Cutscenes is a column exploring—and blurring—the intersection of cinema and video games.
On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit.' As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.
―Ayrton Senna, three-time Formula One championship-winning racing driver
In August 2009, the sprinter Usain Bolt ran the 100-meter-dash in 9.58 seconds, beating his own previous world record by 0.11 seconds. Around the same time, Reza Noubary, a professor of mathematics, computer science, and statistics at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, estimated that the ultimate fastest time that a human could run 100 meters would be 9.44 seconds. Assuming Noubary’s calculation was accurate, Bolt had come within 0.14 seconds of theoretical perfection, a gap that neither he nor any other athlete has managed to narrow since.
The current world record for completing the 1983 Nintendo Entertainment System game Super Mario Bros. as quickly as possible—in a practice called “speedrunning”—was set by the Twitch streamer Niftski in August 2022. He beat the game in 4 minutes and 54.798 seconds, breaking his own previous world record by 0.83 seconds—the equivalent of just five in-game frames. Having worked through the game using software that delivers a pre-programmed set of "perfect" inputs along a predefined, chosen path, Super Mario Bros. players know that the fastest possible known completion should take 4 minutes and 54.265 seconds, meaning Niftski’s run was just 0.533 seconds off perfection, a margin that he and the game’s dedicated community of players fully intend to try and close.
Both records will likely be beaten; it is just a matter of time. Speaking to the writer Chuck Klosterman, the track-and-field athlete and sports analyst Ato Boldon argued that “sprinters believe that—someday—somebody will run the 100 meters and the clock will read 0.00.” Similarly, Super Mario Bros. speedrunners view the computer-perfect (or “tool-assisted”) run not just as something to match, but as something that could feasibly still be improved upon, should there somehow still be new exploits and shortcuts to discover after players have spent four decades turning this game inside-out. “When a sprinter thinks like that, he’s not trying to trick himself,” Boldon continued. “It’s how you have to think. This idea of human limitation is exactly what we’re competing against. It’s thinking about running an 8.99 that gets you down to 9.58.”
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In January 2010, speedrunning enthusiast Mike Uyama decided, after a few successful meetups, to host a marathon event showing off the skills of the best speedrunners while also raising money for charitable causes. After the Wi-Fi in his planned conference venue proved inadequate, Uyama gathered the group of players in his mom’s basement, broadcasting their playthroughs on a dedicated web page and raising $10,000 for the humanitarian charity CARE through viewer donations. This test—a broadcast of both the group’s gameplay and their surrounding camaraderie, sitting together on a sofa attempting to break records in real time—created the aesthetic and logistical foundation for a larger event, Games Done Quick (GDQ). This marathon event has been organized twice annually every year since, livestreaming from Maryland, Virginia, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, and Florida to viewers around the world and raising more than 40 million dollars for partner charities Prevent Cancer and Doctors Without Borders. In 2021, to address gender imbalances in the scene that are evident to anyone who has seen a GDQ stream, a parallel event for women, Frame Fatales, was launched, also held twice a year.
This year’s winter edition, Awesome Games Done Quick 2023—which, like the last few events, took place entirely online—was the first one that I “attended.” By watching fastidiously, I wanted to try to understand speedrunning’s allure. At the start of Patrick Lope and Nicholas Mross’s formulaic but informative documentary Running with Speed (2023), Summoning Salt—a speedrunning historian who serves as the film’s narrator—says that “some find beauty in what we do, others find it a colossal waste of time.” While the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle, it is through watching GDQ’s streams that it is easiest to get a clear sense of not just why speedrunners enjoy speedrunning but also why so many people love to watch them at work. “After watching a run,” writes journalist Julie Muncy, “even the most casual player will have a deeper understanding of the game and its rules”—but really, they learn more. They see the game subverted by a dextrous player able to execute the most precise, pixel-perfect inputs, over and over, without error, despite being on the practice’s most prestigious, public, and pressurized stage. After a week watching players speed through games of all kinds, I felt like my brain had been rewired. Games might be meant to be played, but they’re also made to be broken.
At one point in the documentary, Summoning Salt describes speedrun livestreams as “a new, interactive form of television.” In this arena, “pinpoint precision” combines with “personality” to create a previously unseen form of entertainment, somewhere at the meeting point of pattern-based memory-retention, mathematical fidelity, and technical athleticism. In some of the most iconic runs from previous editions of GDQ, there is a real sense of spectacle that makes these streams resemble a conventional televised sporting or cultural event. Some, like Siglemic’s 2014 nearly two-hour-long, 120-star run of Super Mario 64 (1996), or Calco2’s extremely technically impressive run of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (1995) from 2021, involve familiar games played with a level of pace and efficacy that is stunning to see.
