Speedrun

I’m training, I’m training hard. My muscles are taught like steel cables, my eyes blurry with concentration, and my heart pounds with exertion. I’m beating my best time and then, the console dies. Obviously, I’m not training for the marathon, what with athletes relieving themselves along the roadside. I’m talking about the much more hygienic exertion that is ‘speed running.’ Speed running involves so much practice and OCDness that I’m sure if you rounded up the best speed runners in the world and hooked them all together, they would create a geek singularity.


Speed running is an attempt to get the fastest possible time for completing a game. This is either done by running a game so many times that every short cut is as memorable to you as Mickey Mouse’s sinister face or by a process known as ‘sequence breaking.’ Don’t be fooled, I thought the term sounded cool too, like it had some proximity to ‘hacking’ or ‘code breaking’ but in fact it’s more to do with utilising glitches within a given game. Lame. I’ve put two examples below but please lets try and isolate these people as much as possible less we suffer the geek black hole of doom.