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[electronic chime]
[dramatic music]
[Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! music playing over TV]
[Summoning Salt] In 1985, lots of people started playing video games on Nintendo.
It was a golden age.
So many masterpieces were created.
The feel of the controllers...
-[video game beeps] -...the sounds...
...ultimate nostalgia.
Yeah!
[screaming in joy]
-[woman] What is it? -[boy] A Nintendo.
[Summoning Salt] We've had more than 35 years of digging for secrets in these games.
During that time,
a niche community has formed around the idea
of executing elaborate strategies
to beat games as fast as humanly possible.
We're called Speedrunners.
And to put it simply, our world is complex.
[Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! music over TV continues]
Some find beauty in what we do.
Others consider it a colossal waste of time.
Whatever it is...
...I love it.
I hold the world record for the fastest completion of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!,
and I also hold the world record for the fastest completion
of the last character in that game, Mike Tyson.
I've tried to keep a low profile on, uh, showing myself.
It's honestly just cause that's how I've always been.
I've always tried to stay under the radar.
My background's in business, but somehow I translated that
into playing video games really fast and making videos about it.
In addition to holding the Punch-Out!!world record,
I'm also pretty well-known for a YouTube series I create
where I talk about the world record history
and progression of various video games.
[electronic music]
When my first video came out on YouTube,
my first world record progression video,
it was about Mike Tyson and it got three or four thousand views
in the first couple of weeks.
And I was really excited
because just thousands of people noticing my videos,
this is amazing.
And now I'm at the point where
if I don't get between half a million
and a million views in the video in the first couple of weeks,
it's like a disappointing start.
It turns out there are a lot of people interested in the world's fastest gamers.
And maybe that shouldn't be a surprise.
-[man 1 speaks indistinctly] -[gunshot]
[people cheering]
[Summoning Salt] We've always been fascinated with speed.
[engine roaring]
[jet engine roaring]
-[galloping] -[people screaming]
[Summoning Salt] There's something about the visceral experience
of witnessing speed that is instantly gratifying.
[commentator 1] ...he's gonna catch him.
-[people cheering] -[commentator 2] ...gone again.
[commentator 1] He did it! One-hundredth of a second.
[Summoning Salt] To be fast, you need focus.
It comes via determination,
and only after lots of repetition.
[crowd cheering]
[Summoning Salt] And the human spirit keeps finding ways to push things further.
[commentator 3] The barrier, once thought impossible, is now broken.
Eliud Kipchoge is the first sub-two-hour marathoner,
[Summoning Salt] It's an ongoing pursuit of perfection.
[Mario Kart music playing]
The same, believe it or not, holds true in speedrunning.
It's a select few who are able to master
the mechanics and intricacies of these games.
[commentator 4] Who's gonna get this first?
[Summoning Salt] And it's getting pushed to a level
that even just a few years ago,
was unimaginable.
[people cheering]
[man 2] I was right, baby! Damn right!
Yes, that is right!
[electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] Speedrunning is the art of beating a video game,
or a section of a video game as fast as you can.
-Time. -[applause]
Oh, yeah. [chuckles]
[Summoning Salt] Numerous categories of world records are maintained
for even some of the most obscure titles.
That is a new world record. That is a new world record.
Let's go.
Let's go, man.
[Summoning Salt] But deep-rooted franchises likeMario, Zelda, Metroid
andMega Man are most popular.
-[commentator 5] And time. Real nice. Beautiful. -[commentator 6] Time.
-[commentator 5] Thirty-three, dude. -[commentator 6] Thirty-three.
[commentator 5] Wow. What a beast.
[Summoning Salt] Retro games, in particular,
work well for speedrunning because of the intriguing opportunity
to exploit their glitches.
Every frame I press against the wall,
It'll be, uh, changing my pixels by 50 and if I do it right,
I can sneak into the wall like that there and save quite a bit of time.
[Summoning Salt] Glitches happen when players expose faults
in the game's programming.
This could mean finding spots
where you can slide through walls.
Or triggering the game to respond
in ways it's not supposed to.
[man 3] Air walking, it does exactly what the name implies.
You walk on air... [chuckles softly] and you can use this
to basically skip, like, 90% of the game.
[Summoning Salt] When glitches are found in newer video games,
developers issue patches or updates to fix the defects.
That's not the case with older games.
[Michelangelo] Pizza power.
[Summoning Salt] The classics will always be the classics.
-[silenced gunshots] -[groans]
[Summoning Salt] Their brokenness is set in stone,
And even after two decades,
Speedrunners are still finding ways to go faster.
[chuckles] 17:47, dude.
[sobbing]
So much hard work, so much hard work for this.
[sighs]
I can't believe it, dude. How much time I've putten into this?
The grind.
Oh, my God, I'm so happy. I've finally got it.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] I'm going to start
by introducing you
to a legendary runner
named AndrewG.
In 2010, he speedran Super Mario Bros.
in front of Shigeru Miyamoto,
Mario's renowned creator from Nintendo,
[inaudible chatter]
-[man 4] Yeah! -Woo!
[indistinct chatter continues]
[boy] Yeah, Andrew!
[Summoning Salt] Mario is the most popular franchise in speedrunning.
And AndrewG was a speedrunning standout
before there were standouts.
[Super Mario Bros. music playing]
[AndrewG] There was a point in my life where I really wanted
to get my hand-eye coordination
and reflexes to be as perfect as possible.
Just need to clear the gaps and we're clear to world four.
Okay.
There we go.
One day I decided to try and combine my talents.
I figured out that I could play Super Mario Bros. and juggle at the same time.
[Super Mario Bros. music playing]
I have a bachelor's degree in math and I've noticed
among the Super Mario Bros. Speedrunners,
we all kinda have similar personalities in some ways.
You get to have a very technical kind of mindset.
It's very mathematical.
And it's not always so straightforward.
You've got to kind of think outside the box, and I think
the puzzle aspect of it drew me in, as well as the challenge aspect of it.
[sighs] Uh-oh. Uh-oh.
It's like condensing a math problem
to its simplest form in a lot of ways.
And there always seems to be a more improved version that exists.
Ow!
[snickers]
-[Super Mario Bros. winning sequence playing] -Oh!
I messed up the juggling.
Super Mario Bros. is a pretty simple game.
A lot of people are like, "You just hold right and jump
and get to the flag."
And that's that, you know.
There's not much else to it, but the game is like,
it's way more complex than we ever had thought.
[Summoning Salt] Super Mario Bros. came bundled
with the Nintendo Entertainment System
when it was released in America in 1985.
The latest videogame craze to sweep the United States and Japan,
it's called Nintendo. We have a report--
[Summoning Salt] It's hard to overstate how much they got right with this game.
It had a massive cultural impact.
[woman] Super Mario Bros. is the all-time best selling
video game on the market under the Nintendo label.
And it must be pretty good for someone to want to spend five days doing nothing
but trying to rescue a princess from hundreds of bad guys.
[Summoning Salt] Who would have guessed an Italian plumber named Mario,
racing to rescue Princess Peach Toadstool
would catch on the way it did.
[AndrewG] 2007 was the year that
I got the five-minute Mario, five minutes flat,
and that was a huge deal.
[electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] As speedrunning became a thing
the Any% category ofSuper Mario Bros.
was certainly a holy grail.
An Any% speedrun only requires the player to get to the end of the game.
It's not about collecting coins
or finding hidden mushrooms.
It's just about getting to the end as fast as possible.
This is called the 1-2-G.
Uh, G being in relations-- in reference to me.
Um, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to clip right through this pipe here.
[Summoning Salt] Andrew is using a safe state, which allows him
to practice a trick from the same spot over and over.
You have to slow down to walking speed,
right as you jump.
So it's, it's very precise.
I'm, I'm overthinking, uh...
I think I'm just--
Let me just clear my head for a second.
[chimes]
There we go.
Perfect.
[Summoning Salt] Over the years, Super Mario Bros.
has been optimized down to the millisecond.
Runners from all over the world have collaborated to uncover
-countless glitches. -Yes!
[Summoning Salt] Which can only be accomplished
by performing intricate frame perfect tricks.
Like the flag pole glitch.
This requires runners to jump and land on the first pixel
of the second stare from the top.
And you can't be holding B when you land.
At this point, you press right and B for exactly two frames,
do a full jump, and as soon as he hit the corner pixel of the flag pole base,
you hold left for three frames and jump on the fourth.
The result is that tricks the game into not dropping the flag down the pole,
which saves time on the run.
[Super Mario Bros. music playing]
These are the milliseconds that make all the difference in speedrunning.
Amazingly, from 2007 to 2014,
despite many people knowing all the same secrets,
AndrewG was the sole world record holder.
He continued the whittle his time down to 4:58.09.
But by 2015, a select few finally caught up
First, a runner named Blubbler, and then the ultra-consistent Darbian.
Boom!
That's it.
[AndrewG] Eventually, it was a real race between me and Darbian.
Every night, we were both streaming it.
Now, this is the run.
People in my chat would go, "Darbian is on,
Darbian is on the last stage right now."
You know? And then, and then he would get the same thing.
"AndrewG is on the last stage. You better watch out."
You know? We, we both kind of had our viewers that would,
you know, it's like a different fan base is, you know?
No!
[chuckling] Yeah.
Woo-hoo-hoo!
That was it. That was it. That was it.
Did I break the camera? I kind of broke the camera.
That was it.
And then you had Kosmic come along,
who was also at the same level.
[gasps] Oh, my gosh, guys. [chuckles]
[AndrewG] The three of us, we're all neck and neck,
going for the world record every night.
World record for you.
Here we go.
And you never knew when a new record was gonna pop up.
[laughing]
But you knew it was going to happen
because with three guys at that level,
it's gonna happen.
Please finish. [sighs]
I cannot believe it.
[stammering] Okay. What?
[stuttering] How?
-[video game chiming] -[keys clacking]
[smacks lips]
[AndrewG] At this point, 4:55 is the limit,
and Kosmic was the first person to get that.
This isn't real life, dude,
[AndrewG] Until something new comes along,
it'd be very, very tough to beat that mark.
