List of video games notable for speedrunning

Speedruns are popular for a large variety of games. Most high-level speedruns have been performed by members of online communities. The speedrunning community originated on discussion forums in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where the fastest routes through early first-person shooters were discussed. Later on, as speedrunning became more popular, specific video games became known as common speedrunning candidates. Some modern indie games are designed with speedrunning in consideration.

Doom

The earliest documented speedruns were performed in the 1993 first-person shooter Doom. Among some of its major features, like its then-exceptional graphics, LAN and Internet-based multiplayer support, and user modification possibilities, it also gave the players the ability to record demo files of their playthrough. This particular feature was first picked up by Christina "Strunoph" Norman in January 1994 when she launched the LMP Hall of Fame website.

This site was, however, quickly obsoleted by the DOOM Honorific Titles, launched in May 1994 by Frank Stajano, which introduced the first serious competition between players. This site would create the basis for all DOOM demo-sites that would follow. The DHT were designed around a notion of earning titles by successfully recording a particular type of demo on maps in the IWADs randomly selected from a pre-determined set determined by difficulty. These 'exams' became very popular as the player had to earn each title by sending in a demo of the feat to one of the site's judges to justify their application. Doom II was released in October 1994, and the DHT conformed to the new additions as well as the new Doom version releases. At the height of its popularity, the DHT had many different categories and playing styles. For example, playing with only the fists and pistol while killing all monsters on a map became known as Tyson mode, named after the heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson. Pacifist-mode consisted of playing without intentionally harming any monsters.

In November 1994, Doom's speedrunning scene took off, in the form of the COMPET-N website. Its creator, Simon Widlake, intended the site to be a record scoreboard for a variety of Doom-related achievements, but unlike its predecessors, they all centered around one key idea: speed. Players were required to run through Doom's levels as fast as possible in order to attain a spot on the constantly updated COMPET-N scoreboards. There were two categories which eventually became mainstays in speedruns across all games: Any%, where the runner was only required to complete the main objective of the level, and 100%, where the runner is required to defeat every monster on every level. As of May 13, 2023, COMPET-N contains a total amount of 9608 demos (on both official and custom maps), accounting for a total time of 32 days, 4 hours, 47 minutes, and 36 seconds.

In September 2000, Doug 'Opulent' Merrill opened up a new era of Doom speedrunning with the Doomed Speed Demos Archive (DSDA). Unlike COMPET-N, which requires players to use original executable and restricted competition to a handful of WADs, this new archive supported competition for any WAD, with any executable or source port. For 7 years this initial incarnation of DSDA kept track of the runs submitted by the community, displaying the data in a series of news updates, along with occasional commentary by the maintainer. The work of maintaining the archive was performed manually, and, as time went on, the burden of maintenance increased. To alleviate this issue, and to improve usability of the archive itself, Andy Olivera began working on a second iteration of DSDA, which became available in November 2008. This coincided with a large increase in Doom speedrunning interest, with the annual demo count increasing from approximately 750 in 2008 to nearly 2000 in 2009. While a significant improvement over the original archive, this second version still lacked modern features, such as leaderboards and more advanced stat tracking. Work on a third incarnation began in January 2017, driven by Ryan 'Kraflab' Krafnick. The new DSDA currently mirrors the old archive but is still in active development.

Quake

People first started recording demos of Quake playthroughs when it was released in June 1996 and sharing them with others on the demos/e directory in Cdrom.com's Quake file hierarchy. There were two distinct kinds of demos: those in which the player killed all monsters and found all secrets on the map (called 100% demos) and those in which the player ignored these goals in order to finish the level as fast as possible (called runs). All levels were, at that time, recorded solely on the "Nightmare" difficulty level, the highest in the game.

In April 1997, Nolan "Radix" Pflug first started the Nightmare Speed Demos website to keep track of the fastest demos. The first Quake Done Quick of the game, carrying over one level's finishing statistics to the next. The run ended up finishing the entire game on Nightmare difficulty in 0:19:49, an astonishing feat at that time. It received widespread attention from gaming magazines, being distributed with free CDs that usually came with them. This popularized speedrunning for a much larger audience than before and attracted many newcomers. Not all of those newcomers agreed with the old-timers' dogma that runs should be made on the hardest possible skill level. Thus, in August 1997, Quake Page came to be, run by Gunnar "Muad'Dib" Andre Mo and specializing in "Easy" difficulty runs. One month after that, the famous Quake Done Quick movie was superseded by a new movie called Quake Done Quicker, on September 14, 1997, which improved the game's fastest playthrough time to 0:16:35.

