If you have ever watched someone tear through a game in a fraction of the time it took you, dodging obstacles you struggled with and skipping whole sections you did not know could be skipped, you have seen speedrunning. It can look like wizardry, but it is really the product of study, practice, and a completely different way of thinking about a game. Anyone can start, and understanding how it works makes even watching a run far more interesting.
A different goal changes everything
Most of us play a game to experience it: to enjoy the sights, savour the challenge, and see how the story unfolds. A speedrunner has one goal instead, to reach the end as quickly as possible. That single shift transforms the entire relationship with the game. Everything that does not serve the clock becomes something to minimise or eliminate.
This is why runs look so alien at first. The runner is not experiencing the game in the usual sense. They are executing a plan, a carefully chosen path through the game optimised down to the second. What looks like reckless speed is usually a route rehearsed hundreds of times until every movement is deliberate.
Knowing the game inside out
The foundation of any speedrun is deep knowledge. Before anyone can go fast, they have to understand exactly how the game behaves: where every obstacle is, how enemies move, how long each section takes, and where the time is really lost. Runners study a game the way a scholar studies a text, learning its rhythms until they can predict what comes next without thinking.
From this understanding grows the route, the specific sequence of actions that gets from start to finish most efficiently. Two paths that both reach the end can differ enormously in time, and much of speedrunning is the ongoing search for a faster route. This knowledge is rarely discovered alone. Communities share their findings, and a route is usually the accumulated work of many players building on each other.
The categories: not all runs are the same
Speedrunning is not a single activity but a family of them, defined by rules the community agrees on. Understanding the main distinctions makes runs much easier to follow:
- Any percent. The purest race to the finish, doing whatever is fastest and skipping everything that can be skipped. This is where the wildest shortcuts appear.
- Full completion. Reaching the end while also collecting or accomplishing everything the game tracks, a longer and often more demanding challenge.
- Restricted runs. Categories that ban certain tricks or add conditions, keeping the challenge fresh and rewarding pure execution over exotic exploits.
These categories exist so that people are comparing like with like. A time only means something when everyone agreed on the same rules, so the community defines them carefully.
Glitches, tricks, and the art of the shortcut
Part of what fascinates people about speedrunning is the use of tricks, and sometimes outright glitches, to skip ahead. Games are enormous, complex systems, and no matter how carefully they are made, they contain quirks their creators never intended. Runners find these quirks and turn them into tools, occasionally clipping through a wall or skipping a section entirely by exploiting the way the game handles a particular situation.
This is where opinions differ, and it is why restricted categories exist alongside anything-goes ones. Some players love the ingenuity of breaking a game open, while others prefer the discipline of a clean run using no exploits at all. Both are valid, and both demand real skill, because even a route full of shortcuts has to be performed flawlessly under pressure.
How to try your own first run
The best way to appreciate speedrunning is to attempt it, and you do not need talent to begin, only a game you already enjoy. A gentle path in looks like this:
- Pick a game you know well so you are refining familiar ground rather than learning from scratch.
- Time an honest first attempt just playing to finish, and treat that as your baseline to beat.
- Look for obvious waste, the places you hesitated, backtracked, or took a slow path, and plan to cut them.
- Repeat and improve, because speedrunning is mostly practice, each run a little tighter than the last.
The magic is in that steady improvement. Watching your own time fall, shaving off seconds you did not think were there, is intensely satisfying, and it teaches you the game at a level ordinary play never reaches.
A new way to see old games
Speedrunning gives a familiar game a second life. A title you finished long ago becomes a fresh puzzle, this time about efficiency rather than survival. You start noticing structure you never saw, opportunities hidden in plain sight, and the strange beauty of a game played at its absolute limit. Whether you dive in yourself or simply watch others with new understanding, learning how these runs work reveals a whole dimension of games that most players walk right past.