I've been speedrunning this game for over ten years now.
It's a five-minute run.
How much more could there be?
-[chiming continues] -[keys clacking continues]
[upbeat music]
[Summoning Salt] In the early 2000s, It wasn't realistic
to earn a living from speedrunning.
-Oh! -Ha-ha! Yeah!
Get outta here!
[Summoning Salt] But times have changed.
Especially for the fastest Super Mario 3 player in the world.
[Mitch] I was born in 1988, so I can always remember
there being a Nintendo in the house.
I had an older brother who was more into sports.
But, you know, I never really enjoyed that kind of thing.
So to me, enjoying, like, a Saturday, not being in school
was honestly being inside
just playing Super Mario, Super Mario 3.
[commotion]
I enjoyed playing it with my parents
whenever they had time and stuff.
To me, I thought that was way more fun
than going out and playing road hockey.
[man 1] Oh!
[Mitch] I'm from Canada.
Canada. [chuckles]
I've been in the Guinness Book of World Records for this.
I've been on national television.
Uh, Late Night with Stephen Colbert.
My next guest tonight is a video game Speedrunner
with the world record for beating Super Mario Bros. 3.
Please welcome Mitch Fowler. Mitch, thanks so much for being here.
-Thank you. -[Stephen] All right.
[Mitch] That's the most nervous I've ever been
in my life, because it's one of the biggest opportunities
I could have possibly been given.
National television for playing Mario 3.
How? [chuckles] When does something like that ever happen?
-It's over, baby. It's over. -[commentator] Incredible.
Incredible display of the...
[Mitch] I think that was the exact point in time
where my family and friends and my parents finally understood
that what I was doing was something.
-[inaudible chatter] -Man, this is like my dream come true right here.
We're playing Mario 3.I know.
-Mine too. -With you, my man. How's it going?
-Nice to meet you. Your name was? -Okay, Spencer,
but, like, on the screen, I'm a lurker,
so you're not even gonna know me.
[Mitch] Oh, you've been to my channel?
-[Spencer] Many times. -Damn. Nice
It's a dream come true right now.
Cross that off my bucket list.
[Summoning Salt] Super Mario Bros. 3 was a huge success
when Nintendo finally released it in North America in 1990.
It had come out a year and a half earlier in Japan.
[man 2 speaking in Japanese]
[Summoning Salt] But, since we didn't have the Internet yet,
most people in the US weren't aware
thatMario 3 had even been developed.
That was until it got featured in a major Hollywood movie
calledThe Wizard.
-Super Mario Bros. 3. -[crowd cheering]
[Summoning Salt] This was the first time America got to see the new gameplay.
And it quickly became one of the most
highly anticipated video game releases ever.
Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto had taken everything
that was great about the first two Mario's
and made it even better.
There was P-speed,
and the Super Leaf allowed Mario to fly.
It's the Mario lots of '90s kids remember from their childhood.
And Mitch has three of the four most prestigious world records for that game.
-Can I get a picture with you really quick? -Sure.
-One, two, three. -Thank you so much.
Oh, I've been watching speedrunning for a long time,
and in the community, he's just an All-Star,
like, it's crazy to actually to meet him in real life.
Weeuuu!
[chuckles]
He gets so many people that wanna come and talk, and...
It makes me happy to know that everyone loves Mitch as much as I love Mitch.
[chuckles softly]
[Summoning Salt] And there's no denying.
Mario 3 is just a fun game to play.
-Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! -This-- it's this level.
There you go. Yeah. Hold the B button.
[woman and Mitch exclaiming]
[indistinct chatter]
[soft upbeat music]
I know we found it before. I know we did.
-[Mitch] Are you sure? I don't think we did. -Yeah. No, we did.
[Kailee] We met through Twitch, actually.
I was a fan girl,
-and... [chuckles] -[chuckles] Weeuu.
...just enjoyed watching Mitch.
And we ended up talking,
and getting to know each other really well,
and decided to meet up in real life. [chuckles]
I moved from Canada to Utah to be with her,
and we pretty much have a family.
We got our two cats, we got our home.
-Ah, no! -[laughs]
Oh, my God, please don't die.
[Mitch] It's really like a full-on American family.
It's like the whole thing.
-No! -[chuckles]
I love it.
[grunts]
[Summoning Salt] Mitch's favorite category ofSuper Mario 3,
the one he plays the most is Any% Warpless.
This means that you play through every world in the game
without using warp whistles that skip ahead.
Mitch's world record is 50 minutes and 36 seconds.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
[Summoning Salt] The run takes extreme focus for almost an hour straight.
And to add to its outrageousness,
it also requires a lot of luck.
I've been speedrunning this game for almost nine years now,
and I still haven't pushed the game to its fullest potential.
And the reason for that being there is a lot of RNG.
[suspenseful music]
[Summoning Salt] RNG stands for random number generator.
It's an algorithm that produces random numbers.
In video games RNG is used to make events in the games act random,
so the same things don't happen every time you play.
Like the directions the Hammer Brothers move on the overworld map.
They can be different each time you encounter them.
There's a very iconic component of RNG and Super Mario Bros. 3.
It's called the Hands.
So there's three levels right here.
There's one level, two level, three level,
and when you cross over the level,
there's a 50-50 chance
that The Hand will pull you in and you have to do the level,
which means, in terms of speedrunning,
you want to get lucky and not have to do the level.
But there's three of them, so that's three 50-50s.
So you have a 12.5% chance to get no hands at the end.
We'll go ahead and give it a shot. I'll try and cross the Hands.
Boom! Got pulled in.
So essentially, I just lost the 50-50.
And this is at the end of the game.
So if you play perfectly for 45 minutes,
you get to this point and all three of those hands pull you in,
you're losing a minute and a half.
[lively electronic music]
[Lawso42] No, ho-ho-ho.
[Summoning Salt] It's one of the most painful run killers in all of gaming.
No, dang it
[Summoning Salt] You can perform flawlessly for 45 minutes.
But if you don't, then essentially,
win three 50-50 coin flips in a row,
you're denied greatness.
If I get pulled in by Hand, I can't get the record.
It won't happen.
[electronic music]
[game over tone playing]
[upbeat electronic music]
[Mitch] Yo, 360chrism is raiding me with 213 people.
Thank you guys so much.
Welcome, Raiders.
I am Mitch, the flower power.
How are you guys doing? Welcome to my stream.
I'm speedrunning right now.
Grand Poo World 2 just released, like, a week ago.
I've been able to make a living off of speedrunning,
probably for about a full year now.
Havoc, what's going on? Alex, how you doing?
Am I trying for the world record? I'm trying
for the world record in this game. Yes.
[Summoning Salt] Mitch is live streaming on an internet platform called Twitch.
Amazon bought Twitch for almost a billion dollars in 2014.
Now, millions of people broadcast their game play here every month.
And millions more tune in to watch.
Yo, Lambry, what's going on? Vindem 3.
Yo, future is wild. What's going on, guys?
How are you guys doing on this beautiful, beautiful Sunday?
[tense electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] Mitch has a Nintendo hooked up to an old-school CRT TV.
These are a must when playing retro games.
There's no input lag on a CRT,
so when you push a button, the game responds right away.
Everything is connected to Mitch's computer.
A camera is pointed at his face.
Input displays show the buttons he's pressing.
These are the splits
which can be used to keep track of his pace
against the world record.
And there's a chat,
so viewers can interact while he plays.
Nice.
Yeah, that's not so bad. Still, still the sub two-minute.
Yo, Winter Soldier.
Tier three sub for 14 months in a row.
Thank you so much, Winter Soldier.
If people like my content, they can subscribe to me,
just like anyone would subscribe to their local paper.
Ten bucks a month, and you get papers every other day or something.
It's the same with my channel on Twitch.
If you like my content,
you pay $4.99,
I get a portion of that every month.
Oh my gosh! Move your ass, Mario. Let's go. Come on.
Make it or break it.
[Summoning Salt] Mitch streams five to six days a week
for at least five hours at a time.
No.
[electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] Tonight, the game he's playing
is what's called a Kaizo ROM Hack.
No way, dude.
Oh, my God, I hate doors so much, dude.
Oh, my god.
[Summoning Salt] It's an unofficial variation ofMario
with completely new levels
reconstructed to be ridiculously difficult.
Yeah, get in that door. [grunts]
Finally.
Yo, Starline, what's going on?
Weee!
Whoa! That fish almost got me.
From the minute I go live, it almost is like a new form of television.
Look at that juicy gold.
More of an interactive television.
You like that, Bowser? Hmm?
[Summoning Salt] Mitch combines personality and world-class precision.
It's a big part of why his fans tune in
to watch him night after night.
What? First try and I didn't even take damage.
What? Oh, my God, dude.
Yo, thank you guys so much. Chat is going wild right now. Thank you.
Now, let's get another run going.
Thank you guys so much.
Right on.
[Summoning Salt] But as popular as Kaizo ROM Hacks are...
...Mitch always gets asked
about lowering his Warpless record
inSuper Mario Bros. 3.
Am I ever going back to SMB 3 Warpless?
Yes. We have to get the 49 in SMB 3 Warpless.
I'm right on the brink of it. I'm right there.
And that grind is gonna take a crap ton out of me.
You guys remember the last grind I did?
At the end, I was just zonked, man.
Oh, my fingers can't go anymore.
I want to get lower than 50 minutes.
The game is in control of my full potential in that category.
I could play for six months straight
and not even be given the chance.
That's how crazy something like this is.
That's what it is, man.
And it's way harder than it sounds.
So I have to just keep grinding, and grinding, and grinding.
And hopefully, it happens, but I'm going for it.
I want to achieve that goal.
That's one of the biggest goals I think in gaming.
That was it, guys. [exhales sharply]
[smacks lips] That is it.
Uh, I am done for the night. I'm going to, uh, sit back, relax and rest.
Get ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.
We're gonna grind this down. Hopefully, get the world record.
Good night, guys.
[groans]
So I made probably a little over $500 today.
Uh, something like that. So definitely a good day at the office.