In April 1998, Nolan and Gunnar merged their pages, thus creating Speed Demos Archive, which today is still the central repository for Quake speed demos of any kind. Ever since its creation, a large variety of tricks have been discovered in Quake's physics, which kept players interested even up to today, more than two decades after Quake's release. Subsequently, Quake Done Quick with a Vengeance was released on September 13, 2000, which featured a complete run-through of Quake in the hugely improved time of 0:12:23.

By March 2006, nearly a decade after the game's initial launch, Speed Demos Archive contained a total amount of 8,481 demos (on both official and custom maps), accounting for a total time of 253 hours, 44 minutes and 39 seconds. The fastest minimalist single-segment completion times that have been recorded by 2006, are 0:13:46 for the Easy difficulty run and 0:19:50 for the Nightmare difficulty run, both by long-time Quake speedrunner Connor Fitzgerald. The 100% single-segment completion times are 0:46:02 for the Easy difficulty run and 1:09:33 for the Nightmare difficulty run by Marlo Galinski and Justin Fleck, respectively. By October 2023, 17 years later, the record times had been improved significantly: Russian player CloudEr holds the Easy record with 0:11:39, Finnish player kukkye holds the record for Nightmare with 15 minutes flat, Swedish player jukebox holds the Easy 100% record with 0:36:29, and Hungarian player Muty holds the Nightmare 100% record with 0:57:16 (the only player to complete Nightmare 100% under one hour). Quake demos dropped off precipitously in 2010, but the site saw a resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic. As of October 2023, there are now 17,459 Quake demos, with 29.2% of the total number of demos being submitted since 2020.

Quake Done Quick

Main article: Quake Done Quick

An important aspect of the Quake speedrunning community is Quake Done Quick, a collection of movies in which the game is finished as fast as possible with special rules and aims. Unlike the normal records listed above, these movies are created one level at a time rather than in one continuous play session; as such, it is possible for multiple people to help create the movie by sending in demos of individual levels, and much faster times can be aimed for as the segmentation allows one to easily try again upon committing an error. It also allows runners to only have to focus on a small portion of the game rather than all of it.

These movies are by far more popular than the conventional records, both in the community itself and outside of it. Some of them, most notably the movies that feature a fast playthrough of the game on the Nightmare difficulty level without additional voluntary challenges, have even been distributed with gaming magazines and posted on news sites. Slashdot has published an announcement of the then newly created Quake Done Quick with a Vengeance movie on its front page. Out of all the series' movies, this one is also the most popular. In it, the entire game is finished in 0:12:23 on "Nightmare" difficulty, the hardest in the game. This run succeeded Quake Done Quicker and the original Quake Done Quick movie, in which the game was finished in 0:16:35 and 0:19:49, respectively. The main reason for the latest installment being over 4 minutes faster—an improvement that surpassed the initial expectations of the runners—was the discovery of bunny hopping, which allowed runners to attain a much higher speed in most levels and even made it possible to save rockets or grenades for jumps that could now be done without them. This movie is currently being improved by new and old runners for a production called Quake Done Quick with a Vengeance Part II. As of May 2006, the improvements that have been made thus far would result in a time of 0:11:32 for the entire game, an improvement of 51 seconds.

Metroid series

Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994) became popular among speedrunners due to the emergence of console emulators with demo-recording features. In normal Super Metroid gameplay, the player may find certain items such as "high-jump boots". Since the path through the map is non-linear, it is complicated to find the most efficient speed-running routes: areas with seemingly essential power-ups can be bypassed at the expense of improved mobility. This drove the discovery of sequence breaking, in which a player can acquire power-ups before the game design intends, allowing whole sections of the map to be skipped.

Because the Metroid series rewards players for completing the game faster, groups of players were inspired to discuss techniques on message boards such as GameFAQs and to capture and post videos of full playthroughs. Despite internet limitations in the early 2000s, the ability to share video footage of Metroid runs allowed speedrunners to collaborate and learn from one another. It was during online discussions of Metroid Prime that the term "sequence breaking" was first widely used.

Super Mario series

File:Super Mario World arbitrary code injection.jpg

By injecting arbitrary code into the memory of Super Mario World in the form of graphical sprites, speedrunners can reprogram the entire game on the fly.

