Speedrun

The Quest for the Fastest Time

A speedrun is a style of playing a video game where the objective is to finish it as quickly as humanly possible. This practice transforms the game from a narrative or exploratory experience into a pure test of skill, memory, and optimization. Speedrunners compete against the clock, meticulously routing their path through the game, mastering its mechanics, and often exploiting programming glitches and bugs to skip entire sections.

This highly dedicated subculture has its own communities, leaderboards, and major charity marathon events like Games Done Quick. It is a form of meta-game, where the true challenge is not defeating the game’s enemies but mastering the game’s systems to shave milliseconds off a world record.

From Gaming to General Lexicon

While rooted in gaming, the concept and terminology of speedrunning have bled into the wider internet culture, including film discourse:

• In Video Game Adaptations: When a game with a prominent speedrunning community is adapted into a film, such as Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario Bros., the filmmakers will often include visual gags or Easter eggs that are direct references to famous speedrunning techniques or glitches from the original games, as a nod to dedicated fans.
• As a Metaphor: The term is now used metaphorically to describe any process that happens with extreme, and often reckless, speed. A film critic might joke that a character is “speedrunning bad decisions,” meaning they are making a series of catastrophic choices in rapid succession. A movie plot that accelerates through its story beats at a breakneck pace might be described as a “speedrun of the action genre.”