Ever since the dawn of man, there's always been competitions on who can do something better or faster or throw something farther than one another.  Heck, didn't we just do just that in Paris last month?

 Well, this competitive mentality even extends to video games. No, I'm not talking about multiplayer games like Smash Bros or the games typically thought of when eSports is mentioned in conversation.

 

I'm talking about ...

SPEEDRUNNING 

Which is basically trying to beat a video game (or any other event, really) as fast as possible.  That makes half the Track & Field events back last month in Paris speedruns when you think about it.

 And while a lot of speedrunning involves using any tricks short of using a cheat device (be it a Game Genie, a GameShark, or a Pro Action Replay), there ARE categories typically used that prohibits the use of glitches unintended by the game's developers or any warps offered by the game (think going past the exit pipe in 1-2 to enter the 3-pipe Warp Zone in the original Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System).

To try to keep the playing field even, these categories are kept separate from one another.  That means a run where a player plays all the levels of SMB1 isn't being compared to someone who uses the Warp Zones in worlds 1 and 4 to skip most of the game and that a player who stays within the literal walls of the game's world aren't compared to those who glitch their way out of bounds.

 Speedrunning's gotten big enough as a community that a few week-long marathons occur every year, including a couple from Games Done Quick and some from the European Speedrunner Assembly (the second one is more Euro-friendly in where its held IRL vs the GDQ ones, which are US based).

 I'll provide some playlists for the latest main GDQ and ESA events to have happened

Summer GDQ 2024: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz8YL4HVC87VobIaDgy7SZ4Q-QivCYbyP

 ESA Winter 2024: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkd2f6JAHslKz8UZPzNkFJrgxxmZGiwUu

 And as a bonus: Jon doing his Price is Right as a sideshow during ESA Summer 2023: 



 (Edit, with credit to Sally Crystalia from Twitch for reminding me of this):

Ok, maybe I was too fast to dismiss the cheat devices when it comes to speedrunning cause there's one specific subset of speedrunning that SPECIFICALLY uses those types of tools to get runs/times that are by design HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE to do (even IF the one for SMB1 is almost matched by the top players playing with their own skills)

Going back to the SMB1 example: https://tasvideos.org/1G


Of course, with ANY competitive thing: we have our cheaters.... video splicing, using tools reserved for TAS runs in a normal run, straight up speed hacks for your character.

BTW, "splicing" means in this case taking footage from multiple runs and putting them into one video, making it seem like you have the best run ever when you probably were never near the top times in actuality.  It's different from montage making, where it's known off the top that it's edited together clips and are not meant to represent a full run. This is also not to discourage using video editing software altogether, in case if you stream your speedrun attempts on Twitch and need to edit the Twitch stream's video to only that specific run for the sake of Youtube.

But like roids, pine tar, or a corked bad... these cheaters do get busted eventually and have their entries in the leaderboards for those games purged.

 Heck, one guy got busted because of the timing of Mario blinking in a Super Mario 64 "run".

Another way of challenging yourself in video games coming up  next post! 

 And side note: Nintendo... i see you imitating LiveSplit (the stop-clock program used by a lot of speedrunners) in your recent Nintendo World Championships NES Edition game 

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