Early platform games of the Super Mario series are popular in the speedrunning community. Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island and Super Mario 64 are particularly notable for speedrunning accomplishments. Most notable speedruns of Super Mario games are generally carried out without tool-assistance, though speedrunners make frequent use of glitches, memory corruption, and arbitrary code execution (ACE) to make optimal times.

Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros. is notable for having a robustly calculated theoretically perfect human speedrun of 4 minutes, 54.265 seconds, and for having achieved runs which are very close to this limit. As of September 8, 2023, the Any% world record is held by Niftski, who beat the game in 4 minutes, 54.631 seconds, which is only 0.366 seconds (or 22 frames) shy of the theoretical limit. The speedrun is theoretically perfect until the final level, 8-4, and it utilizes multiple frame-perfect inputs in order to clip into walls to take shortcuts, execute a "flagpole glitch" to skip a level completion animation, trick the game into "wrong warping" Mario into a different area when going down a pipe in 4-2, perform "fast acceleration" from a standstill by precisely jumping backwards, and gaining an extra vertical jump off a wall in 8-4.

The current Warpless world record of 18 minutes, 54.864 seconds, is also held by Niftski. In this category, the use of "warp zones" to skip worlds is not allowed.

Yoshi's Island

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is a game that players commonly speedrun at Awesome Games Done Quick. Charlie Hall of Polygon has described speedruns of Yoshi's Island as a "great introduction to the showmanship and the rich community" behind the Games Done Quick marathons. Through exchanging strategies and doing theory routing, the Yoshi's Island speedrunning community collaboratively work on pushing the completion time down.

Super Mario 64

Super Mario 64 has a rich and vibrant speedrunning history, dating back to at least 2004 for both the 70-star and 120-star categories, with the latter 120-star run from 2004 being almost 3 hours long. It is possible to speedrun Super Mario 64 in various ways. There are currently five major categories on Speedrun.com, roughly defined by the number of "Power Stars" the runner is required to collect for completion: 120-star, 70-star, 16-star, 1-star, and 0-star.

The 120-star category requires a 100% completion by collecting all of the game's 120 Power Stars. Allan Alvarez, aka Cheese, is notable for once setting the world record during a live tournament in February 2020. In late 2023, a new set-up for the "carpetless" strategy was discovered which had the potential to save up to a minute, the biggest potential time skip in the history of the category. On October 23, 2023, Puncayshun became the first runner to set a world record using this strategy, though he only improved upon the previous time by a second, leaving most of the potential time save from "carpetless" up for grabs. As of October 30, 2023, the current world record for the 120-star category is 1:36:48 by Japanese speedrunner Karin.

The 70-star category is the "glitchless" category, where the runner must collect the minimum number to complete the game without using glitches and exploits. As of June 30, 2023, the world record for the 70-star category is 46:41 by Canadian speedrunner Suigi.

It is possible to skip large portions of Super Mario 64 by using a glitch dubbed the "backwards long jump" (BLJ), and variations on it such as "side backwards long jump" (SBLJ) or "lobby backwards long jump" (LBLJ), where the player character can move at very high speeds, allowing them to clip through walls, doors, and level entrances. Using this glitch, a player can skip almost all levels of the game and beat it in only a few minutes, collecting 0 of the intended 70 stars that are normally required. As of October 28, 2023, the Any% world record for this category, dubbed "0-star," is 6 minutes, 16 seconds and 600 milliseconds, by Suigi.

The 0-star category requires a precise BLJ called "DDD skip", which has a high failure rate. Failing the skip, the runner can still continue the run by collecting one star in the stage "Dire Dire Docks" (DDD), which defines the "1-star" category. As of June 30, 2023, the record for this category is 6 minutes, 57 seconds and 580 milliseconds, by Suigi.

Additionally, many players run an older route that omits one BLJ in favor of using a different, slower glitch, which requires 16 total stars. This gives an additional challenge over the "starless" route, as players must execute difficult glitches while also obtaining the fastest (and in many cases, most difficult) stars in the game. The current world record for this category is also held by Suigi, with a time of 14:35.5.

Super Mario Odyssey

In more recent times, Super Mario Odyssey, released in 2017, has garnered a strong community of speedrunners. As of April 2023, the game has the sixth-most speedrunners of any game on speedrun.com, trailing only Super Mario 64 in the franchise. Many glitches are used to optimize the times—such as out-of-bounds clips in the Lake Kingdom, Wooded Kingdom, Snow Kingdom, and Seaside Kingdom—and a jump in the Moon Kingdom skipping the Moon Cave and a boss fight. As of 29 October 2023, the world record for Super Mario Odyssey's Any% category is held by Tyron18 with a time of 56 minutes, 37 seconds.

