Speedrunning
A speedrun is a play-through of a computer or video game, in which the whole game or a select part of it, such as a single level, is played with the intent of completing it as quickly as possible, optionally with certain prerequisites, such as collecting every item available. The term is only used in the context of games that were not originally or primarily designed with time-squashing in mind; one generally does not "speedrun" in 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 [1]). Both speedrunning and time attacking are often practiced competitively in Internet-based communities.
There are two big subgenres of speedruns: unassisted or regular speedruns [2], and tool-assisted speedruns. Unassisted speedruns are done in real-time using only whatever features there were in the actual game and the original hardware, while tool-assisted speedruns also use features found outside the game in order to create the movie, such as the "save-state" feature found in emulators.
History
Doom developed what might have been the first online speedrunning fanbase, emerging in 1994 around newsgroups, FTPs and websites that collected demos (see Doom speedrunning). Speedrunning entered mainstream with the famous Quake done Quick demo for Quake created by the eponymous group. QdQ also produced Quake done Quicker, which was later obsoleted by Quake done Quick with a Vengeance, and Scourge done Slick, movies which in addition to top-notch speedrunning skills featured humorous plot and camerawork, making QdQ one of the pioneers of the machinima community.
It could be argued that all of the Metroid games were among the first to have major speedrun challenges. They have built-in rewards for speed in the form of earning better endings for beating the game faster.
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Techniques
Finding the route
An essential part of speedrunning is to find the shortest feasible route through the game. In highly non-linearly structured games, which are almost exclusively preferred for speedrunning purposes, there is often no obvious choice. The shortest possible route might contain so many obstacles that it is virtually impossible to use, and it is therefore often necessary to find a compromise between ease and distance. Depending on how the player's skill improves, faster but increasingly difficult routes may be chosen.
Additionally, depending on the structure of levels, there has to be constructed a route for them as well. Contrary to strictly linear levels which can only be finished using one predetermined route, there are games in which levels leave a lot of room for creativity in its playthrough.
Good examples of this can be found in Quake, where even years after the initial versions of its speedrun routes there are still additional shortcuts being discovered. Notably, a level which has undergone a lot of route changes in this game is E4M3 (The Elder God Shrine). Originally, the route for this map was very long and involved going through the graveyard and lots of other things. After the release of the first Quake done Quick video, in which this route was recorded as a 1:21 run by Yonathan Donner [3] [4], it was found out that a large part of this route could be skipped by using a slope jump in the starting room, leading to Donner improving his run to 0:57. This was the basic foundation of the map's route, which is still being used today: do the slope jump, get the silver key, run back to the start room, jump to the other side, get the gold key, and exit. A variety of new shortcuts were found since then, constantly updating the optimal route. Following Donner's record, "DooMfienD" [5] used an in-flight grenade jump from the back of a Fiend rather than one from balcony to balcony in order to get to the other side of the start room. He also added a grenade jump at the silver key and got 0:55 for Quake done Quicker [6]. Markus Taipale [7] later replaced this with a bunny hop. Evan Wagner [8] ran 0:54 by adding a grenade jump from the Knights near the gold key and an additional boost in a long hallway. These additional grenade jumps became possible due to more efficient health usage attained by picking up the second large health upgrade when returning at the starting point rather than when starting. Ilkka Kurkela [9] added bunny hops to get 0:50. The grenade jump at the silver key went through a few revisions (being replaced by a double grenade jump or a quad boost) but was eventually reverted to DooMfienD's original method because the health was needed for a much more important trick devised by Markus Taipale: a Fiend boost after the start, and a quad damage grenade jump at the gold key that carries the player at full speed nearly all the way to the exit. Combining all of these tricks, Markus was able to record 0:40 for Quake done Quick with a Vengeance. Even so, the route was still not optimal, as proved by Peter Horvath [10], who added a grenade jump from a Spawn in the lava near the silver key, which gave him the almost unbeatable time of 0:33 [11]. This route is currently believed to be optimal.
The possibility to run through a game faster by using a superior course depends on the linearity of that game. The more linear the game is, the less able a player will be to alter the route of play. The amount of planning that can go in both the level sequence and the actual gameplay may vary a lot and be disproportionate.