To be better than everyone in the world at, at least something
at this point in time and where we are, that's so hard to do.
I want to keep pushing.
[suspenseful dramatic music]
[Summoning Salt] Times have undoubtedly gotten more electronic.
And human nature is to keep going faster.
We can use computers to map the optimal routes through games.
It's called a TAS. Or tool-assisted speedrun.
[grunting]
[Summoning Salt] And as speedrunning continues to advance,
it's become an integral part of studying games
to learn just how far they can be exploited.
But to perform the runs in real-time is different
and means different things to different people.
[dance music]
Speedrunning is the logical endpoint
of the desire to master video games.
Speedrunning is the philosophy
that says I can get a little bit better.
The time, the run is almost just a metric that you can judge yourself by.
I like to say that every world record is just a personal best.
And sometimes you're competing. But often times,
you're just trying to be a little bit better than you were yesterday.
Speedrunning is a philosophy almost.
I think, anyway.
[Omnigamer] One of the things that I'd like to point to is
that speedrunning is just choosing to optimize
the particular narrow problem of a video game.
And even in daily life, people try and do this in all sorts of different ways.
If you're going to the grocery store
and you have a parking lot full of cars,
you have to decide, "Okay,
am I going to try and get a spot close to the entrance?
Do I just say, 'Skip that' and park far away,
and have more walking time?"
For a speedrunner, you have to actually answer that question.
Is it better if I'm going to try and look for somewhere closer?
At what point do I lose out
if I'm gonna park farther away
if the probability of me finding somewhere close isn't great?
And then carry on from that. Other things that you start to think about.
Well, if I'm coming out with a cart,
it depends how close I am to a cart return.
And it just kind of goes further and further down the rabbit hole.
That is a speedrunning problem.
It's over. Ocarina Time is dead. Any% is done.
That's it. That's it.
[Narcissa] I think games end up
very understood, mechanically.
Speedrunning kind of breaks them down,
and looks at all their little pieces,
and puts it back together again,
and sees exactly what you can do with it.
[upbeat electronic music]
There's a difference between-- Yeah, it's big on Twitch.
You're running Fortnite.
World of Warcraft, League of Legends.
These modern esports, like games.
We're playing Super Mario Bros.
We're playing stuff from '80s and '90s.
And obviously modern games as well.
But we're very much like our own rock over here.
Maybe a planet at this point in the universe that is Twitch.
At the same time, nostalgia is a powerful thing.
Mariogames, Zeldagames, Mega Mangames,
they ring true for so many people that
that was their childhood.
Those are the games they grew up with.
So to be able to go back and watch someone
work really, really hard at that game
and then present it to you in a way
that you did not experience at all when you played it,
and in this super play fashion,
I think, as gamers, we love watching it.
I'm glad people wanna watch it. I'm glad there are more people
than just me and five other nerds.
We're trying to send the message that not only is speedrunning a genuine creative craft,
but also that it's more than just a source of entertainment or fun.
It's a passion. It's a career choice.
It's a lifestyle. It's a way of life.
Three, two, one, go
[cheering and applause]
So this is a cooperative game, but it's an asymmetric cooperative game.
[Skybilz] Speedrunning is probably as big of a thing
in my life as anything else right now,
and that's because I currently met my boyfriend through it.
All of my friends, also, speedrun.
Linkdead and Kakusho, I think, are the first ones we ever saw run this,
but also friends of ours, Tessleberry and BBQSauz,
uh, have also run this. This is, actually,
a relatively popular game for cooperative speedruns.
[Skybilz] To speedrun, you're gonna fail 99% of the time.
It's how you handle that as a person that determines
what type of speedrunner you are.
Yes! Thank you.
And it really teaches you something about yourself
that you may have never discovered otherwise.
Oh! That's close. All right. Just don't get hit. Don't get hit.
-Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Come on! -Time.
-Someone. Yes! -[applause]
-Time. -All right. Nice.
Nice run.
[YellowKillerBee] Speedrunning is just a hobby for me.
I actually own an advertising company.
And that's my full-time job. I have a family.
I have a lot of other responsibilities.
Once I found out that speedrunning was a thing
then I started watching more videos,
I found out Twitch existed.
Then I could watch videos any time
and eventually I thought,
"We-- Maybe, I should try it."
I really am anxious to start giving these times,
and so we're just gonna see how it goes.
I found out even if you don't have the top time,
it can still be really fun.
Although the first game that I ran,
Mickey Mania for Super Nintendo,
I ended up getting the world record.
Phew! That's it.
This is new world record.
So I did end up getting a top time.
But even if you don't have a top time, it's still a lot of fun.
[lighthearted music]
[Summoning Salt] Appreciation of video games runs deep.
And there are very few who rival GlitchCat.
[GlitchCat7] I have been collecting games all my life.
I really like Atari 2600. It's kind of the system I grew up with.
This is Chase the Chuck Wagon. This was only available
through the Purina Dog Food Corporation.
You had to actually mail in to get this game. It's absurdly bad,
like, don't play it. It's terrible.
Uh, but I have it. [chuckles]
It's-- And it's really rare.
[beeping]
[electronic music]
Even when the internet started being a thing,
it still wasn't really feasible
that someone would watch you play video games.
I mean, what? But then I think about it now and, like,
if that were a thing when I was a kid, I would have been all about it.
So I understand why the kids are all about it,
to have your favorite player that you can watch
and talk to them in real-time and get tips.
I didn't know how to beat a level.
I had to get the strategy guide
from the library and read it.
There's an old cartoon in the newspaper, The Far Side,
with Gary Larson, of a kid and he's sitting there,
this little nerdy kid playing video games.
His parents are so happy, and they're standing behind them,
and they're thinking about the want ads
from the future in the newspaper.
And all the want ads in the future say,
"Can you save the princess?
We need skilled men and women.
$10,000 a week, plus your own Ferrari."
They're picturing that someday their kids will grow up
to be a famous video game player.
The joke at the time in the comic strip was,
"That's not a real thing.
That's silly." Ha-ha! Joke's on you.
It actually kind of is.
[Super Mario World music playing]
I have played Super Mario World
since December 25th, 1991,
when I got my Super Nintendo
when I was four years old for Christmas,
that was the hot new thing that year.
Since that time, I have been pretty decently obsessed with being
really, really good at Super Mario World.
I have no idea why. I'm just a weird kid that read UFO books
and wanted to be a great Marioplayer someday.
And so, for the better part of my 31 years of life,
I have trained myself to play this game
to absurd degrees.
And finally, the regular game got so easy and so boring
that I had to start inventing hard stuff like this.
[upbeat electronic music]
I am a full-time streamer,
and I have been streaming full-time
for about three years now.
There we go.
On the stream, I speedrun
different games, mostly Super Mario, ROM Hacks.
That's kind of my main thing I play. We call it Kaizo.
Kaizo's a Japanese word meaning rearranged,
but it's come to be a colloquial term for very difficult Mario.
A ROM Hack is a modified version of an original game.
And someone with a computer can take all the code out of the game,
put it onto their computer
and then modify that code
to behave in any way that you want.
We're gonna pick up the shell.
And actually jump and surf on it like that.
And these hacks are really cool like that because they allow you to do things
that the original game would have never let you do.
Grabbed the red shell. Red shell goes under Yoshi's feet in the air.
Eat the green Koopa out of the air. Eat the second green Koopa out of the air.
Green shell off the pipe. This green shell
goes back to the left, green shell forward.
Bail off Yoshi to hit the on-off switch,
slides along the bridge down there.
Drop Yoshi in a pit. Come back up,
grab the green shell, goes up,
red shell goes forward.
Green shell goes into the pit
and it has three hits there.
It's all dead.
Purple Yoshi grabs the shell
out of the nook here, spits it up,
goes off the shell. Yellow Yoshi eats green shell,
juggles the Galoomba because he can stomp sand clouds.
ROM Hacking provides an avenue
for players to get a new experience
with the same old favorite game
that they love in the same old physics.
But with new twists in the level,
and it also gives really experienced players
a chance to see how good they really are.
And now we got the purple Yoshi, so spit the shell out.
The spring goes below his feet. Spring-- Ooh!
There are very, very few people on Earth
that can play to this kind of level,
um, just because of the sheer amount of precision involved.
And the really, really, really solid control that you need to have
over your character just being able to jump.
For example, jump that high, jump a little jump, a big jump.
Uh, having that kind of control over the character
is something that takes years and years and years to master.
[mellow music]
I work dish at the restaurant. I was a line cook.
I was a professional carpet cleaner,
going to office buildings and cleaned the carpets at night.
I worked at a Pizza Hut,
I worked at a factory that processed hospital laundry.
My job was to stand in front of a machine that folds laundry
and feed it laundry to be folded all day.
That was it. That was my job.
And that was boring...
[chuckles] and stupid.
[distorted calm music]
We had an agreement that, okay, I'm going to try this, and if it doesn't work,
obviously, I'm gonna go back to the factory.
I don't wanna fit into that world
where I just have a job and I just go in and do that.
I want to be doing exactly what I'm doing. I can talk to people.
I can share my life with them. I can hear their stories.
I can play my games for people and teach them tricks and stuff.
It's honestly is everything I could have ever wanted.
[distorted calm music continues]
[upbeat music]
[Summoning Salt] Just north of Portland,
a speedrunner named GrandPooBear
recently got signed by Red Bull.
He's the first speedrunner to achieve this level of mainstream sponsorship.
Oh, buttmunch. Okay, I get this section now.
There we go.
Every time someone ask me how I got my name,
I try to make up a different story.
Oh, that was it.
I'm GrandPooBear and that's my name.
And that means-- It's just an internet name.
All right, let's do this.
[music increases]
I think I need to hold jump.
I started streaming because... I was a snowboarder before this.
That's what I did for a living. I taught people snowboarding
and tried to win competitions, and I got hurt.
I got hit by an out-of-control skier.
Was in the hospital for six months.
Had a whole bunch of things.
Almost died. Yada, yada, yada,
It took like my favorite thing from me.
My second favorite thing in the world always was video games.
I had always played video games growing up.
