Two speedrunners playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time at Mang'Azur 2013Īccording to many speedrunners, community is an important aspect of the hobby. Verification is usually done by leaderboard moderators who review submissions and determine the validity of individual speedruns. They often use timers that keep track of splits-the time between the start of the run and the completion of some section or objective. Runners usually record footage of their speedruns for accurate timing and verification, and may include a timer in their videos. As of July 2021, the site hosts leaderboards for over 20,000 video games. According to Wired, the definitive website for speedrun leaderboards is. Speedrunners compete in these categories by ranking times on online leaderboards. Glitchless, which restricts the player from performing any glitches during the speedrun.Low%, the opposite of 100%, which requires the player to beat the game while completing the minimum amount possible.This may entail obtaining all items or may use some other metric. 100%, which requires full completion of a game.Any%, which involves getting to the end as fast as possible with no qualifiers.Each video game may have its own speedrun categories, but some categories are popular irrespective of game. It is common for category restrictions to require a certain amount of content to be completed in the game. Speedruns are divided into various categories that impose additional limitations on a runner. Due to the lack of a human playing the game in real time, TASes are not considered to be in competition with RTA speedruns. To differentiate them from tool-assisted speedruns, unassisted speedruns are sometimes referred to as real-time attack (RTA) speedruns. Although generally recorded on an emulator, TASes can be played back on original console hardware by sending inputs into the console's controller ports. The run is recorded as a series of controller inputs intended to be fed back to the game in sequence. These tools are designed to remove restrictions imposed by human reflexes and allow for optimal gameplay. According to TASVideos, common examples of tools include advancing the game frame-by-frame to play the game more precisely, retrying parts of the run using savestates, and hex editing. Tool-assisted speedrunsĮxample tool-assisted speedrun input file, showing which buttons will be pressed at which point in the sequenceĪ tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) is a speedrun that uses emulation software and tools to create a "theoretically perfect playthrough". When speedrunning moved away from Twin Galaxies towards independent online leaderboards, their use became increasingly common. The use of glitches and sequence breaks in speedruns was historically not allowed, per the rules of Twin Galaxies' early leaderboards. Several speedruns use a "credits warp," a category of glitch that causes the game's credits sequence to play, which may require arbitrary code execution. In some games, arbitrary code execution exploits may be possible, allowing players to write their own code into the game's memory. Some people, called glitch-hunters, choose to focus on finding glitches that will be useful to speedrunners. Video game glitches may be used to achieve sequence breaks, or may be used for other purposes, such as skipping cutscenes and increasing the player's speed or damage output. Skipping a part of a video game that is normally required for progression is referred to as sequence breaking, a term first used in reference to the 2002 action-adventure game Metroid Prime. A route may involve skipping one or more important items or sections. Routing is the act of developing an optimal sequence of actions and stages in a video game. Routing is considered a fundamental process in speedrunning. Speedruns are sometimes showcased at marathon events, which are gaming conventions that feature multiple people performing speedruns in a variety of games. Videos and livestreams of speedruns are shared via the internet on media sites such as YouTube and Twitch. Racing between two or more speedrunners is also a popular form of competition. Many online communities develop around speedrunning specific games community leaderboard rankings for individual games form the primary competitive metric for speedrunning. Tool-assisted speedrunning is a sub-category of speedrunning that uses emulation software to slow the game down and create a precisely controlled sequence of inputs. Speedrunning often involves following planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking and can exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended. 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.
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