Sequence breaking
The best routes rarely rely upon the paths and progressions that were designated by the developers. Skilled players will usually discover ways to finish parts of the game in a different order than was intended, and they consequentially often find ways to skip parts of a game entirely. Using these shortcuts is sometimes called sequence breaking. Shortcuts are often possible because their existence has been overlooked by the developers, but they are sometimes actually implemented intentionally.
A trick for sequence breaking in first-person shooters is the so called "rocket jump", which consists of jumping intentionally over a mine or explosive, or shooting with a rocket launcher on the ground. The explosion allows the character to jump higher than normal, reaching nearby but otherwise unreachable places. Obviously, the character incurs significant damage from the explosion.
In another example (from the Quake done Quick speedruns), the character jumped to an unreachable platform by stepping over a laser shot, just shot by a nearby enemy. This technique requires precise timing and study. Since the level was centered on finding an alternative way to reach the platform, the sequence breaking permitted a player to skip almost the complete level.
One famous example of sequence breaking is a series of glitches which allow Super Mario 64 to be completed after collecting only 16 stars (as opposed to 70); the game can be completed in less than twenty minutes by doing so [12]. The Metroid series is also famous for sequence breaking; many items can be acquired early on or skipped altogether.
Glitches
Sometimes a glitch will allow for an interesting speedrunning opportunity. When running a game, it is sometimes possible to use the physics of the game to do things that would normally seem unorthodox. The classic example is being able to walk through an enemy due to an inferior "close approach" collision detection; games don't do pixel-perfect collision checks, which sometimes makes it possible to touch and even go partially inside the enemies without getting hurt. Additionally, if one is moving very fast, it's sometimes possible to go through objects because the game does not render a frame in which one is inside the object. Combined with the close approach collision abuse, the speed may not even need to be very high.
As such, by various means (such as pushing into corners in strange ways or getting pushed by an enemy), one may sometimes get inside the floor, walls, or ceiling. While it might be that the player just gets stuck and ruins his game because he now can now no longer continue, it might also allow the usage of new routes that did not exist before. For example, one might be able to jump out of the clipping zone very easily, allowing the complete passing through it. Because of close approach collision detection being so simple to most games, it is made to look accurate by "ejecting" the object if it ends up partially inside a wall or other impassable zone. It also ensures the character can't get stuck inside a wall because of simple programming. Visually, this appears as scrolling: the game automatically moves the object that's inside the wall, usually horizontally and to the right, until it finds a place where it can exit the wall. When this happens, sometimes the game will even push the player further into the wall. This feature can be used to take radical shortcuts in games, but are usually too difficult to pull off consistently in most unassisted speedruns.
Another commonly used technique is the usage of temporary invulnerability given to the player by the game, usually straight after getting hit by an enemy. Most games visualize this invulnerability by making the player character flicker. This is to prevent the player from immediately getting hit again, but can sometimes also protect him from instant death hazards, such as deadly spikes or lava. It can also be used to pass through monsters that would otherwise take more time to destroy, or to pass through other nearby monsters that would do more damage. Temporary invulnerability is also usually given to the player during a cutscene that cannot be interrupted, such as a story dialogue or the animation for finishing a level. If the player touches something lethal during this state of game, the game may very well ignore it and let him continue like nothing at all has happened.
Many polished and acclaimed speedruns are filled with glitch abuse, but the usage of several inconspicuous glitches may be left unnoticed by casual gamers.
Tool assistance
Tool-assisted speedruns make use of tools such as slow motion and re-recording. Emulators that currently feature the tools necessary to creating these tool-assisted speedruns include Famtasia, FCE Ultra [13], Nintendulator, VirtuaNES, Snes9x [14], Gens [15], ZSNES [16] and Visual Boy Advance [17]. Doom has a long tradition of both traditional and tool-assisted speedrunning. Since the release of the Doom source, some ports have included tools for doing assisted runs, most notably PrBoom.
The tool-assisted speedruns try to avoid comparisons to the unassisted runs, as this would be unfair to the players. In unassisted runs, it would be unacceptable to use emulator's save-state features to take a shorter but more dangerous path, saving the game when passing an obstacle. Likewise, many unassisted speedrunners frown upon glitch abuse, mainly due to the fact these glitches are usually impossible to reproduce without tool-assistance, while it is highly desirable in the tool-assisted community.