The next winter rolled around. I was really, really, really bored.
One of my buddy was like, "Hey, watch me play Halo
on this website called Twitch."
And it just, like, clicked.
I was like, "Holy God!"
There's this whole community of people nerding out
all the time that I didn't know about.
It was immediate.
Oh, spin jump. Okay.
Just more and more people who kept watching and joining the community.
And then I sat down, and talked to my wife,
and we decided even if it's only for six months,
you got to give this a chance.
Now, here we are three years later,
and it's bigger than anything we could have ever thought.
It's bought us a house.
Video games has given me everything.
We just bought this house like a month ago. So we're still moving in.
We're still getting used to all the things in it.
[mellow music]
We can go walk. Go walk to the park.
-Yeah. Yeah. -[baby cooing]
I was never a corny dude. And then he came along,
and I'm just one of those corny dads,
I love it.
[Gina] Red Bull surprised him to tell him,
and I can't keep a secret from him or really anybody.
[chuckles] And so,
they had me looped in for, like,
two weeks, and it was the hardest two weeks.
I felt like I couldn't talk to him.
-Yeah. -They didn't want to ruin the surprise.
Right, guys. [shushes]
We're outside of GrandPooBear's house right now.
You know what this means? He's coming to the team.
I get to give him this hat.
They flew out my favorite snowboarder in the world.
Like somebody I just utterly looked up to you.
Uh, and had him surprise me
in giving my Red Bull hat 'cause that's, like, what the thing is.
They give you your, your hat. That's like when you officially, like, squaded up.
[John] Hey, bro,
-Whoa! -Looks like you need a new hat.
Whoa!
-Dude! Holy [beep], dude. -Where's my controller?
-Oh, my God. -Yeah, what's up, bro?
-Oh, my golly, due. -Bro, yeah, welcome to the team.
Oh, my God, dude!
In walks John Jackson.
Holding a Red Bull hat, and I knew what he was doing.
But it was just like such a full-circle experience for me.
-Yo, look, look. -[John] Look at this.
-Kid's got a new hat. -I got a new hat.
-I got a new hat right now. -[John] Yeah.
Yo, this is John Jackson, by the way. Hold on, Like,
-get-- this is-- He's, he's like... -Hey.
-...one of the greatest snowboarders of all time. -What's up? Oh, man, thank you.
Oh, my God, like--
Um, I'm nerding out right now.
You guys have no idea. This is like a lot of... [chuckles]
Sponsorship in speedrunning is very new in general.
No company has ever gone all in, the way Red Bull is going all in.
Right, I'm gonna go live.
Hey, everybody.
Chronic Quad. Thank you for 14 months.
Hebrew Lantern, 23 months.
Almost two years. That is a long ass time, man.
Darnzee, thank you for 12 months.
[Summoning Salt] Like GlitchCat, GrandPooBear plays a lot of Kaizo.
Two of the most popular hacks are even named after him.
You like my beard? It's gotta go.
It's, it's-- You know what it is?
It's a "I've been in Vegas for...
[chuckling] for two days beard and haven't fully recovered yet."
I, I went to Vegas clean shaven, and,
and now I'm, I'm growing, like, the "I didn't sleep at all two days beard."
Yo, I just wanna say thank you guys so much for coming out here.
Hold on a minute. I'll get in the camera shot. Thank you, guys, so much
for coming out here to GrandPooBear's Speedrun Sessions in Charlotte.
I do a speedrun tour now
called GrandPooBear Speedrun Sessions,
where we go to different barcades
which is like an arcade inside a bar.
And we do speedrun demos and those have been going incredibly well,
and I try to do at least one or two of those a month now.
-Give it up for GrandPooBear. -Woo! Yeah!
[GrandPooBear] We just did it in Las Vegas, Nevada.
We had it at the MGM Grand.
The number of people that said this was their first time
seeing live speedrunning, like, that's what I wanna do.
I wanna bring speedrunning to everybody.
So you guys all to get to see a lot.
So thank you guys again. Give yourselves a big round
of applause for being a dope-ass crowd.
[lively electronic music]
Streaming is everything in speedrunning.
Oh, and then, then-- Okay. Okay.
This five-six hour live stream will basically be broken down
into two or three half-hour YouTube videos.
Oh! Come on!
My YouTube videos do anywhere
between 50,000 to 200,000 views a day,
depending on the game.
They reach people in 79 countries
or something wild like that.
I really, really enjoyed that level.
That was really, really great.
I have almost 8000 paying Twitch subscribers right now.
So they pay five bucks a month. Twitch takes a little cut, and I get the rest.
So roundabouts like the worst month, it would probably be like
10K now for me. And the best months are,
I think I did 40 recently.
I'm so grateful that I get to be comfortable. I've never been comfortable in my life.
I really appreciate it. Hope you guys have a wonderful night.
Peace. Bye.
[tense electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] Early game developers could never have imagined
how far speedrunners would push their creations.
It's given many games, an extended life,
by creating a world that was never really intended.
[birds chirping]
-[baby cries] -[GrandPooBear] I like that one.
-Are you tired? Yes, that's a good one. -That's a good one.
-That's a good one of all three of us. -Are you tired?
[Summoning Salt] Today, Poo's agent from Red Bull, is coming over to talk
about last weekend speedrunning event in Las Vegas.
-Hey, bud. How's it going? -[GrandPooBear] How's it going?
So I see you got the controller already. Ready to go.
[indistinct chatter]
Okay.
So, dude, within 24 hours we had a recap from MGM.
Here, I'll read you the quote 'cause she emailed it to me.
-She was like, by the way. -Oooh!
-Oooh! I like that. -She said,
"I spent the later part of the night chatting
with the gentleman who's in charge of esports for the MGM.
We had a really nice chat. But as he was leaving,
he turned to one of his friends and said,
'This is about ten times better than I expected it to be.
And I came in with high expectations.'"
I mean, okay.
[soft tense music]
He's like, "Man," he's like, "whoa, what is like
the all-in budget?
What would you guys spend?" I was like,
"$12,100... [chuckles]
and we flew in a dude from Poland," and he's like... [slaps table]
"Get up, you know it."
Okay. He, like, fully went in.
-Oh, wow. -[Aaron] Like they have,
how much revenue they made
-against the reach. -[GrandPooBear] Nice.
Three hundred people is more than I ever thought
would ever come to any one of these when we first...
Like, I always thought it would be, like, a 50 to 150 tops event.
-So I'm really pumped. -[Aaron] I mean, it's kind of the average for all of them.
[GrandPooBear] So far, yeah.
-It makes me happy. -[Aaron] Not bad, not bad.
[Aaron] I kind of think like, "Are we gonna stumble across
some gigantic speedrunning community, like Texas, for example?"
Is there really-- I mean, of like, rough ideas of where the speedrunners live
or where there's a group of people. But, like,
what if you go to Texas and there's like 2000 people
-just cramming through. You know what I mean? -Sure, that'd be wild. Yeah.
Like, where is the hidden speedrun community?
Is there any way to know, other than just doing
session after session to figure out like,
"Whoa, we got a crazy response in, like,
Minnesota or Chicago..."
Or Germany, man. That's where it is.
-Yeah? -[GrandPooBear] Yeah, seriously, Germany is the spot.
Germany is obsessed with speedrunning.
Even if you look at, like, my YouTube numbers
it's like America, Germany, Canada, U.K.
-Really? -Yeah, Germany's number two, like, easy.
-Yeah, it's, it's crazy. -We can make that happen.
[upbeat music]
[woman] What is up, Summer Games Done Quick?
[applause and cheering]
[man 1] Really scary room here, using the high frame,
-skip to the spikes. -[man 2] Really nice.
[commotion]
[GrandPooBear] Games on Quick is the pinnacle.
It's the biggest event we have.
[man 3] Who's doing All Forts? Is that--
Me, Mitch, Haxor, and Lhasa.
[Summoning Salt] Games Done Quick is a biannual,
speedrunning charity marathon.
[commentator 1] Looking good.
-[commentator 1] Very nice. Nice fight. -[commentator 2] Yeah.
[Summoning Salt] Speedrunning happens around the clock
for seven days straight.
They broadcast themselves on Twitch,
and people from around the world tune in and donate.
[woman] We had a $500 donation for Colto,
says, "Shout out to the Mega Man community
being such an amazing group of people."
[GrandPooBear] As big as Fortniteis, as big as League of Legendsis,
as big as Dotais,
Games Done Quick, our viewership numbers rival at all.
It's our Super Bowl. There's really no other way to put it.
It's our Super Bowl. Twice a year.
[indistinct chatter]
Today's a big day. Today is a big day for me.
I didn't know how blue it turned out.
It's supposed to be really blue, but it's actually kind of, like,
it's got a little turquoise-green,
lit the light on it and it's funny.
It's fun. I like it.
You spend a lot of time preparing for a day like this and...
I'm naturally someone with stage fright.
I, um, I'm not good with, um,
like presentations in school. I actually used to skip a lot of school
anytime I'd have to do, uh, a presentation in front of the class.
And video games are the only thing
that can get me in front of a large crowd
and, and allows me to perform. But every time I do it,
I get the same nerves. The heart's pumping.
It's hard to sleep at night before.
You go up there and Speedrunners
like the reset button a lot. But you don't get that.
You, you start it up and you get one run.
And however it goes is-- That's, that's all you get.
That's it. You get one chance.
[lively electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] GlitchCat is here for a highly anticipated
blind Kaizo relay race.
[GlitchCat7] This is the first time
that a race this big
on a Kaizo Mario Hack has been put on for people.
[Summoning Salt] Eight of the best Kaizo Mario players in the world
will race in custom made brand new levels
that they've never seen before and have to solve in real-time.
[GlitchCat7] Do you know the mechanics and physics well enough
to just look at a jump and do it.
And look at some kind of bounce, look at an angle and just do it.
So it's a lot like piano sight reading or musical sight reading,
and the instrument in this case is the game.
GDQ has the potential to just bring out the absolute best in people,
and I like that a lot.
[slow paced beats]
-[man 4] Okay, I got it. -[man 5] There we go.
