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Run Mario Run! Watch Hundreds of Games Completed in Record Time!
Think you're fast at completing games? Or do you just like watching other people zip through a game in record time? Then head over to Speed Demos Archive where you can view and submit videos of people beating some of the most popular games in record time.
According to the site "a speed run is a video of a player striving to complete a video game in as fast a time as they can manage. Sound easy? It's not! A large number of tricks are usually used, possibly skipping whole areas of a game in the process, and there will always be mistakes."
The list of speed runs is quite impressive with a little more than 200 games currently on the site. All of the runs can be viewed as a video and often the "runner" will provide notes as to how they accomplished their run.
What I really like about this site is the outstanding selection of games. Never got around to playing the legendary Chrono Trigger? Well now you can watch someone complete the entire game, including all the side quests! Of course the video of this run is 647 MB but many of the runs are broken up into several segments so even modem users can view most of the runs without too much trouble.
Looking through this list some of these runs are truly impressive, such as the run of Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (1 hour, 11 minutes, 37 seconds -- how did he do that?), Super Mario 64 (19 minutes, 47 seconds -- that's crazy), and Blast Corps (41 minutes, 17 seconds -- this game gets crazy-hard towards the end and it has 57 levels ... how did he do that?).
So what are the longest runs? The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (6 hours, 42 minutes), Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (7 hours, 11 minutes), and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (7 hours, 46 minutes). Whoa, I knew GTA: SA took awhile to finish but when the very fastest run is nearly 8 hours long that's pretty telling.
And the shortest runs? Super Mario Bros. (5 minutes, 6 seconds), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (3 minutes, 35 seconds), and Marble Madness for the NES (3 minutes, 13 seconds). Wow, and you thought King Kong was a short game?
Somebody finished Morrowind in less than 8 minutes???
Posted by AmbberFox at January 16, 2006 11:50 AMThe Morrowind one is pretty clever.
Watch the Metroid ones. They are pretty awesome.
Posted by PatMan33 at January 16, 2006 11:53 AMI've seen sites like this for lots of games, but usually they're for specific titles (like Metriod Prime, or Halo). An entire site with it is a great idea. Good find.
I sometimes think I'm a pretty good gamer, then I watch videos like this and I realize I suck. {grin}
Posted by eawil2000 at January 16, 2006 12:41 PMYou guys oughta be looking for this one speedrun. It probably isn't on that site, so you'd have to look elsewhere.
The guy wired two games, Megaman X1 and X2, together to one controller.
He then speedruns both games AT THE SAME TIME.
Oh my god, it was the most hilarious thing ever.
And if you want to see a completely pathetic speedrun from, yes, that site, look up the one for Super Mario 2: Yoshi's Island.
The guy makes so many mistakes and dies like five times. Not to his advantage or anything.
Kind of sad..
Morrowind?!? 7:30??!?! I wonder how long it would take to get 100% completed at that rate.
Posted by Nacht at January 16, 2006 08:03 PMDon't bash the speedruns until you have tried to do one yourself, Gauphastus.
That was probably on a Single Segment run which are very hard to do.
Posted by PatMan33 at January 16, 2006 08:22 PMWell, I can appreciate the difficulty. I've done a few personal runs myself (Super Metroid being my best at about 1:50). Then again, in Super Metroid, there are no pits of death or the annoyance of having a baby stolen off your back...
Pathetic is too strong a word to describe the runner's making minor but deadly mistakes I suppose.
That speedrun isn't that bad actually. It's very long, and he does some pretty impressive time-saving things in it anyway.
What's nice about these is that you can not only see these guys play the game, but also observe many very unusual time-saving techniques.
I mean, the one I saw for Super Metroid, though I do believe he cheated, had me going back to the game to try to do similar things (like the super speed dash and rolling into a morph ball, or continuous unfailing wall jumps).
Then there's the 'sequence breaking' some of these guys do, skipping whole areas entirely.
Good fun.
I think I'll get a few of these again.
And still, I very much recommend people find that Megaman X1 and X2 speedrun (from wherever it is). Extremely impressive.
Gauphastus,
MegaMan X1 X2 Speedrun
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/movies.cgi?id=380
holy crap. Super Mario was cool. Not ONE mistake, never stops moving either. SO many close calls. Incredible.
Posted by Deep Lee at January 16, 2006 11:48 PMUnfortunatly the downloadm server seem to be down :( Wanted to see that Morrowind thing!
Posted by P4p3Rc1iP at January 17, 2006 12:54 PMThere's a Super Mario 64 run where he ebats it in 16minutes, 19 if you count the credits, I'm not sure if that's the same one. I don't think I would count the credits towards the game time.
Posted by Scipion at January 17, 2006 02:59 PMYou Gaming Steve'ed it!
Posted by Jeremy at January 17, 2006 04:18 PMhere's a link to that dual-megaman speed-run Gauphastus was talking about:
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/movies.cgi?id=380
Posted by riverfr0zen at January 17, 2006 10:51 PMHere's my contribution, my Half-Life speedrun:
http://www.archive.org/download/HalfLife_5109/HalfLife_5109.wmv
Although the record have since then been broken, but back in the day it were quite popular with over 100 000 downloads.
Posted by Dopefish at January 18, 2006 01:17 PMThe super Mario 1 NES run is a really close call. I swear he touches the enemies but doesnt die. I mean i'm talking the pixels are overlapping. he must know at exactly what pixel contact occurs. i am skeptical
Posted by ted at January 18, 2006 02:54 PMThere were a few Mario runs that were not proper. I seem to remember though that the one Speed Demos Archive has is authentic and holds water.
Posted by PatMan33 at January 18, 2006 04:57 PMHaha, yeah, Smokey's 36-28 minute Super Metroid run is amazing, except that he does indeed cheat. However, I am the official World Record holder for Super Metroid, with a sleek 42 minutes. No cheating. Still, I give props to Smokey and Red Scarlet, who both are amazing Metroid players.
(Expect a new record soon, I am about to thrash my current one.)
Posted by Brian at February 1, 2006 12:30 PMhow do i watch the videos?