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Games Entertainment

The Lives And Times of Speed Runners 82

Posted by Zonk from the i'm-late-i'm-late dept.
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. "
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The Lives And Times of Speed Runners More

The Lives And Times of Speed Runners

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  • Memories (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vettemph ( 540399 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @08:43AM (#13293610)
    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!
    • 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!

      That and you pretty much have to in Nightmare mode...
  • ...and the bandwidth is usually pretty good; here's their collection [archive.org].

  • SMB speedrun (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @08:55AM (#13293686)
    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

    • The Megaman series in particular lends itself very well to speed runs. Just dash like a mad man and avoid the enemies while collecting power-ups. I remember beating Megaman X3 in roughly an hour with all items collected that way.

    • Re:SMB speedrun (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @10:36AM (#13294413) Homepage
      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.

  • Quake Done Quick (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zhenga ( 770390 )

    It all started with Quake Done Quick: http://www.planetquake.com/qdq/ [planetquake.com]

    Wallhugging, bunny hopping, rocket jumping, strafe jumping, quad damage jumping, grenade-rocket jumping, trapping a zombie under a closing gate so it reopens again, you name it, its all to get faster records.

    Even did some speed running in Quake myself with another friend a long time ago, shooting each other to gain more velocity, launching rockets at each other to get even more height to get a certain key, etc, its very fun!!
    When I so

    • Oh im wrong that it all started with Quake, seems they were speed running Doom back in 1994 already :) while Quake 1 was released in 1996.
    • <codger>I was speed-running when you Doom and Quake whippersnappers were still in diapers. Get off the lawn of my marine base!</codger>

      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

  • Sport? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by benito27uk ( 646600 )
    Enjoyable activity certainly, but it's stretching the definition to call it a sport!

    If playing a game to try and complete it as quick as possible is high stress I pity the submitter having to deal with real life.

  • Fun to watch (Score:4, Informative)

    by fwice ( 841569 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:04AM (#13293735)
    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.



    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 [bisqwit.iki.fi]. definately go there if you want to relive some nostalgia done perfectly :]



    (advance apologies for the formatting. doing this through lynx).

    • Re:Fun to watch (Score:5, Informative)

      by ALeavitt ( 636946 ) * <aleavitt@@@gmail...com> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:16AM (#13293818)
      Remember - most (if not all) of the videos on Bisqwit's site are time attacks, not speed runs. There's an important difference. Time attacks are recorded on emulators with slow motion, save states, and other techniques to make recording an absolutely perfect game possible. When the movie is played back at full speed in one segment it looks like an amazing playthrough. Speed runs are "pure" runs through games without hacks. That makes them that much more impressive, to me, but it's still pretty entertaining to watch someone just completely destroy one of those super-hard games that used to piss me off.
      • No, they're not "time attacks". They're "tool-assisted speed runs".
        • A time attack is a "tool-assisted speed run." The point is that a speed run can be performed by any gamer with an original copy of the game on its original platform. Time attacks can not.

          • Re:Fun to watch (Score:5, Informative)

            by LocalH ( 28506 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:42PM (#13297565) Homepage
            The point is, the terminology "time attack" is completely unrelated to TAS runs. "Time attack" is already used by many games to refer to a mode where records are kept for the best time through a level, and so shouldn't be used in order to help prevent confustion (after all, look at the mess some of the more vocal speedrunners and TASrunners participated in when people just called them "speedruns").

            The correct, and accepted, terminology is "tool-assisted speed run". I've also seen "superplays" used, although TAS run is more common now.
    • I think what the article found wrong and unethical was the fact that morimoto used emulation and save states that made the game absolutely perfect without truly doing the "run." It was definitely a great save state video, but not a true speed run. hed.

  • ermm .. speedrunning came before DOOM .. (Score:5, Informative)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:10AM (#13293776) Homepage Journal
    .. 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 ..

  • Am I the only one... (Score:4, Funny)

    by madaxe42 ( 690151 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:43AM (#13294018) Homepage
    ...who just had an image of people smuggling amphetamines?

  • Sport? (Score:4, Funny)

    by eXtro ( 258933 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:48AM (#13294057) Homepage
    I guess it's just as much a sport as seeing how many hotdogs you can eat.

    Oh wait, that's not a sport either.
    • From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan's_Hot_Dog_Eati ng_Contest [wikipedia.org]:

      Starting in 2004, the contest began at 12:40 pm presumably because ESPN started covering the event live. In 2004, ESPN hired Windfall Productions (Ralph J. Mole, Exec. Producer) who used six cameras, a live New York City crew and a TV mobile unit to produce a one hour network sports special about the contest. It was hosted by Gary Miller and was carried live in Times Square on the ABC "Jumbotron".

      Man oh man, is that disgusting to watch.

    • In my defense, the word 'sport' doesn't appear anywhere on my site... "grep sport *.html" only brings up three cases of 'transport'.

      It's not like you can speed run a football game or anything.
    • This is at least as much sport as car racing.
  • In recent years the same thing has been done with Sinclair Spectrum games, recorded using an emulator: http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/ [rzxarchive.co.uk]. My favourites replays are Jet Set Willy and Head Over Heels (the latter is VERY fast/tight).

    They're in a replay format which includes the game code, and all input needed to replay the file. You'll need a supported emulator to play them, as detailed on the site itself.

  • Perfect Dark (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kdark1701 ( 791894 )
    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.
  • Anyone else remember that late 90's flick with Fred Savage about his videogame master of a brother [imdb.com]. At the end of the movie there is a "speedrunning" contest between like 4 others playing Super Mario Bros. 3.