[people cheering]
[Summoning Salt] But how did we get here?
And what does speedrunning have to do
with raising millions of dollars for charity?
We're missing Panga and ButchCat, so...
Hey, I'm Miss Kratic Eratic.
-I'm gonna be your donation cheerer. -Awesome.
-So nice to meet you. -It's really cool to meet you
in real life. You're like one of two streamers I watch.
Oh, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
[Summoning Salt] The truth is that none of this would be happening
if it weren't for a gathering that took place ten years ago
in one kid's mom's basement.
That kid was Mike Uyama.
[Mike] When we first wanted to do a charity event,
streaming was not very commonplace,
and the place for Speedrunners to hang out online
was Speed Demos Archive.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] Speed Demos Archive is a website
that originally began as an archive
of quick playthroughs in 1998.
To go back even further, no one can say
with absolute certainty when speedrunning started.
Since any time someone tried to race through a video game...
-[electronic voice] Get set... -[gunshot]
...technically, you could say they were speedrunning.
But many points are in the early '90s,
when a game calledDoom came along and changed everything.
For speedrunning, it wasn't the gameplay that was so important.
It was the fact that it included a rudimentary way to record gameplay
through a system called demo files.
The way demo files work is the game records your inputs while you're playing
and then the game's engine can play them back after you finish.
Essentially recreating your run.
The demo files were small and could be shared quickly over the Internet.
So now players had a verifiable proof of their runs.
Leaderboard started popping up and speedrunning was on its way.
[electronic music]
By the mid 2000s, Speed Demos Archive
had expanded to include many more games.
Mike Uyama had taken over as the site's administrator, and, in 2010,
he organized their first live events,
called Classic Games Done Quick
to showcase Speedrunners.
He planned to live stream their runs
from a gaming convention called MAGFest.
[man 6 speaking inaudibly]
-[man 7] Yeah! -[man 6] We're having a blast!
-Woo! -[laughter]
[man 6] Enthusiasm.
[Summoning Salt] But when they tried to start streaming,
it didn't work.
We have to discuss this really badly right now.
[Mike] Their Internet was very bad DSL
that had about half a megabit of upload.
Yeah, well, this guy's working on a Linksys router
and this guy's working on a D-Link router.
So one would think that between the two of them, we could have,
you know, like that-- use that as an antenna to access the hotel's wireless network.
Run a long cable in here and then voilà, we have internet.
SDA, optimistic all the time.
[Mike] After a lot of deliberating and a lot of confusion
and being really unsure what to do, to be honest,
we decided to pack it up at MAGFest
and then go to my mom's basement to try and stream our event.
[man 8] Oh, why don't we try putting Kung Fu in there and see?
-[man 9] Yeah, can we put Kung Fu in there? -Yeah.
-[indistinct] Kung Fu in there. -Okay, you know,
I have rubbing alcohol and Q tips.
I can get those.
[Sinister1] Thankfully, the main organizer
of Classic Games Done Quick, Mike Uyama,
happened to live close by.
And we were able to transition the event to,
uh, the basement of... [chuckles] of his home.
Um... Oh! It's up.
-All right, here we go. -Let's see how, let's see how he does.
[Susan] When they told me that they were going to have this event,
I could understand wanting to meet the people that you have been
connected with online, but I could never figure out
why they thought people would pay money to charity.
Because they were having video games online.
-It just didn't compute. -[Mike chuckles]
[AndrewG] All the people that were there were really into it.
There were all the people who were really serious about it.
We decided that we wanted to raise money for charity, you know?
We didn't want to just do it just for the sake of doing it.
[Summoning Salt] They announced that all donations
would go towards a humanitarian organization
fighting global poverty called CARE.
[man 10] We have a good connection,
but we don't want too many people
-watching a stream from here. -[man 11] Yes. Yeah.
[Summoning Salt] And then the best gamers
at their respective games
started speedrunning.
-[man 12] That was sick. Good stuff, man. -[laughing]
[Summoning Salt] It's almost like they said,
look how much time and dedication
we've put into understanding these games.
BrownScales gonna try to pull the ladder glitch.
[cheering]
[Summoning Salt] They had done it with no hope for pay.
There was no money in speedrunning at the time.
-Awesome. Thank you, thank you. -[man 13] Nice. You got it. Right.
[Summoning Salt] It was purely passion, and something about that
resonated with a larger, untapped community.
[cheering and applause]
[Sinister1] That event was really the first time
that people kind of realized, "I think we have something here."
We raised over $10,000,
which was way beyond
what people thought was gonna be raised.
It was a no-brainer that, you know, this should be done again.
And that's all for now. Uyama out.
-[laughter] -Yeah.
[Summoning Salt] In winter of the following year,
they organized their second event.
They expanded to include newer games
and called it Awesome Games Done Quick.
This is insanely hard.
-Yes! -[cheering and applause]
[Summoning Salt] Enthusiasts from all over
gathered together to show off intricate time saves
like the jump role inDonkey Kong Country.
[cheering and applause]
[man] What the beepwas that?
[Summoning Salt] To everyone's amazement,
this time, they raised over $52,000
for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
-Oh, no! -Oh, yes!
-[cheering and applause] -All right!
[Summoning Salt] From here on out,
they ran the marathon twice a year.
They called the next one Summer Games Done Quick.
[cheering and applause]
It was clear there were people all across the world
interested in the high level execution of these games.
Oh, you went too far. Oh, don't do it. Yes.
-Yes. -That was insane.
[applause]
[Summoning Salt] And the broader community started taking shape.
This guy is really hard to get in one hit.
It's like a one frame thing.
[cheering and applause]
And after that 2012 event, we're on Twitch at that time,
uh, which had been around for a year,
and, uh, the viewership had gone
significantly higher than ever before.
[upbeat music]
[Summoning Salt] Twitch was a game-changer for speedrunning.
One of the first to blow up was an avid runner named Narcissa Wright,
formerly known as Cosmo.
12:03. Really, really good time.
[Summoning Salt] Narcissa developed incredibly in-depth strategies
for beating what many considered to be the best video game ever made.
The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time.
-Got it. -[crowd chuckles]
[applause]
[Summoning Salt] Another popular runner at this time named siglemic
started routinely drawing thousands of viewers
watching Live on Twitch.
He was one of the biggest stars on the platform.
But he never turned his camera on.
He would grind for hours and spoke very little.
But hisSuper Mario 64 gameplay was second to none.
[siglemic] Oh, my God. That was really the world record.
[chuckles]
Thank you, guys. Thank you.
[Summoning Salt] When siglemic showed up to perform live
on camera for the first time ever,
the intrigue was palpable as fans finally got to see
the wizard behind the curtain.
-Yeah. -[cheering and applause]
[Summoning Salt] Lots of people talk about 2013
and 2014 as being the golden years of speedrunning.
And time.
That's a new world record.
[cheering and applause]
[Summoning Salt] The community was big enough to be legit.
But small enough to still function like a family.
Then they hit a milestone.
[man 14] Let's go.
-One million dollars. -Yeah!
[cheering and applause]
[Summoning Salt] It was the first time they raised a million dollars
at a single event.
[hooting]
Just like that, Games Done Quick had become a fundraising juggernaut.
[soft tense music]
[Sinister1] It's just grown, and grown,
and grown, and grown every year in terms of how much
money is raised, how many people are attending,
how many viewers are watching,
how many games are shown.
There's no end in sight.
[woman] We're almost there, guys. We got it. Come on!
-[cheering] -We did it!
Two million.
[Summoning Salt] By the end of 2018,
Games Done Quick had raised
more than sixteen million dollars
for Doctors Without Borders
and the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
[Susan] I just thank God that this is
such a boon to human kind.
-Excuse me. -[both chuckles]
-Sorry. -Okay, mom.
-Thanks, Mom. -You're welcome. You're Welcome.
[Summoning Salt] In addition of all the money raised for charity,
GDQ events have also become a launchpad
for runners trying to break into the scene full-time.
-Time. -[cheering and applause]
[lighthearted music]
[woman] That was a 48:42.
-Woo! -Nice.
[woman] Fantastic.
Give it up to this man here.
-The Mexican Runner. -Thank you everybody.
Thank you so much. Uh, I'm sorry.
[Kasumi] GDQ is an opportunity for the runners
to burst out of the gate with their own personality.
We've definitely had runners
that that may not have been known before GDQ.
But their commentary is fantastic.
I'm gonna get behind him.
That makes him take more time turning around before he goes phase two.
Just back out for the AOE.
[Kasumi] Their speedruns skills are sharp,
and they create this amazing content
that people are really excited to see.
[cheering]
[Summoning Salt] That brings us to 2019.
It's the fifth day of Summer Games Done Quick,
and they've already raised more than $800,000.
[woman] I have a $500 donation.
[Summoning Salt] It's the fastest the GDQ
-has ever raised this amount of money. -Ho!
[Summoning Salt] And in terms of what people wanna see,
Kaizo speedruns are at the top of many lists.
What format can we expect today from these runners?
Um, basically, it's gonna be just the Kaizo shenanigans all out.
There's some potential to struggle on some bits.
Uh, there's definitely some places
where it can play the different racer strengths.
Y'all can be ready for some crazy stuff.
I'll just leave it at that.
We're gonna count down from five, four, three,
two, one, go.
Again, this is a blind race. None of them have seen any of these levels before.
[lively music]
[crowd] Oh!
[Summoning Salt] The pace of a relay format is intense.
When runners die, they pass the controller to their teammate.
[crowd] Oh!
[Summoning Salt] The first team to get to the end
of the seventh level, wins the race.
GlitchCat is the first one to advance.
[commentator 1] Both teams still working on that first screen.
-As you can see, this is not-- -[commentator 2] Oh!
[cross talk]
[commentator 2] All right, GlitchCat.
[cheering]
[Summoning Salt] These levels were made by members of the Kaizo community.
They used the physics and mechanics ofSuper Mario World.
You see that hitbox?
[Summoning Salt] But they've coded in their own characters and challenges.
