The Rise of Speedrunning: Gaming’s Fastest Phenomenon
Benny Parker | Sep 25, 2024
Have you ever been playing a game and thought, “I can do this a little quicker”? If so, you’ve already become a speedrunner. Speedrunning is taking that thought and crafting it into an art form. Discover how thousands of people have made speedrunning a global phenomenon and why anyone can become a speedrunner.
What is Speedrunning?
Speedrunning is the art of perfecting the completion of a specific goal — most commonly, reaching the end of the game as quickly as possible. However, over time, speedrunning has extended that goal to encompass much more than just finishing the game quickly.
What began as players racing to beat the final level of Super Mario Bros. with the minimal amount of mistakes and taking the shortest path has transformed into a fierce competition where doing frame-perfect tricks-performed within a one-sixtieth of a second period-are a necessity to be on the top. Speedrunners now manipulate games in ways developers never intended to ever be possible, discovering game-breaking glitches, ultra-shortcuts, and strategies that push the limits of what is considered humanly possible. Speedrunning has grown into something far beyond what anyone could’ve imagined.
Made By and For Speedrunners
One of the earliest online sites for tracking speedruns is Speed Demos Archive which was created in April 1998, originally only hosting times for the game Quake. Later on, the site hosted a Metroid Prime 100% speedrun which garnered a lot of attention and caused the site to open up to any speedrun submissions from any game. As the site’s popularity grew, it eventually became the go-to platform for submitting online speedrun attempts for over 1000 titles.
As a result of the ever-increasing popularity of speedrunning, rules and regulations were established to ensure the legitimacy of speedruns. Early on, photographic or video proof was needed as proof, though this was a major hurdle for the early 2000s due to lower-quality cameras and limited digital sharing capabilities. More often than not, any proof would be the occasional blurry photo. However, with the advancement of technology, archiving speedruns became much easier, with video evidence directly attributed to all verified speedruns.
In the late 2010s Speed Demos Archive’s popularity would diminish as a newer site, Speedrun.com would become the new standard for archiving and verifying speedruns, having over 40,000 game communities on the site and over 4.8 million speedruns over its games.
Games Done Quick
In January 2010, Speed Demos Archive hosted the first Classic Games Done Quick, a charity marathon where speedruns of retro-themed 8-bit and 16-bit games were attempted in front of a live audience and livestreamed while donations were collected. The event raised over $10,000 over two days for CARE, an international humanitarian agency.
The event featured livestreamed speedruns where viewers could donate and had the option to leave comments to be read aloud during the stream. This fostered interactivity and would bolster camaraderie within the community. Donations would often include inside jokes or requests for the speedrunners. Some runs were even done in unique or comedic ways, like blindfolded runs, races between runners, or even Tool-Assisted Speedruns (TAS), computer programs that precisely input actions into games in inhuman ways.
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After the event’s success, it was rebranded to Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) and was held again in January 2011 for five days, raising over $50,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Ever since, ADGQ has been held annually in early January, raising over $25,000,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation to date.
In August 2011, the first Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) was held with the same formatting as AGDQ but raising money instead for Doctors Without Borders. SGDQ would also be held annually alongside AGDQ, becoming collectively known as Games Done Quick (GDQ).
In 2015, Games Done Quick migrated from Speed Demos Archives to the newly created, Games Done Quick LLC. As of today, both AGDQ and SGDQ have grown massively into week-long marathons with massive communities, collectively raising over $50,000,000 for numerous charities.
Speedrunning Pandemic
As with most of the world, COVID-19 has greatly affected the speedrunning community, though unlike most of the world, this community experienced massive growth due to its mostly online presence.
This can be seen using Google Trends, observing that speedrunning peaked in January of 2021, amid the COVID lockdown when everyone was locked up inside their homes with only time. Since then, levels of interest have, on average, remained over double that of pre-COVID levels.
Twitch and YouTube have also played massive parts in the growth of speedrunning, being platforms for speedrunners to post videos. During COVID, streams of speedrunning across these platforms increased by 39%, with over 230 thousand titles being streamed.
Another form of speedrunning content that exploded during COVID is video documentaries of a game’s speedrunning history. A particular content creator who is a major figure in the community and one who dragged me into speedrunning is Summoning Salt.
The Future of Speedrunning
Speedrunning is continuing to grow with an ever-increasing community. What began as an innocent thought-to finish the game just a little quicker-has transformed into a cornerstone of gaming culture that has impacted millions of people globally. Whether through charity events like Games Done Quick, the countless hours of content being created online, or just the people who try and pick up a controller, the community remains strong and vibrant.
Speedrunning isn’t just defined by reaching the goal quickly-it’s the perfecting of an art, breaking the boundaries of games, and constantly surpassing the limits of what’s considered possible.
In the end, speedrunning is more than a phenomenon-it’s testament to the determination, creativity, and passion of gamers worldwide.
And who knows? The next record-breaking speedrun could come from someone just like you, picking up that controller, booting up that game, and thinking,
“I can do this a little quicker.”