    I think the movie is a great overlooked example because the kid brother was able to win due to the secret shortcuts he found.
  • frsit psot!!!!!!11

    Now I have to post the demo!! :-) I don't think I have ever speed played except in actual racing games... hrm :-)
    • Wow. At least 12 posts made it in front of your "frsit psot" and yet you want to post a demo of it. The speed you're involved with would seem to be the chemical type, not technological type.

      Go ahead and post your speed demo. Are there DEA workers on /.? :)
    • I can't believe some buffoon modded this as a "Troll".

      He was making a joke about "first posts" being the Slashdot speed-running sport! Hell, he even got "psot" down accurately!

      Jesus H. Christ some people are stupid.

      And no, this psot also is not a troll, as it is also about speedrunning.
  • I was really hoping they would mention the new Kirby game for DS because it is the most fun speed run friendly game I have played. Because your are using a stylus instead of a controller, getting through the level quickly requires a certain finesse of the hand, and when you have to restart a level it's because you didn't do something properly, not because a creature didn't come at the right time.

    If you are into speed runs, definitely give Kirby a go.
  • Videos and tricks related to speed-running through the Metroid series can be found here [metroid2002.com]. There's also a lot of good tips and videos on sequence breaking, low % games, and 100% games.

  • Rocket jumping was not pioneered by Quake (Score:3, Informative)

    by extrarice ( 212683 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @12:27PM (#13295381) Homepage Journal
    Anyone who has played Marathon will instantly recognize:

    "Frog blast the vent core!"

    Grenade-hopping and rocket-jumping started with Marathon, late 1994.
    • Episode 3, Mission 6 of Doom had a secret exit that required you to use self-damaging rocket propulsion to get to. This was released on December the 10th, 1993.

      • Episode 3, Mission 6 of Doom had a secret exit that required you to use self-damaging rocket propulsion to get to.

        The rocket jump is unnecessairy - you can simply use the switch through the wall.

        Of course, Doom was one of the first to intorduce straferunning to a large scale - the bane of map designers as it made shortcuts across what should be considered impossible routes. It was so popular that the developers of Rainbow Six included it in their first of the series.

  • Time attack and Speedruns (Score:5, Informative)

    by DreadPiratePizz ( 803402 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @12:40PM (#13295543)
    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.
    • The Mega Man X + X2 time attack, which beats each game quickly with identical joypad input, is extremely impressive. Even if it was recorded frame by frame with a re-record count of 14432.

      http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/750S.html [bisqwit.iki.fi]

      • That was an amazing video. It's a shame that you can't do that on a regular console, that would be a REAL treat. :)

        I'm with the parent though; tool-assisted runs are cool and all, but it's much more interesting to see somebody play the game on an actual console.

        My personal favourite videos have been the Legend of Zelda videos on SDA. Mike Damiani is king. I'm hoping he does the Oracle games before the new Zelda comes out (though I'll still watch that video when people start running it). The Gameboy Zeld

    • TAS runs take just as much skill as realtime runs. You have to know an entire game inside and out to even begin making a quality TAS, just as you do to make a quality realtime run.

      The people making the TAS runs are NOT lumping them in with realtime runs. If someone does that, jump all over their ass, not the people that make the TAS runs.

      Also, quit calling them "time attacks", because they're not in any way, shape, or form, time attacks. They are "tool-assisted speed runs" or TAS runs.

    • 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

      Even the easiest songs in, say, Dance Dance Revolution have up+down jumps.

      or perform ridiculous acts of precision.

      Just about every song in DDR has already been AAA'd (all Perfect steps).

    • I personally enjoy both sorts of moves - the tool-assisted, manufactured runs and the naturally-played runs.

      However, I disagree with your statement that the tool-assisted videos are mis-represented. The FAQ here certainly indicates that they use every underhanded trick possible:

      http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/FAQ.html [bisqwit.iki.fi]

      And the speedrun collection on archive.org also indicates what exploits are used in the game, such as "exploits luck", "tool assisted", "exploits bugs in the game".

      If you're downloading them se
  • They are still running.

    Here's an excellent site where you'll find a lot of speed runs: Speed Demos Archive [speeddemosarchive.com]

    A lot of them are pretty impressive (ex: SMB 1 and 3, Diablo, etc)
  • For example, it was discovered that due to a math error, running diagonally was approximately 41% faster than merely running forward;

    Interesting,...I guess saying that you running diagonally was sqrt(2) faster doesn't sound as good but it is a little more telling as to the "math error"

  • I seem to have it stuck in my mind that the only game that has ever required speedrunning to beat was Battletoads for the original NES.

    I had only borrowed the game... and I never, ever got past the part where you're going around a road course AND beat the annoying ball thing to death. Well, okay, maybe once.

    Those were some adrenaline-packed hours, trying to not DIE. :-)

  • I always enjoyed mastering a game, the first one I recall was Ghouls and Ghosts, in the arcade, started out seeing how far I could get with $2 in quarters, getting farther and farther; then seeing how few quarters it could take; finally beating the entire game with a single play.

    Good Times.
  • Interesting factoid....

    It seems very likely that the maintainers of the 2D Metroid series at Nintendo in Japan heard about all the speedruns, sequence breaks and low-item games from Super Metroid, because not only are many sequence breaks possible in Metroid: Zero Mission, but the game seems designed to make them possible. There are enough secret, hidden passages scattered around to enable most players to play the game in wildly differeny ways than the "official" route, although unless you know they're the
  • Morrowind in 14 minutes, absolutely hilarious to watch, and Super Metroid in 55 minutes, by Red Scarlet (IIRC) who is a *girl*, I was doubly impressed...

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