In others, feats beyond most players’ technical abilities are thrillingly made to look easy. Fans deliberately remake existing games to make gameplay punishingly difficult, as with Oatsngoats’s 2020 run of Super Metroid Impossible (2006), or this 2022 team relay race of a version of Kaizo Mario World (2007-2012). In all of these videos, the speedrunners’ elastic acts of twitchy dexterity start to recall something like performance art or abstract dance. They impress not just because of their difficulty, but also because of the almost unimaginable amounts of research and practice it must take to achieve this high level of play.
Still other speedruns push the possibilities of a chosen game to an almost absurd degree of specificity and obsession. If achieving a breakneck speed of completion weren’t difficult enough, what if two players were to speedrun a game cooperatively, with each player controlling half of the required inputs, with both blindfolded, able to win only using sound cues and their intensive knowledge of the game’s pre-programmed (but also partly random) patterns of design? So asks Sinister1 and Zallard 1’s 2020 “2 player 1 controller” blindfolded run of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (1987), which sees both players in search of new ways to test their limits in front of an audience. In a practice that is endlessly configurable, this is just one example of the sorts of challenges players set for each other and the gymnastics they perform. Runs like this also reveal why GDQ has become so popular. Spectators are acutely aware that these competitors are not only achieving the impossible: they are redefining—and shattering—the parameters for new forms of theoretical impossibility.
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Players have been trying to beat games like Super Mario Bros. as quickly as possible for as long as the game has existed, but it was mainly with the arrival of the internet that the practice of “speedrunning” began to be defined and formalized. Most accounts trace the practice's origins to Doom (1993), a groundbreaking first-person shooter game that enabled players to record gameplay onto small, easily distributable files called “demos” that could be played back directly through the game. The game’s most skilled players shared their best runs on various purpose-made websites and bulletin boards, where they could analyze each other’s methods and techniques. Distinct from “machinima,” in which players use game worlds and their avatars to film and edit moving-image artworks or narrative films, aesthetic considerations in a speedrun video come secondary to the primary aim of documentation: the capture of play as proof of its occurrence. When Doom was succeeded by Quake (1996), a faster and twitchier game that offered greater possibilities for tricks, jumps, and other forms of technical gameplay, several prominent players (including Mike Uyama of GDQ) worked together to create Speed Demos Archive (SDA), a website dedicated to hosting recordings and leaderboards for speedruns of all kinds.
Thanks to this site, speedrunning would emerge as a culture: an activity with its own structures, systems, rules, and vocabulary, as well as a concrete community invested in supporting players. The collective quest to find the most optimal route through any given game has proved more sustaining than any single player’s desires for individual accomplishment or fame. Most importantly, the SDA community established what it actually means to “speedrun” a game. This may seem simple: to reach the game’s conclusion in the shortest possible time. But what does it mean to “reach the conclusion”? Is it fair game to make use of the various bugs, glitches, shortcuts, and warps that exist in every game in some shape or form, and if so, what sorts of behaviors constitute “cheating” or actual foul play?
According to the artist and designer Tobias Revell, “speedrunning challenges the notions of how we 'play' and 'beat' games.” In regular play, “these terms are used to mean the game was followed and finished within the confines of the way the developers intended.” But, as a form of game-destruction as much as it is game-completion, speedrunning “challenges the world the developers have built; it abuses and exploits glitches, cuts, tricks, shortcuts, and hacks to defy the world that was created in the first place.” Rovell sees this as “true play,” a creative “pushing and testing” of the game-world’s structures and boundaries beyond anything that its creators had intended. As the academic Stuart Thiel explains, a speedrun can involve “extremely skilled precision play that may take advantage of minor glitches but generally leaves the game world intact,” but it could also mean “abusing programming oversights to skip major segments of a playthrough or even the whole game.” Because of these idiosyncrasies, runs are ranked on different leaderboard categories according to what actions are required, or what completion path or objective a player will be following during their run.
