Week 8 Speedrunning

No, I’m not talking about the Olympic sport of speed running. I’m talking about videogame speed running. I have played videogame for a long time ands have played many games. In my travels as a gamer, I came across speed running years ago. Speed running has always intrigued me. It is a completely different way of playing the game. Some games being played normal is hard enough and some people are crazy enough to spend thousands of hours practicing and optimizing speed runs.

What is a speed run? A speed run is when someone completes a game under a time limit trying to beat the game as fast as possible. Seems pretty straight forward right. I thought so to until I started learning how speed runs work. The speed run community has been around since the 1990s. For every game there are multiple speed run categories like any % completion, glitch less any %, 100% completion, 100% completion glitch less and so on. There are tons of categories depending on and how a person completes the game. If someone uses glitches in the game then it goes into that category. The different between any % and 100% is in any % you can skip parts of the game by using specific mechanics in the game. It gets even more complicated when you factor in the luck it takes to do some speed runs.

RNG which is random number generator is the bane of all speed runners. Let’s take for example a game like Mario Kart 64. The full complete speed run of Mario Kart 64 relies on a lot of RNG. Every time a speed runner needs to get a specific item from the item box, they have a one in fourteen chance in Mario Kart 64. There are fourteen different outcomes every time which makes it difficult to even get a speed run on this game even close to completing a run. There is also the factor of depending on what position you are in the race will give you certain items more often. The statistical odds of some speed runs are insane.

Confused yet. I just scratched the surface of what speed running is. The part that has me interested the most is any game can have a speed run. The big ones are a lot of the Nintendo Mario games have a lot of speed runners. A lot of older late 1990s early 2000s games are speed ran because they contain glitches and make the game more fun and interesting. The variety is immense. I have seen Wii Sports golf speed runs before. Any game can have a speed run.

The reason I brought this up today is last night I was watching a guy called Abney play Mario Kart 64. Held the current world record for his speed run back in July 2021 for completes all the races in Mario Kart 64 in order with glitches. His record was 23:47.9. Last night he beat his own time with a 23:29.9. In the world of speed running beating a time by nearly 20 seconds is really good. I encourage you to check some speed runs at some point. It you want to watch a good recap of a speed run on a game go to YouTube and look up Summing Salt. He has detailed videos on multiple game and one of them being Mario Kart 64 which might be my favorite.