A speedrun is a playthrough of a game with the intent of completing it as fast as possible for the purposes of competition, entertainment, or as a Self-Imposed Challenge.
Speedruns look very different to casual play. A speedrunner is less interested in the game's intended experience and more focused on how they can optimize their gameplay to achieve the absolute fastest possible time. As such, story and exploration take a back seat; a speedrunner will skip everything they can, and will often perform actions that seem quite illogical and even impossible to a casual player.
Pulling off a successful speedrun requires a combination of strategy and execution. Strategies (frequently shortened to "strats") are techniques which have been developed to save time. Execution refers to how well a player is able to play the game and perform the necessary strategies.
Common strategies in speedrunning include:
- Advanced movement techniques: In many games, the conventional method of movement is not always the fastest. By mastering alternative methods of movement, a speedrunner can travel through the game more quickly.
- Skips: Finding ways to avoid playing parts of the game. Skips can save significant amounts of time and are highly prized by speedrunners; the discovery of a major skip in a game can impact the leaderboards dramatically, sometimes completely changing the way the game is run.
- Routing: Finding the quickest route through the game, or the fastest order in which to complete objectives. Often, the game's intended route is not the fastest. Speedrunning communities will often settle on what they believe to be the best route through a game, but this can and often does change as new discoveries are made. Some games also require speedrunners to perform routing in real-time in response to game conditions, which can be a difficult skill to master.
- RNG manipulation: Randomness in games is typically the enemy of a speedrunner; it can cause runners to lose arbitrary amounts of time, and makes it more difficult to execute strategies consistently. In the worst case, bad RNG luck can kill a run completely, even if it was going well up to that point. However, computers are notably bad at producing "true" randomness, and with some ingenuity, players can sometimes manipulate games into giving them the outcome that they wanted instead of an unpredictable one.
- Fast cycles: Some games force the player to wait for an obstacle to move out of the way before they can progress. If there are many such obstacles in succession, these waits can add up to a lot of time lost. A speedrunner will typically try to get past these obstacles at the earliest possible opportunity to avoid this compound loss of time. Doing so is referred to as getting the "fast cycle", because failing to get it means you have to wait for the obstacles to realign themselves to a favorable position again (the "slow cycle"). Getting the fastest cycle typically involves great precision and execution, but can be a huge timesave if performed successfully. Often, speedrunners will find emergent cycles that weren't even intended by the game.
- Damage boosting: By taking damage at the right time, the player is able to gain an advantage that is not intended in normal play, such as using Knockback to boost themselves to a usually unreachable position, or exploiting Mercy Invincibility to move past an obstacle that isn't meant to be bypassed.
- Death warping: By taking an intentional death, the game repositions the player character in less time than it would take to get there by normal movement.
- Pausing: By strategically pausing the game, speedrunners can achieve effects not usually possible in casual play. One common strategy is pause buffering: by pausing the game between inputs, the player can effectively slow down time, such that the game believes those inputs have been made far faster than a human could normally execute them. This can allow speedrunners to pull off tricks that otherwise require near-frame-perfect precision. Another common use of the pause is to manipulate the game's internal clock: often, a game's internal sense of time keeps progressing even while paused, and if the game uses its internal clock to schedule game events, this allows a speedrunner to control when those events occur. This often allows RNG manipulation as well, since a game's random number generator is often tied to its internal clock.
- Backup strats: Sometimes, if speedrunners fail to execute a strategy, they can fall back to a "backup strategy" which is slower, but reduces the amount of time they would have lost through failing the first strat.
Speedrunning is, by its very nature, a highly competitive venture, as players are all vying for the fastest possible time, with the ultimate goal being the World Record. The main metric for a player's progress is the Personal Best, or PB: the fastest time that a player has managed to achieve.
In order to keep track of who has the fastest time in a game, players come together to create leaderboards and compete against each other to attain the highest position possible. Communities of dedicated players naturally form around these leaderboards, often sharing and discussing strategies and new discoveries with each other as they compete.
Speedrunning communities typically recognize many different categories of speedrun for a given game. Each category has its own rules as agreed by the community, and a separate leaderboard. Often, speedrunners will choose to specialize in a particular category and master strategies that are specific to it.
Common speedrun categories include:
- Any%: The most common category in most games, this simply involves beating the game as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.
- Glitchless: Similar to Any%, except that using bugs and glitches in the game to gain a speed advantage is not allowed.
- 100%: Fully completing every objective in the game in the fastest time. These runs typically require great endurance, routing skill, and a full mastery of every game mechanic and strategy.
Many speedrunning communities also have a number of joke or meme categories which are often completely pointless or absurd, often requiring skills that have little to no application outside of that category.
As well as leaderboard play, speedrunning communities also sometimes organize speedrun racing events and tournaments to allow players to compete with each other more directly, giving runners a chance to showcase their skills and strategies.
There is a second form of speedrunning which is regarded as a separate but related type: the Tool-Assisted Speedrun, or TAS. Unlike speedruns performed by humans, TASes are instead performed by computers, using pre-programmed inputs. By exploiting the inhuman precision and execution speed of a computer, tool-assisted speedruns can achieve feats which would be absolutely infeasible (and sometimes, physically impossible, such as pressing two opposite directions at once) for a human player to perform.
TASes can be created for entertainment purposes, to show what a game can look like when played at perfect precision. However, they are also very useful to human runners as research tools; they can be used to algorithmically find potential strategies that a human wouldn't be able to, and can be a way to benchmark a speedrun to show what time saves are possible. A strategy that can only be performed by a TAS is called a "TAS-only" strat. Sometimes, with extremely good execution or when combined with other techniques and discoveries, a strategy previously thought to be TAS-only can become human-viable.
Since the rise of online video streaming services such as YouTube and Twitch, speedrunning has become an increasingly popular spectator sport. Speedrunners will often stream their runs live to an audience, both for performance and also as a way to verify the legitimacy of their runs. These can pull in significant numbers of viewers, to the point that speedrunning is a career for some high-level runners.
There are also speedrunning events and organizations which showcase speedrunners: the largest and most well known is Games Done Quick, who host two major speedrunning conventions each year.
