Hopped Up on Speedrunning

Shortly after 2 pm on the afternoon of May 18th, 2005, Brandon Erickson stepped back from the Star Wars arcade cabinet he'd been playing continuously, with no deaths, extra credits, or nap breaks, for the past 54 hours, having failed to break the Twin Galaxies record of three hundred million points in 49 hours established 21 years earlier by one Robert Mruczek. Perhaps these records of scale are best left in the distant past: all the golden age games had to offer a master player, after all, was more, more, more of the same. Let marathon play sessions in pursuit of the biggest score be consigned to the ashbin of the '80s along with the big cars, big hair, and shoulder pads in power suits; the fashion of our times dictates that minimalism is the new bombast.

One thing game-players in 1993 were not wondering was how quickly they could blast through DooM -- no, they lingered over every atmospherically-flickering alcove, marveling at its unprecedented immersiveness. It was not until its maps had been fully savoured that they would raise the bar, culminating in a powerhouse drive to excel and trump their friends' achievements under curious self-imposed limitations by doing the same, only faster.

By the time Quake came out in '96, the FPS community was already conversant with the notion of proving who could play through a game the fastest (aka speedrunning), often by devising unexpected strategies (in this case, the rocket jump) to bypass unexpectedly extraneous portions of the game through what came to be known as sequence breaking.

("Sequence breaking"? To confabulate an example, imagine that the goblin at the base of the tree won't let you into the treehouse until you give him the diamond found at the bottom of the mine. Through some designer oversight (foolishly assuming some modicum of self-preservation instincts), it turns out that it's possible to fly through the air and land in the treehouse from the adjacent waterfall without having to deal with the goblin or the mine at all: all you have to do is jump on your own primed grenade before it goes off, blowing yourself off a clifftop and landing a bloody, shattered heap in the treehouse -- but a bloody heap that's now shaved twelve minutes off the total necessary play-through time!)

1997's "Quake done quick" (a 20-minute continuous promenade from start to end of every Quake level -- ordinarily an all-night session for even the most stalwart mortals) mainstreamed speedrunning for every hardcore fragger, and six years later, Morimoto's astounding tool-assisted 11-minute completion of Super Mario Bros. 3 (with 99 extra lives, to boot!) gobsmacked the rest of us. Curiously, with the hours of mapping and strategising necessarily involved in plotting out an optimised course, like an assault on a lofty mountain peak, saving time is the last thing on anyone's mind when they take up speedrunning. No, these are ambitions as any marathon gamer of yore might have trained and worked toward -- the difference is just that the extreme du jour has flip-flopped over, formidably high scores after long, gruelling sessions perversely being replaced with feebly low scores after long series of short (but still gruelling) sessions.

Despite its myopic Olympian dedication toward shaving off fractions of seconds, the stubborn attachment to perfecting play of the old games demonstrates curious sentimentality. The nostalgic appeal of retrogaming is straightforward, but what does it say about the games being produced today that droves of hardcore gamers are choosing instead to focus on honing the gameplay offered by titles from decades past? The rigorous ethic of this cult of efficiency seems at odds with the self-indulgent goals of fun and exploration implied in video games, but it may just be the case that some people will turn anything, even play, into work.

Certainly the thriftiness of the speedrunners is to be applauded, turning dusty classics into new challenges by casually dismissing their original goals (eat the fruit, defeat the foozle, rescue the princess) with new ones (ignore the princess, forget the foozle: instead, find a way to unlock the final treasure room, and fast.) If the entire video game industry, satisfied with its achievements, were to shut down operations tomorrow, taking on speedrunning records could keep game players occupied for years to come. And when every game's optimal course had been plotted and documented? Someone will always find another way to layer on further complication to compound achievements and one-up their friends; perhaps Morimoto's granddaughter would set the record for fastest completion of Super Mario 3 while suspended in a straightjacket upside-down over a bed of hot coals with rabid weasels fighting in her pants. The kids will always find ways to breathe new life into old games.

~~~ This week's guest writer is Rowan Lipkovits, a raccordionteur living in Vancouver.

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Tags: arcade , Doom , efficiency , games , Golden Age , Mario , Quake , sequence breaking , shooters , speedrunning , Star Wars