If we consider speedrunning a sport, it is as much about self-improvement as it is about beating others. After “expert” members of the site vet submitted runs, micro-communities of players collaborate to optimize paths through a game, then compete with each other to execute that perfect route. “Unlike, for instance, tennis, cricket, football, cycling or any other form of sport or game where mastery is measured by and conflated with just being very good at performing the sport within the confines of the rules,” Revell notes in his article, “speedrunning rewards 'play' in the truest sense of flexing the edges of the technical construction of the game.” Such “play” can take the form of frame-perfect button presses, time-saving glitches, or “sequence-breaks” that skip over entire sections. Speedrunners compete with rivals to break records, or with themselves to reach a personal best, but mostly, they compete against the game itself. As the writer and games designer Kat Brewster puts it, “it’s a kind of subversion, a subtle power play of guerrilla game design. Players take what is given, and build something else out of it.”
Unlike sports or eSports, “where keeping a new trick under wraps is considered a strategy,” argues Muncy, “it is expected of speedrunners to share what they discover.” Every speedrun must be documented in order to be accepted, meaning that every technique or trick that a player invents immediately belongs to that game’s entire community. Speedrunning becomes as much about collaboration as it is about competition, so much so that some runners, referred to as “glitch hunters,” are less interested in actually setting records themselves than they are in searching for new glitches that will facilitate faster runs for all other players.
With the popularization of livestreaming at the start of the 2010s, players became able to make world-record attempts in front of a live audience in real time. They could talk through each action they took, welcoming the uninitiated while strategizing with the already converted. Further, with these platforms, a new aesthetic identity for speedrunning emerged, with the default view involving three concurrent visual planes: the in-game frame, a real-world feed of the player, and the chat box on the right unraveling in a vertical scroll. Viewers have the cinematic action of the game being played, as well as a simultaneous, evidential image of the player at work, sometimes seen only through close-ups of their controller and hands. And, through the chat box function, any viewer can become an active part of the recorded action. Speedrunning was always networked and communal, but with the introduction of this new level of immediacy, the pursuit shifted from a remote atomized activity toward something more electrically performative and raw.
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This sense of liveness and community was what I was seeking from the most recent GDQ event, tuning in, on and off, for the full week to watch players remotely broadcasting their playthroughs. Viewers constantly communicated with each other via an ever-active, surprisingly respectful (and well-moderated) Twitch chat box, encouraging runners, cracking in-jokes, sharing stories about their own love of the games being played, and sending in touching messages for the game’s announcers to read out loud. Prior to the event, I’d read about various controversies such as runners wearing MAGA hats or using derogatory terms, but overall the mood of the week was sweet, supportive, and, to use the language of the games industry, “wholesome” in tone.
While nothing from this year’s edition was perhaps as significant as any of the classic runs detailed above, AGDQ 2023 did contain a number of standout events. One glitch-heavy highlight saw the completion time for the action role-playing game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) brought down from an average of 100-150 hours to less than a half-hour; the player exploited a series of strange quirks to teleport across the game’s map, a technique known as “clipping” through “out-of-bounds” spaces. By catapulting their character into unreachable areas, a player can skip entire dungeons, story sections, and boss battles. While it is oddly satisfying to watch a player so egregiously cheat the game’s intended path of progression, their narration of their chosen strategy was what made each run interesting, exposing how a game’s internal logic could be contorted and reengineered to fit their own unorthodox desires.
In a short video produced by the gaming website IGN, the experimental games designer and philosopher Bennett Foddy explores this conflict between speedrunners and designers, speaking over a video showing a speedrunner utterly destroying the intended play-path of Getting Over It...with Bennett Foddy (2017), which he designed.” A game designer painstakingly carves a beautiful sculpture out of wood,” Foddy says, “chiseling it out of a raw block, then gradually rounding off any rough edges.” The speedrunner “takes that sculpture and they look it over,” carefully appreciating “all the work that went into the design.” Then, “having understood it perfectly, they break it over their knee,” much like Player 5 does in his Breath of the Wild speedrun, exposing the game’s seams. A game’s developer can try to control the path that its players take so that they have the best time, but ultimately they cannot prescribe any single correct way to play. Once the game is released it belongs to the players. In Player 5’s run, he and his commentators pull apart the game entirely, but in doing so they demonstrate their appreciation for it; it’s evident that they’ve devoted so much of their time to subverting its design.
