Last updated 1 May 2026. Speedrunning explained, in one sitting: what it is, where it came from, why people spend three years shaving 0.4 seconds off a run, and how a community that started in id Software’s office basement turned into a charity machine that has raised more than 54 million dollars. If you have ever watched someone clip through a wall in Super Mario 64 and wondered what on earth was happening, this guide is the answer. We cover the categories, the slang, the tools, the etiquette, and the cat-themed corner of the scene that nobody warned you about.
Table of Contents
- What Is Speedrunning, Really
- A Short History of Speedrunning
- Speedrun Categories Explained: Any%, 100%, Glitchless and TAS
- How a Speedrun Actually Works, Frame by Frame
- Tools of the Trade
- Games Done Quick and the Charity Side
- How to Start Speedrunning Without Losing Your Mind
- Speedrunning FAQ
What Is Speedrunning, Really
The textbook definition is short. Speedrunning is the practice of completing a video game, or a specific section of one, as fast as possible against a clock. The honest definition is longer. A speedrunner is not playing the game the way the developers wrote it. They are negotiating with the game’s physics, memory layout, and rule enforcement, looking for any legal route from start to credits that the original designers did not block.
Two players can finish the same game with completely different times because they used different routes, different glitches, or different category rules. The leaderboard at Speedrun.com currently tracks more than 25,000 games, and most of the popular ones have a dozen or more categories competing in parallel. There is no single “fastest run” of Super Mario 64. There is the fastest 0-Star, the fastest 16-Star, the fastest 70-Star, the fastest 120-Star, and a few stranger ones underneath.
What it is not
Speedrunning is not just rushing. It is the opposite of rushing. A serious run is a memorised sequence of inputs, often timed to single frames, executed under nervous-system pressure for two hours straight. People practise the first thirty seconds of a run for months. The good runs look smooth on YouTube because every panic move was deleted from the timeline.
A Short History of Speedrunning
People have raced video games since the arcade era, but the discipline as a community really started in 1993, with Doom. Id Software shipped Doom with a built-in demo recording feature, which let players save their full input stream to a tiny file and share it. Doom communities started posting these demo files on bulletin boards and FTP servers, then comparing times.
The next inflection point arrived in 1996 with Quake. Nolan “Radix” Pflug launched Nightmare Speed Demos that year, a website dedicated to fast Quake runs on the hardest difficulty. Two years later it absorbed a sister site for the easier difficulty, becoming Speed Demos Archive. SDA is the direct ancestor of every modern speedrunning institution.
The Twitch era
Live streaming changed the scene completely. Once Twitch made it viable to broadcast a 90-minute run with a live timer in the corner, runners stopped competing through static demo files and started competing in real time, in front of audiences. The chat became part of the run. So did the mistakes.
The TikTok era
Twenty-six years after Quake, “speedrun” has slipped out of gaming entirely and become a generic word for any optimised run at a real-world task. People speedrun packing a suitcase, speedrun ordering at Starbucks, and as we covered earlier this year, teenagers are speedrunning Scientology buildings on TikTok with stopwatches in the corner of the frame. The vocabulary won. The game stayed where it was.
Speedrun Categories Explained: Any%, 100%, Glitchless and TAS
The word “category” is the most important piece of speedrunning vocabulary. A category is a rule set. Two runs are only comparable if they use the same category. Here are the ones that show up in almost every game.
Any%
Any% means: reach the credits using any technique allowed, including glitches, sequence breaks, and out-of-bounds tricks. This is the headline category for most games. Any% is where you see walls clipped through, bosses skipped, and entire chapters cut. It is also usually the shortest category, sometimes by a factor of ten compared to a casual playthrough.
100%
100% requires every collectible, every side objective, every secret, every star, every shrine, every cheese wheel. Definitions vary game by game, but the principle is total completion. These runs are long. The 100% category for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes more than 35 hours.
Glitchless
Glitchless is the purist category. Same goal as Any%, but no exploits, no clips, no underflow tricks. What counts as a glitch is decided by the community, written into the rules, and argued about constantly on category forums. Glitchless runs reward routing and execution rather than research.
TAS, the asterisk category
TAS stands for Tool Assisted Speedrun. A TAS is built input by input inside an emulator, with savestates, slowdown, and frame-perfect editing. A TAS is not a human run and is never compared to one. It serves a different purpose: showing the absolute theoretical floor of what the game allows. TAS routes often get adapted, slowly and partially, into human runs once someone proves a trick is reproducible.
How a Speedrun Actually Works, Frame by Frame
To understand why a single run can take months of preparation, look at what is happening underneath. Old games run at fixed frame rates. The original Super Mario 64 runs at 30 frames per second on N64. That means every action is locked to a 33-millisecond grid. If a trick requires the second jump to land on frame 47 after the first, you have one window of 33 milliseconds to press a button.
Multiply that across an hour-long run. A run is a chain of hundreds of these windows, some of them dependent on enemy AI seeded with random numbers, some of them dependent on whether you collected a coin two minutes ago, some of them dependent on the exact angle you walked through a doorway. A “good” run is one where every window held. A “world record” run is one where every window held and a new trick was added.