Tool-assisted speedruns are not done to show off one's playing skills, but more to show off all kinds of techniques that are theoretically possible in the game but impossible to do in practice. Because of this, tool-assisted runs discern themselves by pushing the gameplay to the physical limits of the game's engine. This is extensively demonstrated in the Mega Man and Rygar runs.
While speed is desired in these runs, the focus is on entertainment. For example, there is a famous tool-assisted speedrun of Super Mario Bros. 3 by "Morimoto" that finishes the game in approximately 11 minutes - the fun is in the breathtaking speed and overall craziness of the game, not the skills. The video has since been "obsoleted" by a faster tool-assisted speedrun, but this video is still the best-known example of its kind.
The controversy revolves around the similarity between the finished products. Websites exist dedicated to each side in the hopes that the movies will be considered separate. However, some individuals have allegedly tried to submit tool-assisted speedruns as unassisted speedruns. Without careful analysis, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the two, and this undermines the effort put into unassisted speedruns.
Official recordkeeping only considers unassisted speedruns. Some believe this is the only real way to do a speedrun, even going so far as to describe tool-assisted speedruns as "fake" or "cheating".
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Notable games for speedrunning
Quake
- Main article: Quake speedrunning
Quake is arguably the most popular game to speedrun ever. 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 cdrom.com's 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 fast 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 Pflug (aka. Radix) first started the Nightmare Speed Demos web site to keep track of the fastest demos. The first Quake done Quick [18] project was started in June that same year. 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. This popularized speedrunning for a much larger audience than before and attracted many newcomers. Not all of those newcomers agreed with the old-timers's 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 Andre Mo (aka. Muad'Dib) and specializing in Easy difficulty runs.
In April 1998, Nolan and Gunnar merged their pages, thus creating Speed Demos Archive, which today is still the central repository for Quake speed demos of any kind.
As of November 2005, Speed Demos Archive contains a total amount of 8515 demos (on both official and custom maps), accounting for a total time of 253 hours, 44 minutes and 39 seconds [19].
Techniques
The reason why Quake became so popular to speedrun is mainly due to the buggy physics engine which creative players can use to their advantage. This has caused many unconventional techniques to be invented, most notably the rocket jump (or similarly, the grenade jump), which is a jump combined with a rocket fired at a surface near the player's position. The rocket's explosion can then be used to propel the player to large heights that are normally unreachable by normal jumping, or to attain very high travelling speed.
Another technique, bunny hopping, was pioneered by Ilkka Kurkela (aka. Mineral) in May 1998 after being discovered in Deathmatch play. Bunny hopping is essentially a technique that involves jumping and strafing in order to accelerate to speeds up to around 60% higher as when normally running. It has since been virtually impossible to beat records without using this technique.
Records
| Category | Time | Player |
|---|---|---|
| Easy difficulty (run) | 13:46 | Connor Fitzgerald |
| Easy difficulty (100% run) | 46:02 | Marlo Galinski |
| Nightmare difficulty (run) | 19:50 | Connor Fitzgerald |
| Nightmare difficulty (100% run) | 69:33 | Justin Fleck |
The records listed here are continuous runs through all of Quake that are recorded in one playing session. This kind of runs, done on either full episodes or the entire game, are called Marathons. The runs are categorized in two difficulty levels and in two types of runs; 100% runs, in which it is required that the player kills all monsters and finds all secrets on every level, and runs without this requirement. These are the most noteworthy Marathons, but there have been created many more; for a full list, see SDA: Marathons.
Doom
- Main article: Doom speedrunning
December 1993 saw the release of id Software's Doom. Among some of its major features, like at that time unparallelled graphics, LAN- and Internet-based multiplayer support, and user modification possibilities, it also gave the players the ability to record demo files of their playthrough. This particular feature was first picked up by Christina Norman (aka. Strunoph) in January 1994 when he launched the LMP Hall of Fame website.
