The first speedrun was probably an accident. Some kid in 1987 found that Mario would clip through a wall if you hit it at exactly the right angle, and instead of treating it as a glitch to avoid, they asked: how do I do that every single time?
That question turned into a subculture that now draws 50,000 people to a convention center every year and raises millions for charity. Speedrunning is one of the strangest things gaming has ever produced, and it started with players who refused to play games the way they were designed.
What Speedrunning Actually Is
The premise is simple: beat a game as fast as possible, with the time recorded and submitted to a public leaderboard. But the rabbit hole goes much deeper than that.
Speedrunners divide their craft into categories. “Any%” means reaching the credits by any means necessary. “100%” requires collecting everything. “Glitchless” bans exploits. Some games have dozens of categories, each with their own records and communities, each requiring years of practice to approach the top.
The runs themselves are almost nothing like how the games were designed to be played. Super Mario 64 players use a technique called “parallel universes” that exploits floating-point arithmetic errors to teleport Mario across the map. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time runners manipulate game memory mid-run to skip entire dungeons. Pokémon Red players use carefully timed button presses to corrupt the game’s RAM and trigger the credits from the opening sequence.
None of this was intended by the developers. All of it was discovered by obsessive fans who treated a commercial entertainment product like a puzzle to be disassembled.
The Bugs Are the Game
The relationship between speedrunners and glitches is one of the most interesting dynamics in gaming culture. Normal players experience bugs as obstacles. Speedrunners experience them as tools.
When speedrunners discover a new skip, they share it immediately. The community is collaborative in a way that contrasts with the competitive nature of the leaderboards. Someone finds a new trick, posts a video explaining exactly how to replicate it, and within weeks the entire community has integrated it into their runs. World records fall. Previous records that took years to optimize become obsolete in an afternoon.
Some of the more famous discoveries have genuinely shocked the developers. The Ocarina of Time runners have found ways to beat the game in under eight minutes. Nintendo engineers spent years building that game. Players found a route through it that takes less time than a sitcom episode.
This has created an odd respect between developers and the speedrunning community. Some studios now deliberately include hidden speedrun timers and leaderboards in their games. Others have hired prominent speedrunners as consultants. A few have patched out tricks that were making runs too easy, which caused significant controversy in the community.
Games Done Quick and the Charity Connection
Speedrunning left the basement in 2010 when a group of runners organized a week-long marathon called Awesome Games Done Quick. The event streamed runs 24 hours a day and raised money for charity. The first event brought in $10,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
By 2024, the same event was raising over $3 million per run week. Viewers donated to influence the runs in real time, paying to see runners attempt extra-difficult challenges, pick the harder path, or play games in silly ways. The charity angle gave speedrunning a context that normal people could latch onto, and the format turned out to be surprisingly entertaining television.
Watching someone play Super Metroid in 45 minutes while explaining every decision into a microphone is not something most people would have predicted would attract a live audience of 200,000. But it works, because the runners are genuinely doing something remarkable, and they talk you through it.
The Longest Games Have the Smallest Times
One of the more counterintuitive things about speedrunning is how games with enormous amounts of content produce the shortest completions. The bigger the game, the more surface area for glitches and skips. RPGs that take 80 hours to play normally can be finished in under an hour by runners who have mapped every exploitable memory address.
The Sims creator Will Wright spent 11 years building a game about how players use their own memories. The speedrunning community would spend 11 months breaking it. That is not disrespect. That is the ultimate engagement with a game’s systems.
Some developers have started hiding “developer rooms” and secret content specifically for speedrunners to find. Getting there requires the kind of exploits that only someone who has played the game for 500 hours would ever discover. It is a private conversation between the people who built the game and the people who cared enough to pull it apart.
Why People Watch This
The appeal of speedrunning as a spectator sport is hard to explain to someone who has not watched it. The best analogy is Formula 1: the cars are technically the same cars everyone has driven, but the drivers are doing something with them that ordinary people cannot do, and the gap between their performance and yours is fascinating to observe.
Speedrunners have learned things about their games that the developers never knew. They have found routes through levels that were designed to be impassable. They have exploited physics engines in ways that required understanding the underlying mathematics. Some runs depend on frame-perfect inputs, meaning the player must press a button in a specific 16-millisecond window, and they must do it consistently enough to compete.
Gaming culture has always had its competitive edge, from the early days of quarter-fed arcades to the rise of esports and games like Fortnite. But speedrunning is different from traditional competition because mainstream esports games are designed for competition from the start. Speedrunning applies that same intensity to games designed for solo adventure, finding a different kind of challenge inside experiences that were never meant to have one.
The Retro Resurgence
Older games dominate speedrunning leaderboards in a way that reflects something real about gaming history. Games from the NES and SNES era were coded close to the hardware, with less abstraction between the player’s inputs and the underlying machine. That closeness created more opportunities for exploitable edge cases.
The revival of classic games in modern formats has brought new runners into the scene. Collections like the Mega Man Star Force Legacy release introduce games to younger audiences, some of whom then discover that the games have active speedrunning communities with 20 years of accumulated knowledge. The backlog of tricks and skips waiting to be learned is enormous, and the communities around classic games are welcoming to newcomers in a way that newer games often are not.
There is something almost archaeological about top-level retro speedrunning. Players are working with games that were released decades ago, discovering new techniques and setting new records in 2026 for games released in 1996. The games have not changed. The players keep finding new things inside them.
That is a strange kind of permanence. Most entertainment from 1996 is simply historical. These games are still active competitive arenas, still being explored, still giving up secrets. The people who built them could not have imagined this. The people who play them cannot stop.
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