Chapter 1
The birth of breaking games
Chapter 2
The physics of glitches
Chapter 3
The precision of tool-assisted speedruns
Chapter 4
The global community and charity
Ch 1 · The birth of breaking games
diegoplays Speedrun Completion Categories
Any percent, any percent, Collect it all or nothing at all.
diegoplays After id Software released Doom in 1993, players shared gameplay recordings on early internet forums to compare their run times.
Quiz
Which 1993 first-person shooter popularized speedrunning by including an in-game timer at the end of each level?
Quiz
What was the name of the first major web-based speedrunning community founded in 1994 to track Doom records?
diegoplays This time-based reward system sparked the global obsession with competitive game speedrunning.
Quiz
Who is the bounty hunter protagonist of the Metroid series whose speed-based endings helped spark early speedrunning?
Quiz
Which 1986 Nintendo game rewarded players with a secret ending revealing the protagonist's identity if they finished in under three hours?
Fun Fact
Metroid's speedrun origin: The original Metroid (1986) on NES had five different endings based purely on how quickly you completed the game.
Quiz
In which Iowa city was the famous Twin Galaxies arcade score-tracking organization founded in 1981?
Quiz
Which website, launched in 2004, became the definitive online archive for high-quality video speedrun submissions?
Glossary
sequence breaking (noun)
The practice of performing actions in a video game out of their intended chronological order. The term was first coined in 2002 by players of the Nintendo GameCube release Metroid Prime.
The practice of performing actions in a video game out of their intended chronological order. The term was first coined in 2002 by players of the Nintendo GameCube release Metroid Prime.
diegoplays Decades of optimizing the 1985 NES classic have pushed the Any% world record to near perfection using wall jumps and flagpole glitches.
Quiz
What is the approximate current barrier of perfection for the Super Mario Bros. Any% speedrun, which runners have pushed under?
Quiz
Which classic 1985 NES game is widely considered the most intensely optimized speedrun in history, with records contested by milliseconds?