Splits and PBs
Runners track their progress with splits. A split is the time at a specific checkpoint, like “first castle clear” or “boss 2 fight start”. Every run gets compared split by split against the runner’s personal best, or PB. If splits are 4 seconds ahead at the end of level 1 but 6 seconds behind at the end of level 2, the runner knows exactly which segment regressed and where to practise.
RNG and resets
Random number generation, or RNG, is the great enemy. Many games randomise enemy positions, drop tables, or boss patterns. A bad pattern can cost 30 seconds and kill any chance of a record. Runners reset, meaning they start over, sometimes hundreds of times in an evening, until they get a starting roll worth committing to.
Tools of the Trade
The infrastructure for tracking your own runs is mostly free.
- LiveSplit. The standard timer. Open source, runs on Windows, integrates with auto-splitters that detect game state and trigger splits automatically.
- Speedrun.com. The leaderboard host. Almost every category that matters lives here, with rules and verification handled by community moderators.
- OBS Studio. Free streaming and recording software. Required if you want a run verified, since most leaderboards demand video proof for top placements.
- Therun.gg. Live splits and statistics tracking, useful for pace analysis and gold split tracking across long sessions.
- Game-specific practice ROMs and mods. Many older games have community-made practice tools that let you load arbitrary positions and rehearse a single trick a thousand times.
None of this is gatekept. The community has spent two decades building the toolkit and giving it away. If you are putting together a setup, our Gaming category covers a fair amount of the peripheral side, and our Technology coverage tracks streaming hardware regularly.
Games Done Quick and the Charity Side
Speedrunning has a charity arm, and it is bigger than most people realise. Games Done Quick, abbreviated GDQ, is a twice-yearly speedrunning marathon that has been running since 2010. It streams non-stop for a week, with runners taking turns on stage, and asks viewers to donate to a partner charity during the show.
The cumulative total has cleared 54 million dollars. Awesome Games Done Quick 2026, the most recent winter event, finished at 2.44 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Summer Games Done Quick 2022 still holds the single-event record at 3.4 million dollars. The events sell out a hotel ballroom every year and pull six-figure live concurrent viewers on Twitch.
Why the donations work
The format is unusually well suited to fundraising. Each run is an hour or two, the host reads donation messages between segments, and donors can fund “incentives” (extra costume runs, harder categories, additional bosses) by hitting specific dollar thresholds. The viewer feels their five dollars do something visible. That feedback loop is rare in charity streams.
How to Start Speedrunning Without Losing Your Mind
If this guide has nudged you toward trying it, here is the short version of starter advice that runners give beginners on the speedrunning forum.
- Pick a game you actually love. You will play the first ten minutes of it three thousand times. If you do not enjoy those ten minutes already, you will not survive.
- Pick a forgiving category. Glitchless or 100% is often friendlier for new runners than Any%, because Any% on a popular game is usually saturated with frame-perfect tricks.
- Read the rules before you run. Each leaderboard has its own rules about emulators, version, region, and timing method. Submitting a run that breaks the rules is a fast way to get nothing back.
- Aim for “completed” before “fast”. Your first goal is finishing the game with the timer running. Your second goal is beating the median time on the board. Records come later, if at all.
- Talk to the community. The discord for any active game category is usually friendly. Half of the available routing knowledge lives in pinned channels, not on YouTube.
If you want a softer entry point, watching is its own hobby. Most major runs are archived on YouTube within a day. Browse the gaming archives in our Internet Culture coverage for more on the streaming side, or visit the shop if you want a cat in a controller mug while you watch.
Speedrunning FAQ
Is speedrunning cheating?
No. Glitches and out-of-bounds tricks are part of the game’s actual code, not external modifications. Cheating is using third-party software, hacked saves, or tool assistance in a human category. The rules are explicit on every leaderboard, and verification is strict.
What is the most popular game to speedrun?
Super Mario 64, Minecraft, and the older Zelda titles (Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker) are perennial top-charts on Speedrun.com by participation. Minecraft Any% Random Seed Glitchless has had the largest active runner pool on the site for several years.
How long does it take to get good?
Reaching the top half of a leaderboard usually takes a few weeks of focused runs for most games. Reaching the top ten can take months or years depending on the title. World records often require thousands of attempts and a degree of luck, since they typically need a near-perfect run on a good RNG seed.
Do I need an old console or special hardware?
It depends on the category rules. Some leaderboards require original hardware for legitimacy. Others allow accurate emulators like Bizhawk for older systems. Check the rule page on the specific category before buying anything. Plenty of viable categories run on a regular PC with a USB controller.
Why does the speedrunning community keep finding new tricks in old games?
Because old games are large pieces of software, frequently with decompiled source code now publicly available, being examined by thousands of motivated researchers in parallel. New tricks in Super Mario 64 are still being found in 2026, almost three decades after release, mainly through brute-force memory analysis and decomp-driven route theorising.
The Last Word
Speedrunning is the niche that ate gaming culture and then quietly exported its vocabulary to the rest of the internet. It is patient, technical, social, and surprisingly charitable. If you came in thinking it was a stunt, you should leave thinking it is a discipline. If you came in already knowing, share this with the friend who keeps asking why you have been playing the same level for two weeks. They will get it now.
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