Red Arremer
Member
Most of you probably have heard of Siglemic or CosmoWright, some might even have watched their streams at some point, or maybe some of you have watched a speedrun marathon.
This thread will be dedicated to speedrunning, and give you the basics of what's going on with that, and if you are interested, where to go if you want to find out more.
The heck is "speedrunning"?
Speedrunning, in its basic gist, means playing a game as fast as possible.
There are many different types of speedrunning, but the most important ones as TAS and "normal" speedruns.
TAS stands for Tool Assisted Speedruns. This means that the person who speedruns the game uses emulators and their built-in tools such as slowdown (down to frame by frame slowdown) in order to optimize the button inputs, routes, and even find exploits and glitches. TAS are NOT using any cheats or cheat devices.
Normal speedruns are just someone picking up a controller and playing through the game as fast as they can. Even if you are just casually wanting to beat your favorite game as quick as you can, and even if you aren't world record material, you could call yourself being a speedrunner.
TAS and normal runners often work together, some do even run their game in both ways. This thread is mostly focusing on "normal" speedrunning, although I wanted to mention the TAS as well, as they are a significant part of speedrunning in general.
Okay, that sounds cool. How do I start?
Just pick up a game you really enjoy playing, and don't mind playing a LOT in case you wanna get really good at it. You will have to play that game over and over again, hundreds if not thousands of times.
Most speedrunners stream their games on Twitch nowadays, so it's very easy to find a runner you can watch and pick up tricks from. Watching recorded speedruns as well as TAS videos also can help you to find the quickest route, possible skips and glitches.
Almost every game has several categories it is run in. The most common ones are any% and 100%. Any% means that a game is run as quickly as possible, taking every skip and exploit you can, and possibly leaving out large portions of the game. 100% means that you, for instance, pick up all collectibles, or complete all levels in a game.
There's more categories for specific games, if you wanna know more about your game, it's best to read up on it a bit, and see what feasible categories there are.
Games usually also are completed either segmented or single segment/real time attack (RTA).
Segmented means that you save in between certain levels or sections of the game, and manipulate your luck rolls by loading until you have the possibly best outcome.
Single segment/RTA means that you play through the game in one sitting, and deal with whatever the dreaded RNG (Random Number Generator, which is the speedrunners' universal name for randomness/luck in a game) throws at you. There's a small difference between SS and RTA, which is that one of them allows you to reset in between (e.g. for RNG manipulation or save file corruption), while the other doesn't.
Maybe find other people who wanna play it or are already doing so - having someone around your level of skill to race and play with is great, and if you find someone who's much better than you, they can teach you a few tricks.
Alright, what can I speedrun? Are there any games I can't?
Just run whatever the heck you want! Almost every game can be speedran, although there are some games that don't lend themselves very well to speedrunning (e.g. fighting games), or they already have an established progression that cannot be sped up (e.g. rhythm games, and a lot of shoot em ups), or they have no actual end (e.g. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, or social games like Farmville).
Every other genre is being run, though - and it doesn't matter what generation it is from either. You can find speedrunners for popular and well-known games such as Mario or Final Fantasy, up to speedrunners for really obscure or terrible games, including recent ones such as Sonic 06.
Of course, different games mean different expectations from you as a player. There are very execution heavy, skill-based games. Other games are very long to speedrun and pretty much require you to keep notes and have quite some endurance - RPGs often fall into this category.
Do I need recording gear, or do I have to stream my stuff?
Nah. If you want to submit your run to SDA (I'll get to that in just a bit), you should, and if you want to race on SRL, you should as well. But there's no requirement. If you just wanna run your game and noone should see it, that's just as fine as streaming it to other people, or recording it and sharing it on video sites.
Okay, you say I should check for other people running those games. Where should I go?
For you as an aspiring speedrunner, there are 3 major sites you want to look into:
TAS Videos is as its name suggests, a site dedicated to videos of TAS runs.
Speed Demos Archive (SDA) is a site dedicated to presenting high quality recordings of speedruns, and their forum is one of the biggest communities to discuss strategies for speedruns.
SpeedRunsLive (SRL) is dedicated to the live streaming aspect of speedrunning, focusing on races between speedrunners, as well as a leaderboards system, thus shifting more towards the competitive side of it.
You can find links to each just a bit further down. SDA and SRL are your go-to sites even if you are not interested in running a game yourself, but just wanna watch some streams or know what's going on in the speedrunning community.
Quite a few games also have sites or wikis dedicated to collecting strategies and/or best times, which you should easily find out by either asking at the respective threads on SDA, or asking a runner who does the game you're interested in.
Cool! You mentioned marathons earlier, what's up with that?
Most of the speedrunning community is very dedicated towards getting together and streaming speedruns live in marathons over several days, in order to raise money for charity. The most notable marathon in this regard is Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), which is an annual event hosted by SDA every January that usually runs for about a week, and raises money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
There's also an off-shoot during summer (Summer GDQ), and there's also many more marathons hosted for different reasons - last year saw, for instance, the Hurricane Sandython hosted by SRL, which raised money for victims of the titular hurricane.
Usually the marathon hosts try to not schedule their events during other speedrun events, so it's unlikely there'll be more than one marathon at a time.
Useful Links:
Speed Demos Archive (SDA)
SpeedRunsLive (SRL)
TAS Videos
Team Ludendi - A Swedish speedrunner/gaming community that hosts the European equivalent of AGDQ, the ESA marathon (European Speedster Assembly).
The Sunday Sequence Break - A weekly podcast (each Sunday @ 7PM EST), covering each week's speedrunning news, such as world records, as well as a game of the week that gets special showcasing, and weekly special guests.
Stream pages:
There's a LOT of speedrunners, and I wouldn't do any of them justice if I just linked those I was watching. You can find just about every speedrunner in one (or more) of these Twitch TV team pages:
http://www.twitch.tv/team/sda
http://www.twitch.tv/team/srl
http://www.twitch.tv/team/ludendi