Mario Kart series

The Mario Kart series also has gained considerable attention from the speedrunning community, and various games have attained considerable amounts of attention. While speedrun.com lists Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as its most popular entry in the series, media coverage has been significant around Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Wii as well due to both games' enduring legacies. The culture around speedrunning and attaining world records for completing all tracks within the game, individual tracks, and single laps is noted to be extremely competitive globally. Most mainline Mario Kart games prior to Mario Kart 8 are also noted for their immense amount of game-breaking shortcuts (with major shortcuts known within the Wii community as "ultra-shortcuts"), which enable large portions of tracks to be completely skipped.

Mario Kart 64

Mario Kart 64 has maintained a popular following in the three decades since release, with 2,495 full-game runs having been submitted by 656 players to speedrun.com as of October 2023. Mario Kart 64 is particularly notorious for its shortcuts, and the history of its shortcuts dates back to soon after the game's 1996 release. Choco Mountain, for example, can have each of its laps completed under 6 seconds through the use of a mushroom (dubbed the Weathertenko as a portmanteau after its co-discoverers Drew Weatherton and Greg Ihnatenko concocted it in 2014, with a video by Summoning Salt featuring the trick attaining more than 5 million views as of October 2023); additionally, another course in Mario Kart 64, Wario Stadium, can have a lap completed in less than one second.

In May 2023, it was discovered that it was even possible to get a lap time of 0:00.01 on Yoshi Valley by exploiting the game's lap-counting mechanism, and similar exploits were soon found and executed for Luigi Raceway and Toad's Turnpike over the following month, netting the same 0:00.01 time (the lowest possible, as null times cannot be saved as records). Other course-breaking exploits can be found in most of the game's courses, several of which were known about within a year of the game's release, with many of these discoveries being found by shortcut-hunting pioneer David Wonn in the 1990s, including the bridge shortcut on Frappe Snowland. In modern times, several new shortcuts were discovered through experimentation using tool assistance, although not all shortcuts found this way are viable for humans to do in real-time. In all, 13 out of the 16 tracks have unintended shortcuts that are currently known about; ironically, Koopa Troopa Beach has two intended shortcuts, but so far this is one of only three courses where no unintended shortcut has been discovered.

There are different categories for a full-game speedrun in Mario Kart 64. The so-called All Cups (Skips) category challenges a speedrunner to complete all cups in Grand Prix mode at 150cc in a single session using whatever means necessary. In addition to using shortcuts, players will often exploit glitches, sandbag for item manipulation, and deliberately take damage to make shortcuts (such as firing a shell at one's self to scale a wall). The current All Cups (Skips) record is 22m 58s 680ms, set by American speedrunner abney317 in July 2023. The "No Skips" version of the speedrun has had hundreds of players submit speedrun times, with the world record of 38m 29s 910ms being set by Dan Burbank (DansGame89) in September 2023.

It is of interest to note that there are two major releases of the game with defining characteristics: NTSC and PAL. NTSC runs at a slightly faster frame rate of 29.97 frames per second, while PAL runs at a slower 25 frames per second. Both formats convert so that the times accurately match a real-time clock, but this means PAL players have the advantage of slower gameplay (meaning they can react more quickly) for time trials, but it has the opposite effect when the goal is simply to beat the game as fast as possible. This is why all of the non-shortcut course records are set in PAL but the top All Cups shortcut runs are in NTSC, as the latter category uses real-world timing, not in-game timing. For technical reasons, the Japanese (NTSC-J) version is faster, so most of the top speedrunners choose to use this for both shortcut and non-shortcut speedrunning.

The Legend of Zelda series

The original The Legend of Zelda is a popular speedrunning candidate. Any% speedruns of this game involve a great deal of movement optimization and item drop management, as well as some amount of luck. Speedrunners rely heavily on having bombs with which to defeat high-level enemies. A common glitch used in speedruns of this game involves clipping through walls while the screen is scrolling.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the third game in the series, can be beaten within two minutes by using particularly advantageous glitches.