[commentator 1] This second screen is giving the players a lot of trouble right now.
[cheering and applauding]
Yeah! Yes! Yes!
Yes! Let's go.
[commentator 2] Such a close race.
[Summoning Salt] Kaizo is a combination of old and new.
Oh!
[Summoning Salt] And to watch these levels get conquered
by the world's best in real time...
You might be able to cycle and respawn that, but it'd would be slow.
[crowd] Oh!
...it's at the cutting edge of speedrunning.
-[commentator 2] There we go, Glitch. -[commentator 1] Oh, Glitch.
[cross talk]
[commentator 2] He's in there.
All tied up here.
Who's making some moves here? There it is.
[commentator 1] Poo trying to tie it up for his team right now.
[commentator 2] And that's the checkpoint.
[Summoning Salt] All eight runners had their moments.
[commentator 1] Right now, basically tied up going here into this final level.
[cheering and applauding]
[Summoning Salt] But after almost an hour of racing...
[GlitchCat7] Oh, come on.
...it all comes down to which team
can knock off four pink triceratops first,
[commentator 1] Who can count to four?
[commentator 2] I couldn't think of a better way to end the race.
-[commentator 1] Oh, Tofu! -[commentator 2] One more to go.
-Going to the-- -[commentator 1] Two more down for Juz.
-[commentator 2] Oh, and Tofu-- -[commentator 1] The first team out.
[exclaiming]
[commentator 1] Tofu pulls it off.
-[commentator 2] Wow. -[commentator 1] Let's give it up,
ladies and gentlemen.
[commentator 2] Wow.
What a race. What a race.
-[GlitchCat7] Good game. Yeah. -That was so much fun.
Yeah. That was-- The levels were insane.
-That was awesome. That was just-- -The levels were insane.
[GlitchCat7] And look at this crowd. Look at the energy.
Look at the money that we raised for charity.
Look at how the community came together to do this.
This is like one of the biggest Kaizo ROM Hack event that there ever has been.
And, like, the most people watching a race like this at once,
I honestly think this is the beginning of something really cool.
That was awesome. I played all right.
I made myself happy, and that's, that's good.
[crowd cheering and applauding]
[tense electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] In the practice room, Mitch is warming up
for aSuper Mario Brothers 3 race.
In a category called All Forts,
meaning runners have to complete
all the fortresses before beating the game.
Nice.
[Summong Salt] Mitch's world record is just over 45 minutes,
and his strategy revolves around his use of an item called the Hammer Suit.
In the All Forts, you get what's known as the hammer suit.
And you just have to make a lot of very precise shots with the hammers.
And if you don't, you'll either take damage or you'll die.
And if that happens, you only get one hammer suit. So once you get in world seven,
you have to keep it until the end of the game.
So if you lose it, you're, you're kind of screwed.
It's gonna be nerve racking.
One of the other racers is not gonna use the hammer suit.
Because it, it does take a long time to learn,
and you do have to change how you actually play some of the levels.
Yeah.
As long as it goes like that
in the race, I should be all right.
[commentator 2] We've got the world record holder of this category,
MitchFlowerPower coming in 45:25.
[cheering]
And finally on my right, the people's champ,
he's here to stomp out the competition, both literally and figuratively.
-Give it up for GrandPooBear, everybody. -[cheering]
GrandPooBear, is almost, in a way, the LeBron James
of the speedrunning community
from a streaming and a business standpoint.
He's got a massive fan base.
And, at the same time, he's a very humble person about the whole thing.
[Summoning Salt] In 2018, Poo and Mitch traded the world record
back and forth in this category.
[GrandPooBear] That is a new All Forts world record.
Mitch is gonna get it back soon.
Like, this is going to be fun. This is fun for me.
[Summoning Salt] But in a race with four world-class runners,
anything can happen.
[suspenseful electronic music]
[commentator 1] All right, Lawso is going for it.
Oh, he gets it! What a save!
-Such an easy trick. -Yeah!
[suspenseful music]
[Summoning Salt] GrandPooBear got out to an early lead.
[commentator 1] So we see Poo kind of hanging on the left for a second
to hopefully build the speed, does get it.
And now, let's see if these fish cooperate, they did, very nice.
[Summoning Salt] By World six, Mitch led the way.
But Haxor is right behind him.
And, at this point, it's still anyone's race.
[commentator 2] Haxor and Mitch both taking some intentional damage there.
Being small is very important for this trick.
[Summoning Salt] The trick coming up that he's referring to
was mentioned in Nintendo Power magazine back in 1990.
As small Mario, if runners can manage to hit a specific pixel on the wall
and jump again at just the right time,
they're able to get to the top of the blocks of ice.
This means they skip having to go down the pipe
to play through the entire level
and instead can move right to the end of the stage.
It's a trick that saves around 25 seconds in the speedrun,
but can be very difficult to pull off under pressure.
[commentator 1] And Mitch gets there in first try. Very nice.
-[commentator 2] He read-- -[commentator 1] Haxor gets there in first try as well.
[commentator 1] These guys had the lifetime Nintendo power subscription,
I guess. Holly molly.
-Unreal. -[commentator 2] Come on, Poo.
[commentator 1] See if Pooh can match. Oh, he hit the pixels.
Did you see that little stunner? That means he got it.
Oh, he's getting it. He's just gotta get that one frame.
[commentator 2] It's a very tough job.
[commentator 1] Yeah, very, very tough.
-[commentator 1] There it is. Very nice. -Yeah.
[cheerings and applauding]
[Summoning Salt] Mitch, Haxor, and Poo,
each picked up the hammer suit in World seven,
But as is often the case withMario 3 runs,
it all comes down to who gets lucky at the infamous Hands.
[music continues]
[commentator 1] Mitch getting out with just a Hand.
Haxor getting grabbed by the second one.
And so now, all of a sudden, Poo is was right behind Haxor.
So that's kind of exactly how it shows
of how these Hands can really have their say in this, in this run.
-[commentator 1] Oh, no. -[commentator 2] Oh, no.
[tense electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] With Poo losing a life
and Haxor getting pulled in by all three hands.
The rest of the race is smooth sailing for Mitch.
[commentator 1] Very nice.
Now, if you blink, you'll miss it.
This hammer kill is very quick,
and he's done it.
-[Mitch] Time. -[cheering and applauding]
You were doing so freaking good, man.
I just-- I don't know what happened. Like I did this full jump,
and it was just like I forgot what the hand was. It was...
[Summoning Salt] With almost a million dollars raised and still three days to go,
SGDQ is on pace to raise more than ever before.
[screams]
-[GrandPooBear] Hey, man. -[cross talk]
-You've basically got me. -Oh, thank you.
Yeah, I know that name, dude. Yeah, dude.
Got him, added to the collection.
Added to the collection. That's right.
-I love you, man. -[Mitch] Thanks, dude.
[Summoning Salt] It's hard not to get caught up in the idea
that something special is happening here.
That a strong community has formed
around a group of gamers who found their people.
[man] What an awesome day.
Way better than I anticipated.
-Thank you very much. -Right on.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Mitch] Hey.
-[Kailee] Hi. -[Mitch] How's it going?
[Kailee] Oh, my God, it was so fun to watch.
-Right? -You did so good.
Thank you. I definitely played
a lot better than I thought I was going to.
-[Kailee] It was so fun to watch. -Right?
I hope a lot of people were watching.
I d-- What was the view cap?
[Kailee] It was, uh, I think, 140,000.
[whispering] Wow! [normal voice] That's a lot.
-Um... -[Kailee] That was so awesome!
[birds chirping]
The past year has been a little bit different than usual.
I've actually had to kind of cut back a little bit on the gaming
just because I've had some different things going on.
[soft dramatic music]
I've got a job recently as a truck driver.
It doesn't leave a whole lot of time
for the gaming that I like to do.
Yeah, it's nice being married, finally.
Um, I've been, I've been with my wife.
We actually met freshman year of high school.
Sometimes I joke with people that I knew Andrew before he was famous,
uh, before he had any world records,
or things of that nature,
because, clearly, I married him for his fame.
My wife, Laura, she's very supportive of my gaming.
I don't think it would make sense for me to give up gaming
or give up speedrunning by any means.
But I do think there are times when
it needs to take a backseat to other things.
I'm in the process of buying a house,
and maybe when I get the house,
I'll have time to work on Super Mario Bros.again.
My work, it has-- had been a lot of hours. It's been...
It's been tricky to find time to do anything besides work.
I don't think this is my career, long-term,
uh, truck driving.
[sighs] I think there's probably something else out there for me.
[soft melancholic music]
[Summoning Salt] Another reason Andrew hasn't been able to devote as much time to gaming
is that six months ago, his family was struck by tragedy.
My dad was hit by a car,
and he suffered some really extensive injuries.
He's had a really rough recovery.
Um, he first few weeks, we still didn't know if he was really gonna make it.
Uh, you know, we didn't know if, for the first few months,
whether he was even gonna-- if-- whether he was gonna be paralyzed,
or what, what the real outcome was gonna be.
I took a break from speedrunning largely due to that.
I was able to be there for him.
It's only recently I've been in the snicker.
'Cause I started with the wheelchair,
then went to the walker, and then went to the cane.
This is the first week I've been able to put my foot
on the sneaker without support.
My foot will always be screwed up, but I'll be able to walk on it.
-So I'm happy about that. You know? -Yeah.
[Roger] I'm actually happier since the accident
just to sit around and kind of evaluate
-the important things in life. -Right.
You know, what's important to you?
Is it money? Is it a car?
Is it this? Is it that?
I find those are nice things,
but your family and your health,
and the things that you do, and how you treat people, and how you view life
is really the most important, you know?
And that you have a positive effect on people, like you do, you know?
You exude, you have that thing about you
that people wanna be around you.
-They wanna know more about you. -[AndrewG chuckles]
They wanna follow you on your gaming progress and stuff.
-That's great. That really is awesome. -[AndrewG] Yeah.
Definitely when I was little, like, I was pretty...
I don't know, a lot different than I am now,
-I guess is kind of, like... -[Roger] Oh.
