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The Lives And Times of Speed Runners
1up.com has a feature looking into the high stress world of game speed running. Primarily a history of the sport, they start with Doom and Super Mario Bros. and walk us forward to sequence breaking runs through Metroid Prime. From the article: "While there are plenty of real-world time-based challenges, speed running stands apart thanks to its virtual nature. You'll never tune in to a track meet and see competitors taking shortcuts across the grass, but that's essentially the modus operandi of video game speed runners. Similarly, you'll never see athletes exploiting flaws in reality to jump further or to warp themselves ahead in the race. Again, that's something that can only be done via video games. While speed running has been acquiring a serious head of steam over the last few years, its origins can be traced back to one game in particular: id Software's late 1993 bombshell of an FPS, Doom. "
...and the bandwidth is usually pretty good; here's their collection.
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An accurate artice, to say the least. I've attempted my share of speed runs and time attacks, and eventually resigned to the fact that there are people who have much more time and patience than i do to get things perfect (for more evidence of that, check the sonic 3 speedrun on bisqwit's site). but i definately enjoy watching the runs myself. there's still something to be said about watching someone smoke bionic commando in 15 minutes or utterly destroy mega man 2.
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a point of note -- when the article talks about morimoto, he's the one who did a crazy smb3 run. the article makes it seem like what he did was completely wrong and unethical. on the contrary, the video is a time attack. the levels in question are automatic side scrolling levels, where the speed cannot be changed and the time is consistent whether its me playing it or him. instead of making the video extremely boring and unpleasant to watch in those 2 minutes (by hiding in a corner and getting pushed along or something) he jumps and accumulates a ton of lives during a time that would otherwise be paint-dry boring. i think it was well done.
the link to bisqwit's site (mentioned in the article, iirc. read it yesterday.) is http://bisqwit.iki.fi. definately go there if you want to relive some nostalgia done perfectly
(advance apologies for the formatting. doing this through lynx).
.. before Wolfenstein (saw it for that a few times), before Duke Nukem (non-3D), even before Jet Set Willy.
..
Pacman had speed runners. Pitfall too. Speed running is at least as old as the 70's.
Maybe 'in the modern context of video games', where modern = 'anything since 1990', speed-running 'can be traced' to DOOM, but its an old sport.
speed running is what you did in the 70's when you already 'beat the game' a few times, and you had nothing else to play
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Just FYI, there are several secrets in Serious Sam that require rocket-jumping (for instance, the powerups up the rim of the 'exploding frog room' about a third of the way through the game.) You can be assured at least some of the Serious Sam level designers knew about rocket jumping.
Comment of the year
First Encounter
Second Encounter
Speed Demos Archive - Lots of speed runs!
Anyone who has played Marathon will instantly recognize:
"Frog blast the vent core!"
Grenade-hopping and rocket-jumping started with Marathon, late 1994.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
I'm involved in Speedrunning, and I really dislike the way timeattacks get lumped in with them. They are not similar AT ALL, and I do feel that time attacks are decieving.
I don't nessesarily have an objection to timeattacks in general, but they are presented decievingly. Increasingly they are played at 6% speed using thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of re-records. However, it is presented to you as a continuous video, which it is not. This is deception.
Furthermore, many of the movies create glithes in the game because they are not humanly possible to accomplish, therefore the game designers had no way whatsoever to know that it was possible to hit up+down at the same time on the exact frame, or perform ridiculous acts of precision.
Even though they make it clear the runs are being played with emulators, many people don't know what "tool assisted" means, or why they don't see somebody loading a savestate. They assume it was a continuous run, simply played on an emulator since the fellow didn't have the original cart or system.
Don;t get me completely wrong: there are some tool assisted runs that I enjoy watching. But speedruns always have that element of skill, and more importantly improvisation. The timeattacks are so precicely done, they are on the verge of mechanical.