The Shrine

Doing this sort of stuff would probably drive me to depression =P
But I can appreciate that people like this exist playing the games I enjoyed as a child.

Speedrunners.

To give a little bit of insight into their insanity:

I follow speedrunning a bit. People speedrun Persona games lol. I haven't looked up the world record but I saw someones personal record at about 18 hours for Persona 5.

IIRC the first speedrun of 100% Breath of the Wild was so long that the runner went to sleep during the run.

Speed running Mario Bros is one thing, but a game like Breath of the Wild to 100% seems to be so large that it would be difficult to get the method down to that kind of precision would require the same degree of knowledge retention that you’d find in world class historians or zoologists/taxonomists.

There an event that happens twice a year called Games Done Quick where runners showcase games 24 hours a day for seven days. It already happened in January so you have to wait until Summer for the next one but I'll try to remember to bump this thread when the Summer one happens. They always showcase popular games in major US and Canadian time slots because they're raising money for charity and that's when most people can tune in. They did a Breath of the Wild run this year with the other super popular game probably being Dark Souls 3.

A fair amount of the people who run the long games stream on Twitch so they can do it every day until they memorize it while either doing it as a full time job or at least some supplemental income. A ton of the people who make it to GDQ tend to either have enough of a following to afford getting there no problem or at least to raise the money to get there. Some of the more niche people (Youtube or the person only does events in their home country) are brought in on the dime of other speedrunners. I think something like that happened for a Stepmania showcase at GDQ a couple years ago. They usually have a Tetris Grandmaster showcase as well and I think one year that involved a pro from Japan.





The stepmania video is insane I recommend skipping to 26:40 into the video, even if you don't really care, just to see how crazy the real reason they flew this guy in to showcase.

Edit: As a funny aside, of course any event involving a ton of people is going to have drama... basically every year. Have a video of one of the better ones lol. These days the audience is separated enough to keep things like this from happening

Happy Hob did a no hit run of the entire Dark Souls trilogy which was crazy impressive. He hopes to practice Demon Souls and Bloodborne and get to to the point where he can do a run with all fives games without getting hit once. But I'd imagine that sounds like 15+ hours of basically uninterrupted concentration. The trilogy took about nine hours, but 15+? Yikes.

The sGDQ for the year starts tomorrow at 1PM EST. https://www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick

24/7 speedrunning of varying quality. Basically one long showcase involving dozens of runners.

This year was not one of the most interesting years from what I watched but this is the coolest thing from a couple years ago - a blindfolded run of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.



The run starts about 10 minutes in.

I don't really get obsessive speedrunning. Just a couple days ago someone posted an "unattainable" Super Mario Bros speedrun in 4:55.978 or something crazy like that. It was like .300 of a second faster done through a new "glitch" where they can shave a frame here and there depending on a specific sequence of events.

That's a lot of obsessive work to even figure out those unintended programming quirks. Call me crazy but I play games for this psychotic notion of "fun". I loved playing games over and over when I was a kid. I could beat SMB in under 10 minutes, Mega Man 2 in about 45 minutes, watched a bud do a 100% run in Super Metroid in 1:37, beat Final Fantasy 2 (4j) in 10:42 straight once because I wanted to. It was always because we enjoyed playing them and wanted to experience them again.

This obsession with glitching to save frames? That's too far for my liking. It's going beyond the goal of the game (fun and task-oriented designed goals) to tangent, non-gaming designed goals for a status level.

But then again, I don't get Twitch feed obsessions either. I love watching people play games and all. But it's a social thing for me not something I want to see online for hours on end.

Yes, yes, I know. I'm old and out of touch with the new generation. My kids (twins at 10 and an 8 year old) are proving that to me more and more everyday ;-)

You can develop relationships/friendships with smaller streamers, but mostly it's just entertaining to watch someone whose personality you enjoy play games. Some people love watching the most popular people who barely have enough time to thank each person giving them money - I really don't get that side of Twitch. Watching someone play a game you have an emotional connection to and watch them connect to it, as well, is a pretty great experience. Obviously Twitch isn't for everyone, though. I mostly use it for background noise but I would say the overwhelming majority of my Internet social interactions have a basis/connection on friends/discords I have found on Twitch.

Speedrunning isn't entirely based on glitches. Some games have glitchless runs. Old games tend to have ran for so long that any time saved will be in the seconds or less. And, yeah, I agree that isn't very interesting. It attracts a certain personality type. I don't have any interest in ever doing it personally.