-You were such an introvert. It's like... -[AndrewG] Yeah, I mean--
...people would say hi to you. I mean, you'd be civil and everything,
-but you'd be like "Oh, hi,", you know, and that would be it. -Yeah.
[Roger] It'd be the extent of the conversation.
But then you, you started coming here and talking,
like, really deep thoughts, and I'm like...
I started being a lot more social and...
-I don't know. I-- [chuckles] -'Cause he met me.
-Yes, exactly. -[Roger] Because he met you.
-Of course, Laura. We know. -No, I, I don't know.
I think gaming definitely contributed to me
becoming more extroverted, you know, a little bit.
I talked a lot on the forums, the Twin Galaxies
and Speed Demos archive forums.
And it was nice to meet a bunch of people
that were doing the same kind of thing that I was doing.
You know, I was mostly at work 'cause I worked off shifts,
but still, I remember you being up awake at late
on the nights that I was around and I'd be like...
-[AndrewG laughing] -..."Oh, my God,
is this kid ever gonna go to bed?"
And then you'd be fine the next day and acting normal.
I'm like, "Okay, he was up all day yesterday.
All night. And now he's up, and 'Hey, how you doing?'"
And I'm like, "I don't know. How are you doing?"
I played more than I'd like to admit I did. [chuckles]
I wanted to be the best. That was a lot of it when I first started.
[melancholic music]
I feel like I definitely did miss a lot of the...
You know, I did get into streaming,
but I felt like I'd already kind of done my stuff.
By 2010, 2011, which is when streaming really started taking off,
that was really when I felt like I had accomplished
kind of everything I wanted to do with speedrunning.
As far as like what my initial goals were,
I got the fastest time in Super Mario Bros. 1.
And then, I, I got the fastest time in Super Mario Bros. 2.
And then I got the fastest time in Super Mario World,
which is the Super Nintendo one.
Then Super Mario Bros. 3.
And then finally, I got the Japanese Mario, too,
-the last levels. And-- -Wow.
And that was, that was my goal.
-To get, to someday have gotten each one. -Yeah.
-And I'm the only person that's ever done that.
I mean, it's hard not to be jealous
of the 16-year-old kid that just won $3 million in Fortnite.
-I know. But you know what? -And, and, but then I think--
And sometimes, I think to myself,
"Well, maybe, if, right when Fortnitestarted,
maybe if I had played it nonstop, nonstop, nonstop, maybe I'd be that guy."
But you know, I'm not really into, I'm not...
That's not a game I really care about.
-[Roger] Yeah. -It's not really...
You know, I didn't have any interest in it.
[Summoning Salt] AndrewGs fastest time atSuper Mario Bros.
is less than two seconds off the current world record.
But even if he never gets back to that place,
his legacy is cemented in time forever.
[AndrewG] You have different stages in your life.
This stage of my life, I need to be there for my family.
Speedrunning will always be there.
Anybody that knows you loves you.
That's true. I mean, really, 'cause you're a good kid.
[birds chirping]
[tense electronic music]
[indistinct chatter]
[Summoning Salt] Back in Minnesota,
it's the final night of the week-long
Summer Games Done Quick, 2019.
And lots of money is being raised.
[man shouting] Let's go!
[cheering]
Feels great. It's the earliest we've ever hit $2 million.
I'm, I'm pretty much speechless.
I, you know, I was expecting this marathon to do well,
but not this well. [laughs]
[fastattc] It's amazing that these games are still being improved
so long after they've been released.
[commotion]
Fresh set of eyes will come and look at a game
and, and find something that somehow got overlooked
by hundreds and hundreds of speedrunners.
[YellowKillerBee] Thank you for all of those
generous donations that keep pushing us.
[YellowKillerBee] I like to consider it like multiple levels of nerd culture,
because you have, like, people that play video games,
and then, people who watch other people play video games,
and then people who play video games really fast.
Awesome!
Come on!
[YellowKillerBee] Each game has its own community,
and sometimes there's even microcommunities within it,
like, people who run different categories of a certain game.
But, overall, when we come to an event like this,
I feel like the sense of community comes from, like,
we all have a common interest.
[woman] Now let's get that $3 million.
-Hype! -[audience chanting] Three! Three! Three!
Three! Three! Three! Three! Three! Three! Three! Three!
[all cheering]
[Summoning Salt] GDQ's record for money raised at one event
is $2,425,000.
But tonight, they're taking it to the next level.
[woman] Come on! Come on!
[cheering]
[woman] Oh, my God, guys!
You guys are so amazing.
[Kasumi] We're going to go ahead and read our grand total now, which is
$3,003,839
raised for Doctors Without Borders.
Thank you so much.
[all chanting] GDQ! GDQ! GDQ!
GDQ! GDQ! GDQ! GDQ...
[soft instrumental music]
[Summoning Salt] There's no doubt,
sometimes speedrunning can feel hopeless.
There's never any guarantee that you'll find what you're looking for.
Some people look for a while, but move on.
Maybe you can think of speedrunners as the ones who like to just keep looking.
[birds chirping]
Gotta warm the hands, man,
It's the most important thing.
They are our medium through which we play our video games.
If you don't take care of your hands, you can't speedrun well.
[video game chiming]
My name is Allan Alvarez. My Twitch name is Cheese.
I was born in Venezuela.
At three years old, I moved to Trinidad in the Caribbean.
Yeah, this is what...
..."back home in Trinidad" looks like.
It's not bad.
Grew up there all my life from three-years old, all the way till 20.
I moved to Spain in February of 2016.
I live over there.
That's where I live.
I speedrun Super Mario 64 mainly.
I have no clue why I started speedrunning or why I did what I did.
And why I didn't stop doing it.
I just felt like I had to do it.
Because it was my passion.
I didn't, I didn't know if it was gonna work out,
I didn't, I had no clue what was gonna come.
But then... a year later,
I got world record in, in 120-star.
It worked out.
[Mario] It's me, Mario!
[Summoning Salt] Of all the different Mario games,
Super Mario 64 is the most popular with speedrunners.
Cheese's record in the 120-star category,
which means that runners need to collect every star in the game
before beating Bowser at the end,
is one hour thirty nine minutes and twenty seconds.
It's the game's most prestigious title.
His biggest rival is a runner named puncayshun.
And puncayshun has some bragging rights of his own.
I beat, uh, siglemic's 120 world record
who was dominant for, like, years.
And all these people were like...
It was a really big deal that I beat him because all these people
were like, "Oh, sig is unstoppable.
It's been so long since anybody beat him."
Um, I'm siglemic.
I'm the former 120-star world record holder
for Mario 64.
The record was recently taken from me.
Like two days ago, maybe.
So, pretty recent.
[Summoning Salt] siglemic was the original ambassador.
But then puncayshun was faster.
And Cheese was even faster than that.
My whole body is... shutting down right now.
I can't even think. [sighs]
[Summoning Salt] By 2016, siglemic had disappeared from the scene.
Cheese and puncayshun traded the record back and forth a number of times.
But Cheese has been on top for the past two years.
[dramatic music]
Another day, another race.
And I can't wait for it. So let's, let's go.
[Summoning Salt] Cheese and punayshun are both in Maryland
for a first-of-its-kind tournament.
It's a league being run by a new group
called the Global Speedrun Association.
Three! Two! One! Go!
[Cheese] We have arrived. The nerves are settling in.
[Summoning Salt] Mario 64 players all over the world
have been racing online for the past six months.
The Top-4 qualified for this first live event,
a four-day round-robin tournament.
[Mario grunting in game]
GDQs are amazing.
But they only happen twice a year.
So as more and more people get interested in speedrunning,
competitions are popping up to meet demand.
To get to a top level, just like anything, it's extremely difficult.
So, it'll be exciting, I think, to see the reaction
and the response to it.
-[cheering] -[commentator 1] 47:59
-[commentator 2] Let's go! -[commentator 1] Final posted time!
[Summoning Salt] Like GDQ, they're broadcasting the event on Twitch.
But instead of raising money for charity,
the tournament has a couple thousand dollars in prize pools
for the most popular games.
Coming at you live,
one of the first live competitive speedrunning events.
[Mario hollering]
[Summoning Salt] You can think of Super Mario 64
as a giant Easter egg hunt.
[exhales sharply]
[Summoning Salt] Runner's speed through on predetermined routes,
collecting power stars,
[Mario] Here we go!
[Summoning Salt] These are 70-star races,
so they're shorter than the full 120-star race.
[commentator 1] He's got a speed towel. Make sure that the hands are nice and dry.
You don't want any sweat getting on those handles.
[Summoning Salt] But they still require almost an hour
of precise, clean movement.
[commentator 2] Perfect, three for three from Cheese
and a 48 under his belt here at PACE.
-I was in Zen mode, dude. -Yeah.
-I don't know. I felt like... -In the zone.
-...a Zen mode. I felt confident. -Yeah. Right.
And I don't know where it came from, but it's good.
[Summoning Salt] After three days of head-to-head races...
-[Cheese] Love you. -[puncayshun] Good work.
...Cheese and puncayshun have reached the finals,
and will face off in a best-of-three series to determine a winner.
A good thing to note is that puncay always tells me himself,
that the person he's always afraid to race most, is me.
So that means that he probably would be feeling more pressured.
And I could use that to my advantage.
[dramatic electronic music]
[Simply] Ladies and gentlemen, we're back once again
for the final event. Cheese versus puncayshun.
[puncayshun] I definitely think I can win.
I'm just, like, really consistent,
and that gives me an edge in races.
puncay has a better average time than Cheese.
But Cheese's is peaks...
I mean, he's been just running nonstop since my title.
Cheese doesn't normally run this good in races.
-Yeah. -But he's just been killing it. I... [stutters]
-He's just on right now. -He's really on point.
I don't know if anybody's gonna beat him.
Cheese is a weird specimen. I mean, just look at that man.
He's got the hot red glasses, looking fresh.
You got puncay with a bun.
It's finally coming to a head. Three big days.
-Yeah. -And the boys are here, they've been practicing,
putting their heart into it. It's gonna be lit.