This site was, however, quickly obsoleted by the DOOM Honorific Titles [20], launched in May 1994 by Frank Stajano, which introduced the first serious competition between players. This site would create the basis for all DOOM demosites that would follow. The DHT were designed around a notion of earning titles by successfully recording a particular type of demo on pre-determined maps in the Iwads. These '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 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 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. Many legends in the Doom speedrunning scene started out in the DHT, including George Bell (Tyson), Steffen Udluft (Pacifist), Kai-Uwe "Gazelle" Humpert, Frank "Jesus" Siebers (Nightmare), Thomas "Panter" Pilger (Reality), Yonatan Donner, Rich J. Sham, Jonathan "Hunter" Hoof, Andreas "Anthe" Kren, Adam Williamson, and Steffen Winterfeldt. Unfortunately, the DHT always had trouble retaining a permanent Internet location. This, combined with the changing rules and the diminished importance of most of the titles, made public interest wane as the years rolled on.
In November 1994, the Doom speedrunning scene, in the form of the COMPET-N [21] website, took off. Its creator, Simon Widlake, intended the site to be a record scoreboard for a variety of Doom-related achievements, but unlike its predecessors, they all centered around one key idea: speed. Players were required to run through Doom's levels as fast as humanely possible in order to attain a spot on the constantly-updated COMPET-N scoreboards.
Like the DOOM Honorific Titles, this site experienced multiple location changes over time; it was even at cdrom.com for a while before Istvan Pataki took over as maintainer and moved the site to the now defunct ftp.sch.bme.hu. From there on, since early 1998, it was in the hands of Adam Hegyi, who has been the maintainer ever since. It is currently located at doom2.net.
As of November 2005, 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 [22].
Techniques
Due to speed being the only prerequisite, the runners began developing repertoires of tricks that enabled them to attain speeds that are otherwise impossible to achieve with conventional gameplay. For example, it was discovered that due to a mathematical error in the game's physics, it was possible to go approximately 41% faster by running diagonally rather than straight forward. Even greater speeds could be achieved by rubbing or "wall hugging" against a north-south wall. It was also discovered that a great speed boost could be attained by using the attacks of enemies to one's advantage, such as using the Arch-Vile's nasty pyrotechnic attack as a free boost across gaps and up onto ledges.
Like in Quake, a lot of these techniques rely on luck as well as skill; after the runner had honed his abilities to a point where he could begin to attempt the tricks, he still had to have a lot of luck for the circumstances to be absolutely perfect, something which is often beyond a runner's immediate reach. This is acknowledged by Kay Berntsen, a Quake speedrunner, who states in the accompanying text file with his 00:24 run of E1M1 (The Slipgate Complex) that "skills made it possible, but luck got it done". [23]
The Metroid series
Released in August 1986, Metroid was the first game to introduce special rewards for fast completion times. Featuring highly non-linear gameplay, it was possible for a player to extensively search for faster routes towards the end of the game. This has been researched thoroughly since the game was created, and it has since been concluded that only a few items are necessary to complete the game.
The release of Super Metroid in 1994 greatly increased the quality of Metroid speedrunning. 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 the they could perform these tricks in contextual situations. Additionally, it had the same non-linear gameplay the fans had come to expect from the series. Due to the way the game is laid out, serveral different run types or tiers that incorporate different completion percentages have been done. The most popular type, which focusses solely on finishing the game as fast as possible with no other prerequisites, is aptly named the any% run. Besides it, speedrunners also attempt runs in which all items are obtained, called the 100% run [24]. The tool-assisted community has also made a run in which as few items as possible are obtained, accounting for a completion percentage of 14%; this is called a low% run [25], the "low" usually being substituted for the actual completion percentage attained in the run. Even though much fewer items are taken in this run, it's slower than the route in the any% run because of how long it takes to kill Ridley and Mother Brain with only the Ice Beam.