The fourth game in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, can be beaten in under two minutes using arbitrary code execution (ACE). The DX version of the game, which added colored graphics, an extra dungeon, and more side quests, and removed the well-known "screen warping" glitch, can be beaten in under three minutes using ACE. The world record for the main Any% category, which bans the use of wrong warps, saving and quitting and then re-entering the file, or going out of bounds, is 48 minutes and 59 seconds, held by TGH. The game's 2019 remake for the Nintendo Switch has also become somewhat popular for speedruns.

More recently, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been a popular subject for speedrunners due to its non-linear format, which allows the game to be beaten in less than half an hour with only minor glitches. In particular, the French (France) version of the game is used frequently in Any% speedrunning because the voice acting runs slightly faster than in other versions (e.g. 3.967 seconds faster than the English version). The current Any% record is held by Player5 at 23 minutes, 42 seconds. In 2021 the speedrunning community released a segmented Any% speedrun which is supposedly the best theoretical time at 22 minutes and 44 seconds, though development has continued and the best possible time currently sits at 22 minutes and 30 seconds with other categories such as Master Mode Any%, Bug Limit Any% and All Dungeons also being worked on.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

A speedrun of Ocarina of Time being carried out at Mang'Azur festival in 2013

Originally, Ocarina of Time speedruns took several hours to complete, as the game contains many long, mandatory dungeons. Throughout the mid-2000s, the Speed Demo Archives community discovered various glitches and sequence breaks in the game that allowed players to skip large portions of it. For instance, the Door of Time Skip allows the player to skip the child Link dungeons by doing a precise side hop through the Door of Time, which has a slight opening in the corner of it. In 2012, the "Wrong Warp" glitch was discovered. The complicated trick has many uses, the most famous being the wrong warp from the Great Deku Tree, the first dungeon, to Ganon's Castle after Ganondorf has been defeated. This allows the game to be beaten as child Link, which allows for the game to be completed very quickly.

Speedruns of Ocarina of Time are dependent on the console the game is played on and what language the game is being played in. There are many different Nintendo-released versions of the game on a plethora of consoles, with each console having many advantages and disadvantages over each other. For the Any% category, runs have primarily been done on the Japanese Wii Virtual Console version of the game. The Virtual Console has both faster loading times and less lag than the Nintendo 64 version of the game, although it takes longer to reset the game on Virtual Console. Runs used to be done mainly on the English version of Ocarina of Time until runners realized that in order to compete with Japanese players' times, they would have to use that version of the game because the text scrolls faster on the Japanese version of the game than it does on the English version. In that regard, the Chinese iQue Player version of Ocarina of Time has both faster loading times and faster scrolling text than the Nintendo 64 and Virtual Console versions of the game. This was the fastest version for Any% until the discovery of Get-Item Manipulation, a glitch that crashes the game on this system. In 2019, Stale Reference Manipulation, and subsequently arbitrary code execution (ACE), were discovered, thus bringing the Any% time into the single digits. ACE was originally thought to be possible only on the Nintendo 64 version, which is where the record was brought down to about ​7 ¹⁄₂ minutes in mid-2020. The current record was achieved on the Japanese Gamecube Master Quest version of Ocarina of Time. This version of the game has a video file in place of the credits that gets triggered upon the game's completion, and it was discovered that this function can be executed in Kokiri Forest, which cut the record by another 20 seconds.

Ocarina of Time has been described as "one of the most intricate and well-documented games for speedrunning" because of its familiarity, as it is one of the most popular games for both speedrunning and casual play, and its wide array of glitches.

Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox survival game developed by Mojang Studios and released in 2009. The goal of standard Minecraft speedruns is to defeat the game's main boss, the Ender Dragon, and reach the end credits. While the PC Minecraft: Java Edition is the most active and noteworthy version of the game for speedrunning, there is a devoted community for the console Minecraft: Bedrock Edition as well.

Minecraft is notable in that it is procedurally generated, so every run is done on a different world unless a specific seed is provided to the game. As such, speedruns are split into two categories: set seed and random seed. In the set seed category, the player can choose the seed and has total knowledge of the world layout, though there are still some random elements. In the random seed category, the player does not, so unlike most other speedrunning games, where a route through the game is preplanned and carefully executed, speedrunners must learn to play as optimally as possible given their randomly generated world, and getting top times is largely reliant on spawning into extremely lucky worlds.

In addition to splitting random-seed and set-seed categories, standard Minecraft speedruns are split into five categories according to which game version is played: pre-1.8, 1.8, 1.9-1.12, 1.13-1.15, and 1.16+. This is due to new versions of Minecraft introducing new mechanics which speedrunners can use to lower times, or tweaking mechanics in a way that result in much longer times. The strategies and routes differ widely between these categories.

