game, with only the Ice Beam weapon.[16]

Following Super Metroid there was an 8 year gap during which no new Metroid games were released. During this time, the first games in the series were played intensively by dedicated gamers, and many tricks were discovered that allowed players to achieve incredibly short completion times. As the Internet became more available to the general public, runners began to find each other online. Groups of players started collaborating on message boards and sent tricks back and forth to one another, in what became a community based on playing the games speedily.

The first Metroid community that was created for the purpose of fast completion was Metroid Prime Discoveries, created and led by Jean-Sebastien “Zell” Dubois.[17] Rather than being a site that focused on speedrunning, it was dedicated to documenting the possibilities of sequence breaking in the game Metroid Prime. When the interest arose to begin the documentation of other games in the series, however, the new site Metroid 2002 was created by Nathan Jahnke in August 2003.[18] Initially, the only incentive was to document the two Metroid games released in 2002—Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion—but this changed when Nathan was asked to take all content of Metroid Online—another site that had been developed at that time and contained sequence breaking documentation, a message board, and a 1% Metroid Fusion run—and relaunch Metroid 2002 as “the one resource for Metroid Prime sequence breaking info.” This relaunch happened less than two weeks after the proposition and came to be in November. Ever since, it has been the central repository for everything related to speedrunning the Metroid series.

It was also in November 2003 that Metroid speedrunning reached its peak, after Nolan Pflug released his 100% run of Metroid Prime, in which he finished the entire game in 1:37. Since it was featured in the games section of Slashdot, it gained widespread attention.[19] Publications in numerous different languages ran stories on the run, and topics about the run were made on gaming message boards around the world. The first segment of his run was being downloaded over five thousand times a day at the peak of its popularity. The Metroid 2002 IRC channel was flooded with people who had heard about the run and wanted to know more about it, quickly dwarfing the original population, and its message board saw its member count double in size the month following the run's release. As a result of the popularity of this run, it was decided that in order to best serve the growing bandwidth consumption, Metroid 2002 would have to merge its array of videos with Speed Demos Archive, which was at that time being provided nearly limitless server capacity for their runs on the Internet Archive.

As of June 2007, the best completion time for the North American version of Metroid Prime is 1:03 by Besmir “Zoid” Sheqi, and the best 100% time was reduced to 1:28 by Paul “Bartendorsparky” Evans, making Nolan's hugely popular run obsolete.[20]

TASVideos (tool-assisted speedruns)

Main article: TASVideos

<Insert history and description here>

Media

Screenshot of the Mega Man tool-assisted speedrun, excerpted below.

This article includes several digital videos to help describe the speedrunning phenomenon by giving clear, real-world examples, mostly excerpted from representative speedruns. These files have a video steam encoded in Theora and an audio stream encoded in Vorbis. Due to the open source nature of these codecs, there is a wide variety of software available that can play these files, allowing them to be used on most personal computer systems. For more information, please see Media help, or refer to the documentation of either codec or your operating system. Template:Multi-video start Template:Multi-video item Template:Multi-video item Template:Multi-video item Template:Multi-video end

See also

Related articles

• Tool-assisted speedrun — a speedrun in which one uses tools such as slow motion and re-recording.
• Notable games for speedrunning — an extensively documented list of noteworthy games for speedrunning purposes.
• Time attack — a mode which allows the player to finish a game (or a part of it) as quickly as possible, saving record times.
• Score attack — the attempt to reach a record logged point value in a game.
• Sequence breaking — the act of performing actions or obtaining items in a video game out of the intended order, or of skipping said actions or items entirely while still successfully completing the game.
• Electronic sports — a general term used to describe computer and video games which are played as competitive sports.
• Speed Demos Archive — the largest speedrunning community on the Internet.
• Parkour/Free Running — a real-world urban activity similar in philosophy to speedrunning.

Other information

The dictionary definition of speedrun at Wiktionary

External links

These external resources are generally Web links that lead to sites that specialize in speedrunning, and are therefore reliable locations for further research on the subject. Among the listed sites are also communities that have been created so that players of video games may compete against each other for fast times and high scores. For reasons of practicality, sites which only give a brief description or passing remark about speedruns, of which there are many, are not included.

General speedrun, time attack and high-score sites

• Speed Demos Archive - The largest repository and community of speedrunning
• TASVideos - Speedruns through various NES/Famicom, Super NES/SFC, Mega Drive/Genesis, Game Boy/Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 64 games, made with emulation and by slowing down the gameplay
• Collection of speedrun videos at the Internet Archive
• わいわい芸夢館 - Japanese collection of speedruns Template:Ja icon
• Twin Galaxies - An organization that tracks video game world records

One may find various speedruns also available on sites that specialize in video sharing, such as YouTube or Google Video.

Game-specific sites

• COMPET-N - Doom series (excluding Doom 3)
• Metroid 2002 - Metroid series
• Quake done Quick - Home of the famous Quake collaborative speedruns, including the “Nightmare” difficulty run in 12:23
• Speed Demos Archive - Quake - Individual level runs of Quake, including runs on hundreds of home-made maps
• Half-Life 2: Done Quick - Half-Life 2 speedrunning forum

de:Speedrun fr:Speedrun ja:やり込み nl:Speedrun pt:Quebra de Seqüência fi:Speedrun