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 founded solely for the purpose of fast completion was Metroid Prime Discoveries [26], created and led by Jean-Sebastien Dubois (aka. Zell). Rather than being a site that focussed on speedrunning, it was dedicated to documenting the possibilities of sequence breaking in the game Metroid Prime. When the interest arised to begin the documentation of other games in the series, however, the new site Metroid 2002 [27] was created by Nathan Jahnke in August 2003. 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 later than 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 (aka. Radix) released his 100% run of Metroid Prime [28], it was featured on the front page of Slashdot [29]. 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, taking up more than three times the monthly allotted bandwidth for the server a day. 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 and the Super Metroid 100% completion run in exactly 1:00 by Red Scarlet that was released shortly afterwards [30], 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 January 2006, the best completion time for Metroid Prime stands at 1:04 by "kip", and the best 100% time was reduced to 1:28 by Paul Evans (aka. Bartendorsparky), obsoleting Nolan's hugely popular run [31].
Super Mario series
As games, the Super Mario series features some of the most defining games to the platformer genre. Due to their popularity and simple yet challenging physics and gameplay mechanics, every instance of the series is well-suited for speedrunning. As such, there has always been a lot of competition for the top times for these games.
The first platformer game to feature Mario as protagonist was Super Mario Bros., for which Trevor Seguin recorded the world record time of 0:05:06 in November 2004. This is only 6 seconds slower than the fastest tool-assisted speedrun, which stands at 0:05:00, created by R. Yoshizawa (aka. Pom) in July 2005. Despite the fact that tool-assisted speedruns are usually much faster than their unassisted counterparts, due to the way they are created (for example, it's easily possible for tool-assisted runners to perform a glitch that allows them to walk through walls, something that is too difficult to do in unassisted play to be a viable strategy), the difference between the two runs in time is very small. This is because the gameplay of Super Mario Bros. leaves much less room for impressive speed tactics than its successors, most notably due to the relatively slow and easily maintainable running speed. Since its creation, Andrew Gardikis and Carlos Krueger have managed to equal Trevor's record. Gardikis has the fastest time of the three by a split second — not enough to warrant the official recognition, since speedruns must be one second faster than the old version to count as record breaker.
Another incredibly popular speedrun in the franchise is Richard Ureta's Super Mario Bros. 3 run. He runs through the entire game and uses warp whistles to skip worlds 2 through 7 entirely, bringing the final time to 0:11:11.
Interestingly, the tool-assisted speedrun of this game, made by "もりもと" ("Morimoto") in November 2003, was also very popular outside of the speedrun community as it was the first published run of this famous game, ending after 0:11:04 of input. As such, there was little knowledge of how and why tool-assisted speedruns were made, which spawned a lot of controversy over his run; after it was mass-posted on forums all over the Internet, the users of those forums would call it a hoax after finding out that it was created using an emulator, citing that Morimoto himself "admitted" to creating the movie "frame by frame" and that it took him two years to do it. These claims came to be after a page was found on Morimoto's now defunct site in which he explains how he created the run with the Famtasia emulator, using conventional tool-assisted speedrunning methods [32]; however, when it was posted, a machine translation was used instead of the original text, causing it to be severely different than intended, which spawned the misunderstandings.
This run has since been obsoleted a few times by faster versions. The current fastest tool-assisted speedrun for Super Mario Bros. 3 stands at 0:10:35, created by Jean-François Durocher (aka. Genisto).
Mega Man series
The Mega Man series, featuring partially non-linear gameplay, is interesting for speedrunners mainly due to extensive route planning possibilities that exist in most of its games. The player is allowed to choose in which order he'll finish the main stages or levels of the game, which all consist of a platformer-style gameplay and a boss fight with its Robot Master. After defeating the Robot Master, Mega Man will acquire its power, which he can then use for the rest of the game; it's for this reason that a lot of thought must be put in finding the fastest order in which one can complete the game, as the weapons that can be obtained in certain stages could save time later on in the game.
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The Legend of Zelda series
The games in the Legend of Zelda series generally take a large amount of effort to speedrun due to them being very long, even when played as quickly as possible, and because a lot of different techniques can be used in addition to extensive route planning. None the less, they have been fought over by many speedrunners due to their high popularity, and have thus been improved frequently.
