Video games have been a hobby and refuge for their fans for a long time now. They’ve become even more popular currently, as people find they’d much rather explore fantastical worlds full of challenges and interesting creatures, both friend and foe, than spend every day staring at a different wall in their house during quarantine.
As with any devoted subculture, we also find people that look to take it to its absolute limit, sometimes deconstructing it along the way. Think of Legos. They started as a toy that had your mom quizzically asking of the jumbled rectangles you handed her, “Oh … it’s a rocketship?” (It was supposed to be an alligator.) Nowadays, master builders use this basic toy to construct scale models of Gothic architecture that would probably be worshipped as a religious artifact if sent back in time through a wormhole.
That, in the world of videogames, is where speedrunning comes in. Going from a fairly niche subculture growing on IRC servers and internet forums to today, where speedrunning showcases like GamesDoneQuick have hundreds of thousands of people watching live, raising millions for charity (Earlier this month, AGDQ 2021 raised almost $3 million for charity.)
Which is both great for charity and a cool way to see someone kill Marble Madness in under 3 minutes.
If you’re unwise enough to bring up the category to a stranger, at a bar, or even more unwisely, on a date, the response you’d usually get is “Why?” followed closely by “Why does anyone watch that?” The answer to the first: they enjoy it. For the second, I think it’s as simple as this: people like watching someone do something they’re really, really good at. When Reddit and TikTok are filled with “oddly satisfying” videos and GIFs of fisherman gutting and cleaning fish at high speed, is it that weird that people want to see someone dissect Mario the same way?
It seems only natural to start with what’s probably widely considered the most iconic game of all time. Even though your grandmother may be wrong when she sees you playing any video game and kindly asks, “Is that Mario?” the fact remains that she’s heard of the plumber/clone super-soldier extraordinaire. He also serves as a great example of the heights of optimization that these games get to, as well as the fact that they’re constantly being improved upon. In fact, this world record was set only two weeks ago, uploaded to YouTube on January 2, 2021, by runner Miniland.read more
5 Beloved Video Game Realities Broken By Speed Runs
