Speedrunning: History and Key Facts

Speedrunning is the act of playing a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible. Speedrunning often involves following planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking and exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended. Tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) is a subcategory of speedrunning that uses emulation software or additional tools to create a precisely controlled sequence of inputs or to slow down the game to perfect movements.

Many online communities revolve around speedrunning specific games; community leaderboard rankings for individual games form the primary competitive metric for speedrunning. Racing between two or more speedrunners is also a popular form of competition. Videos and livestreams of speedruns are shared via the internet on sites such as YouTube and Twitch. Speedruns are sometimes showcased at marathon events, which are gaming conventions that feature multiple people performing speedruns in a variety of games.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Speedrunning by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.