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. "

Comments

Memories

[vettemph]

Yep, I used to do this back then. Doom would report your time to complete a level. At some point the thought occurs. Hey, i'll just skip killing the bad guys and run my ass off!

SMB speedrun

[88NoSoup4U88]

I once seen a video of a SMB-speedrun (afaik, it was the current record holder) : Ít was just insane seeing how he held the right-direction button almost constantly pressed while running through there.

The only lame thing about that record was that it was recorded/played on an emulator, and in the end the various level-times were pasted onto eachother : Still a mighty freaky job.

And Quake speedruns are a feast for the (FPS) gamer-eye. :D

Re:SMB speedrun

[Pxtl]

Actually, I'd be more interested in a speedrun in one of the more chaotic FPS games than Quake. Something like Serious Sam. Quake doesn't pit you against hundreds of foes at once the way Sam does. The problem with Sam is that the levels were designed with a total ignorance of rocket jumping, so probably half the game would be skipped through such methods.

The big thing is that in Sam, you almost always have to kill everything in the room to progress, and "everything in the room" can be a very large number. So it would likely be one of the most ultraviolent speedruns ever completed.

Alternately, Abuse would be cool for Speedrunning. The game is pretty much designed for the kind of enemy-evasion you use in speedruns, as Abuse levels usually give the player the option of just retreating. The problem is that retreating will give you an ever-growing mass of hundreds of ants chasing you.

It All Started With...

[klausboop]

I was speed-running when you Doom and Quake whippersnappers were still in diapers. Get off the lawn of my marine base!

Seriously, anyone recall using these same tactics in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons on their Intellivision in 1980 or so? Talk about exploiting flaws in the physics modeling and stuff: you could actually run THROUGH the bad guys (the dragon, snake, lizard and demon). You would accrue damage (which was not fixable with a health-pak or anything, those didn't exist back then), but you could run through them. Similarly, your arrows would *ricochet* off the walls, so sometimes you could get a shot off as you sped around a corner. Overall, you could definitely complete a level without firing an arrow, just holding down the side run button on the controller the whole time. Especially useful if you were just completing a mountain to move through the terrain map and didn't actually need any of the items in the mountain.

Great, now I have to break out the intellivision AND reinstall Doom and Quake!

Perfect Dark

[kdark1701]

Its possible to beat the first mission in Perfect Dark by falling through the 100 or so floors in the Lucrene Tower straight into the elevator for a total of six seconds. Its reallly quite amazing to see.

Re:ermm .. speedrunning came before DOOM ..

[ArsonSmith]

I think the original Metroid was also one of the big ones. It had a, slightly, diffrent ending depending on how fast you beat it. If it was less than 1 hour You'd get Samus in her Bikini suit rather than the big bulky one.

Where was Hillary then?