At GDQ, this satisfaction was clear from a complete playthrough of the single-player campaign of Worms Armageddon (1999). The game is not an obvious candidate for speedrunning, perhaps; it is a two-dimensional, turn-based game that sees teams of cartoon worms attempting to kill each other strategically using an array of comic powers and weapons. Gameplay progresses fairly slowly and contains periods where the player can do nothing but wait for their opponent to act before they regain control, but speedrunning communities have never shied away from a challenge. This game must be approached through Rube-Goldberg-device-like means, requiring complex chains of game manipulation and technically demanding play that prove supremely entertaining to behold. During the stream, RuffledBricks and Mablak narrate the various known strategies for winning each of the game’s matches in the fewest possible steps, much of which involves memorizing, preempting, and even actively influencing the AI opponent’s actions. Like video-game gymnasts, they strategically find the most efficient ways to kill their enemies and quickly progress to the next objective, lurching through the campaign.
Many viewers find speedruns relaxing to watch, almost inducing a meditative state in the viewer. One obvious point of comparison is slow cinema (or slow television), given that speedruns are similarly structured around duration and often also see figures traverse landscapes over uninterrupted periods of time. The most accurate cinematic equivalent is perhaps the single-take-film. In something like Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) or Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015), the film’s creative team are required to meticulously plan a complex route through the film-world’s environment, chaining together a precise series of camera movements and orchestrations of bodies without a single misstep. In marathon runs, speedrunners must execute a dizzying series of rigorously memorized button inputs and movements without ever making a false move. Pleasure can be found in the meticulously rehearsed, technical balleticism of both.
During the most exciting landmark at AGDQ—a record-breaking run-through of Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010)—all four competitors were almost uncannily synced in their trick jumps, fiddly shortcuts, and glitch exploitations, remaining neck and neck for the majority of the three-plus-hour race. If it were not hard enough to execute this perfectly at breakneck pace, all four did this under the unrelenting pressure of live head-to-head competition, lifting their fingers from the controller only intermittently to wipe away stray beads of sweat. As exciting as it was, something about this competitive format felt a little off. Much like how many skateboarders—another practice that is creative, collaborative, and based around a community that encourages each other to extend the limits of the possible—felt there was something incongruous about skateboarding being included as a competitive event in the Olympics, some speedrunning fans feel that race events like this are incompatible with speedrunning in its purest incarnation, bastardizing the collectivist structure of the activity by pitting players directly one against another. As much as the audience tries to support all of the players in an event, there is something awkward (and also decidedly uncinematic) about watching race winners sit still at the race’s end and wait for the deflated runners-up to complete their runs. If the point of speedrunning is to see players supporting each other and building a community around their favorite games, the race format seems antithetical to that aim, centering competition over collaboration and turning players not just into athletes but rivalrous personalities, too.
As time passed in the Super Mario Galaxy 2 race, the pressure rose. Any error made now would be calamitous, given how perfectly things had gone so far. After about two hours and 40 minutes, both the run’s commentators and the more hardened Mario Galaxy 2 fans in the event’s chat started to suspect something special might be happening, with some viewers speculating that the race’s leading player Jhay may well be on “WR pace.” As he went into the game’s final level, when viewers observed that he was six seconds ahead of the game’s current best ever time, things started to get frenetic and charged in the chat. It is not likely that a world record would be set during the intensity of a live race, rather than during home play or a personal stream—this is the equivalent of a golfer getting a hole-in-one in all eighteen holes. After Jhay accurately fired off the three projectiles required to dispatch the game’s final boss, it was clear that he had broken his own world record. “I’m not even as good at breathing as Jhay is at this game,” said the event’s announcer after Jhay slumped back in his gamer chair, his eyes wide, visibly elated after more than 180 minutes of flawless flexing of his finger muscles. For a few seconds, it looked like Jhay’s soul had left his body, but, shortly after, he looked ready to do it all again, keen to shave a few more milliseconds off that best-ever time.
With most sports, a professional athlete plays the same game that an amateur does, albeit with a significantly higher level of beauty and skill. When a speedrunner plays a game, there is really no such resemblance between “casual play” and that of these seasoned pros; a pixel-perfect performance often seems abstract and unrecognizable. There is something equally demented and beautiful about this obsessively mathematical meeting between creativity and a rigorous, rehearsed application of technical skill. In the aforementioned article about the limits of speed, Ato Boldon proposes that “people who love track want to see guys run fast,” and this applies to speedrunning too, even in a race event. “The sport is not built on personal rivalries or constructed purity or nationalism or the import of tradition; the sport is solely driven by the excitement of people doing what no one has done before.” It is simultaneously relaxing and stimulating to see the familiar absorbed, analyzed, and shaped into something new, especially in ways that had not been considered achievable before.