Due to the luck-dependent nature of Minecraft speedruns, there have been several instances of players cheating by modding the game in order to get better luck on their runs overall. Most notably, Dream, a former world record holder in the random seed category, was accused of cheating through modding. He subsequently admitted to cheating, though he claimed that it was done unintentionally. Another notable example is MinecrAvenger, a former world record holder in the set seed category, who cheated by splicing different speedruns together, modifying the game to increase the probability of obtaining crucial items in chests, and decreasing the time it took for the final boss to "perch". MinecrAvenger is also notable since he initially raised suspicions about Dream's improbable luck.

Dark Souls series

Dark Souls

Dark Souls, a 2011 game by FromSoftware, is known for its high level of difficulty. Through the use of several intricate skips, glitches, and wrong warps, it is possible to complete an Any% run in under 25 minutes, though average players take dozens of hours playing through the game once. 20-minute speedruns are possible because of a glitch dubbed the "Kiln Skip", which can be used to skip almost the entire second half of the game. The original method for this exploit was removed in an update, but a new method of performing it, which requires the current game update, has also been devised.

Dark Souls II

Any% runs of the Dark Souls sequel, Dark Souls II, can be done in under 20 minutes, as it is possible to avoid almost all battles in the game and to move around the world at a "ridiculous pace" using the "binoculars" item. The tricks that make a run this short possible were patched out in "Scholar of the First Sin", but can still be used if current patches are not downloaded.

Spelunky

Spelunky, a 2008 indie platformer created by Derek Yu, has been a common candidate for speedrunning, with its fastest runs taking between one and two minutes. As Spelunky features a large amount of random procedural generation, speedrunners cannot solely rely on memorization. To get the fastest runs, a speedrunner must get a specific random seed, though despite this, skillful players may recognize repeating level patterns and know how to optimally use the game's items, such as a difficult to use "teleporter" that allows a player to skip large chunks of a level.

Despite the high difficulty of the game, even Spelunky's "Hell" levels have been used for speedrunning, with the world record sitting under four minutes. Another highly difficult run of the game is the so-called "eggplant run", in which a player has to go through a specific set of objectives to turn the final boss into an eggplant. This was done solo for the first time in November 2013 by speedrunner Bananasaurus Rex, though it took him 90 minutes. Douglas Wilson of Polygon dubbed this run "2013's most fascinating video game moment".

Cuphead

Cuphead is a run-and-gun indie video game developed by StudioMDHR, inspired by the rubber hose animation style of the 1920s and '30s. The game features one or two players taking control of animated characters Cuphead and his brother Mugman to fight through several levels that culminate in boss fights in order to repay a gambling debt to the Devil. Cuphead has been noted for its notorious difficulty, and has spawned a dedicated speedrunning community, with The Mexican Runner running the game at AGDQ in 2018 and 2019.

Cuphead runs fall under multiple categories, such as Any%, All Flags, All Bosses and Full Clear, and are usually divided by difficulty - "Simple", "Regular" and "Expert". Cuphead runners have also invented many creative categories, such as only using one gun type, completing the game in pacifist mode, and completing the game as fast as possible using the character duplication glitch.

Portal

Portal is a puzzle game developed by Valve in 2007 as part of The Orange Box. The game's speedrun was popular enough to be run at AGDQ 2019 and SGDQ 2020. Portal runs on the Source engine which brings multiple glitches that players can exploit. One of those glitches is called the "Edge Glitch" in which the player's camera and Hitbox can be separated from each other, which allows the players to get to places they normally can't and can be preserved with the "Save Glitch". Portal is popularly speedrun due to its simple mechanics and short runtime.

Portal players have been speedrunning for years, with the lowest current completion time being 5 minutes and 50 seconds, executed by player "Sarahspeedrun" in July 2023. There are 4 main categories with different rules and guidelines: Glitchless, Inbounds NoSLA (No Save Load Abuse), Inbounds, and Out Of Bounds.

External links

• Pflug, N. (2004). "History of Quake speed-running". Speed Demos Archive. Retrieved October 16, 2005.
• Merrill, D. (2003). "A Brief DOOM Demo History". Doomworld. Retrieved October 16, 2005.
• Mills, A. (2005). "Metroid Sequence Breaking". Samus.co.uk. Archived from the original on October 28, 2004. Retrieved December 21, 2004.

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