Interestingly, the tool-assistance community has been able to reach the end of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in only 03:48 (3 minutes, 48 seconds) due to a glitch that allows Link to travel through walls [33]. Since the levels in the game are connected by the edges of one screen, the player is able to walk through walls, passing entire levels as he goes, and eventually reach the Triforce room. This glitch, which requires that the player presses the "up" and "down" keys at the same time, can theoretically be reproduced on a real console, although it is practically impossible to perform by a human player: pressing "up" and "down" at the same time is impossible with most controllers, which feature a D-pad that can't be depressed in opposite directions at the same time. The run also features a trick that makes Link run faster by alternating "up" and "down" button presses every other frame; this is also not practically possible to perform by a human player due to the high speed at which one would have to give this input. This makes the run a very clear example of the difference between human and physical limitations.
Besides a very short completion of this game, another version that does not use the aforementioned glitch was also produced, resulting in a much longer run of 1:20:16 [34].
The fastest unassisted speedrun available for download completes the game in a time of 1:39:47 [35]. The player is Mike 'TSA' Damiani, who has also completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 4 hours and 57 minutes [36]. The Ocarina of Time speedrun is generally regarded to have a very high level of quality even compared to much shorter speedruns. This level of play and the length make it one of the most respected runs on Speed Demos Archive.
Other Zelda game speedruns include The Legend of Zelda in 34 minutes and 4 seconds by Tom 'rdrunner' Votava [37], Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in one hour, 12 minutes, and 10 seconds by Scott Kessler, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask in three hours and 37 minutes by Peter 'pyh189' Yeh [38], and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening in one hour, 30 minutes, and 36 seconds by John 'Maur' De Sousa. [39]
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Halo series
Halo was released alongside the launch of Microsoft's Xbox console in 2001. Nearly a year later, after many fragmented attempts by individual gamers to speedrun through the game, halo.bungie.org [40] began the first major speedrun contest, titled Going Nowhere Fast [41], requesting speedruns for individual levels on "Legendary" difficulty, the hardest difficulty level in the game.
Since then, Halo has been one of the most popular speedrunning games for the Xbox. A multitude of speedrunning sites have opened, most notably High Speed Halo (currently defunct).
The most important glitches in Halo speedrunning are grenade jumping and creative usage of vehicles (including getting them into spaces that would normally be inaccessible). Circumventing loading zones is also a common tactic — due to dynamic loading in the game, skipping a loading zone would load the environment data, but not the enemies.
When Halo 2 was released in 2004, many speedrunners were disappointed at how Bungie, its developer, had attempted to patch up many of the holes that the original game had, which included the addition of instant-kill zones to prevent the player from leaving the level and thus breaking the sequence of the game. None the less, there were still some notable glitches that speedrunners use in Halo 2 — grenade jumping, loading-zone circumvention, and sword-glitching. The latter is facilitated by the addition of the Covenant Energy Sword, which has a one-hit kill lunge attack at close range (when the reticule turns red). It was soon discovered that the lunge could be "cancelled" by pressing the X button after the lunge begins; the player would begin moving forward at a rapid speed, but the attack would not connect, and the player would continue to possess the velocity of the lunge until a barrier was hit.
NetHack
NetHack, as a turn-based game, is not played in real time, but has a turn counter. Although the game is extremely difficult to finish (or "ascend"), the scoring system means advanced players have no problem accumulating very large scores, and so a secondary challenge has been to finish the game in the fewest possible turns. All conventional real-time speedrunning techniques have analogues in NetHack, from skipping large sections of the game (thus giving up the extra items they offer) to optimising movement tactics.
The fastest known ascension is 6480 turns [42], played on October 2005 by "Rast". It is roughly ten times faster than a conventional ascension, and one of only 3 known ascensions under 10,000 turns in the 19-year history of the game.
Notes
- ^ Although the term "time attack" is used to indicate a playthough of a game's dedicated mode for achieving fast completions, the term "タイムアタック" ("taimuatakku") is the dominant terminology for a speedrun in Japan. There is no commonly used loanword deriving from the term "speedrun".
- ^ The term "unassisted" or "regular" speedrun is a retronym, invented after tool-assisted speedruns came to be.
See also
- Speed Demos Archive - the largest speedrunning community on the Internet
- Time attack - a mode which allows the player to finish a game (or a part of it) as fast as possible, saving record times
- Score attack - the attempt to reach a record logged point value in a game
- Game demo - a freely distributed demonstration or preview of an upcoming or recently released computer or video game
- Electronic sports - a general term used to describe computer and video games which are played as competitive sports