-[man] Good luck, babe. -[all in unison] Five! Four! Three! Two! One!
Go!
[audience applauding]
[Summoning Salt] Earlier in the tournament,
during the round-robin stage,
Cheese beat puncayshun.
But then, in the first race at these best-of-three finals,
puncayshun beat Cheese.
[Simply] puncay takes it home.
Now one game away from first place.
Pressure's adding on. Both these players...
[commentator] puncay doing what he does best.
Putting his head down and just running.
[Simply] They know they can win. But they both said
that when they're racing against each other,
the nerves are like no other race.
-[gasps] The slip from Cheese not able... -[commentator] Oh, no.
...to clear the gap. Oh, that's such a weird mistake.
[Summoning Salt] If Cheese loses this race, he's done.
[Simply] There's breezes on the table for puncay. He is going for it.
This is an opportunity to make up time over Cheese,
and he gets it. Very nice.
[Summoning Salt] Despite being down for most of the race, Cheese caught up.
[Simply] Oh, Cheese just looking butter. Looking, looking, super solid.
They're both performing so well that it's hard to appreciate
-how well they're doing. -[commentator] Agreed.
[Summoning Salt] Remarkably, after 48 minutes of racing,
-they had both collected the 70 stars needed. -[audience cheering]
Now, it's just a sprint to see who can get to Bowser the fastest.
[music continues]
-[commentator] Oh, no, Cheese falls! -[Simply] ...from Cheese.
-And that might be it! -Oh, no!
[Simply] puncay landing it, and now the throws
are in between him and first place at PACE.
[Mario] Yippee!
[Summoning Salt] With a slight lead,
puncayshun just needs to be the first to complete
three successful Bowser throws to win it all.
[Simply] I can't even begin to imagine the nerves.
Here comes the throws.
Ooh, there's one.
[commentator] Oh? And a miss from puncay!
[Simply] This is the beginning of something.
Cheese pushing the glasses up.
Full anime-mode commence.
Here we go.
That's the second one for puncay.
Just one more, and he's got it in the bag.
One, for Cheese.
-And winner is puncay! -[commentator] There it is.
[simply] He's your SM 64 70-star League first-place finisher.
[commentator] Insane.
-Oh, wow. -[Simply] You can see it in Cheese's face.
He knows it was a good race, but...
puncay! puncay! puncay! puncay! puncay! puncay!
[all] Cheese!
-puncay! -[camera shutter clicks]
[dramatic music]
[gunshots over video game]
[Summoning Salt] In 1994, an exceptional video game was released
for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
It's on many lists of top video games ever made.
Super Metroid is a masterpiece.
And one of the best to ever play it
is a runner named Zoast.
Getting the Any% world record in Super Metroid
is definitely one of the biggest achievements anybody could hope
to achieve in speedrunning.
Since, like, 2008,
there's only been five people since Hotarubi
that have gotten this record.
That's it. And a lot of people have tried.
[Summoning Salt] In the landscape of speedrunning,
theMetroid series has become synonymous
with something called sequence breaking.
And to understand why sequence breaking is so important to speedrunning,
we need to start at the beginning.
[dramatic music]
[man speaking Japanese]
[Summoning Salt] Metroid is a Japanese franchise
that came out on the original Nintendo in 1986.
[beeping]
It combined the platforming ofSuper Mario Bros.
with the exploration ofThe Legend of Zelda.
But it had a darker, more isolated feel.
Developers had speed in mind when they createdMetroid.
If players were able to beat the game in under an hour,
the protagonist, Samus,
revealed what was a surprise at the time.
Samus was a woman, who interestingly, was based
on the character played by actress Sigourney Weaver in the movieAlien.
Speed was also at the forefront when players began finding ways
to break the sequence ofMetroid's playthrough.
Sequence breaking is when you do something
that allows you to play a game
out of the order it was meant to be played.
And to even sometimes skip sections altogether.
The classic example of aMetroid sequence break
let players get to the end much quicker than was originally thought possible.
Normally, to unlock a bridge that gets you to the final boss,
you need to have beaten both mini bosses, Kraid and Ridley.
[beeping and chiming]
But instead of using the bridge,
players figured out a creative workaround
to bypass having to take on the mini bosses.
If you could lure an enemy through the door,
once inside, you can use Samus' ice beam to freeze it,
and then use it as a platform to get across the gap.
This little trick completely circumvented
howMetroid was intended to be played.
Now, players didn't need to make their way through large portions of the map,
and instead could proceed right to the end
to take on Mother Brain.
[beeping and chiming]
Sequence breaking opened the door
to a new way of playing games quickly.
And by the time Super Metroid came out,
sequence breaking was considered a discoverable feature, not a bug.
[Zoast] I can't tell you how many hours I've put into this game
The gimmicky thing is you're supposed to put 10,000 hours
into something before you master it.
I'd say I've put 10,000 hours into this,
which is kind of crazy.
I just love video games, you know.
I've been playing video games my whole life.
The first system we ever got was a ColecoVision when I was a very small kid.
One of the best things about Super Metroidis
the ability to sequence break the game,
and the fact that the game is so open-ended.
If you're good enough, or you can do some of the advanced techniques,
you're able to completely change the way you play the game.
There is a freedom to Super Metroidin that way
that is pretty rare in older games.
[Summoning Salt] For example, in a casual playthrough,
when Samus reaches this room,
she can't make it out of the lava to get to the upper landing.
But in a high-level speedrun,
Zoast performs an elaborate sequence break.
As he enters the lava, he intentionally runs into one of the skulls on the wall.
If you look closely, the skull is actually shooting a fireball,
and when it hits Samus, it causes a damage boost
that pushes her towards the floor.
Zoast then executes a perfectly timed Shine Spark,
which is a special move that skyrockets Samus to the ceiling.
That just scratches the surface
of all the inputs that Zoast needs to precisely control
to make this break happen.
But if you can pull it off, Samus can access an area
you are not supposed to be able to get to yet.
And over the years, as more breaks were discovered,
times got quicker.
[lively electronic music]
Super Metroid was one of the first console games with an in-game timer.
So there was added prestige in trying to beat it quickly.
And to do it at the highest level takes creativity.
I'm sort of known for changing my grip a lot.
When you try to run, and you accidentally switch over
to X-ray, it stops you.
And that's a big problem when you're speedrunning, obviously.
So what I do is, I do this thing I call the piano grip,
and I go like this, so I can use all four of these fingers
and then to hit Select.
It's obviously not easy, but... [chuckles]
It allows me to do these rooms as fast as I can do them.
[Summoning Salt] When Zoast first saw speedruns himself in the mid-2000s,
no one was better atSuper Metroid
than a mysterious runner from Japan named Hotarubi.
Very little was known about him,
but he held records in a number of different games.
Hotarubi is a legend, in a Super Metroidspeedrunning,
and speedrunning in general, really.
He just crushed everybody at the time.
When people first saw his runs,
they weren't sure whether it was real or not.
They thought that he had cheated to achieve those,
or spliced together the run.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] Turns out, Hotarubi was a kid growing up outside of Tokyo,
who was particularly good at math
and patterned his play by studying runs
created optimally by humans and then played back by computers.
Or tool-assisted speedruns.
[video game music]
[Summoning Salt] When Hotarubi set theSuper Metroid Any% record in 2006,
he came out of nowhere, and was almost four minutes ahead of the next fastest time.
And to add to his lore,
towards the end of his world record run,
Hotarubi saved the animals.
After defeating Mother Brain,
Samus has to escape the planet before it explodes.
But there's a quick detour that leads to a room with trapped animals.
It's a fun side-challenge, but you don't need to do it.
So not only was Hotarubi's run so fast that people thought it was fake,
for good measure, he also saved the animals.
You have to go to this sort of alternate route
and you can blow the wall up and they, they escape.
And that allows you to leave the room.
When the planet explodes, right before it explodes,
you see, like a little blip, like one little pixel flying off.
That's the only change it makes in the ending.
Right here, you'll see the animals.
See that? [laughs] That's it.
That's the only change it makes in the game.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] Hotarubi could have never imagined that, years later,
deciding whether or not to save the animals,
would become a focal point at Games Done Quick marathons.
[announcer] We have "save the animals" at $14,939
-and "kill the animals" at $16,440. -Oh.
Yes. Here we go.
[Summoning Salt] GDQ uses the decision to save,
or in essence, kill the animals by not helping them escape,
as a major incentive to raise money for their charities.
[commentator 1] I got $20 from Carrie.
"I send this money against cancer and towards the animals.
How can you not save them?
Let's show everyone what speedruns truly are capable of.
Let's save these animals."
[Summoning Salt] Viewers donate during the run to determine the runner's route.
[commentator 2] And with a final total of $128,152
to $126,711
at SGDQ 2017,
the animals will...
-...die! -[audience cheering and applauding]
[Summoning Salt] It's gone back and forth over the years.
But if it were up to Hotarubi...
[slow dramatic music]
[Summoning Salt] Every so often, someone comes around
who is light years ahead of the competition.
It's not always easy to put a finger on how they do it...
...but it's fun to appreciate it when we see it.
[dramatic music]
Hotarubi held the world record for almost six full years,
and eventually moved on to other games.
That's when a new wave of runners caught up.
Zoast was part of that new wave.
[tense piano music playing]
[Summoning Salt] Since 2013, Zoast has traded theSuper Metroid Any% world record.
back and forth, with just three other runners,
as the speedrun continues to evolve.
[beeping and chiming]
To stay on top of a game as contested asSuper Metroid
takes dedication.
[Zoast] On average, I usually spend about 30 to 40 hours a week on speedruns.
Streaming is my primary job right now.
I have an electrician's license
I'm in the electricians union as a backup.
But my primary source of income is streaming.
[upbeat electronic music]
I've been around for so long, and I've accomplished so many things in Super Metroid
that I don't feel like I have to prove anything anymore, really,
but I still very much enjoy it.
As new generations come to watch games,
they definitely gravitate a little bit more towards the newer games.
But there's no shortage of people that still love the old games at all.
[dramatic music]
One thing about speedrunning is that it's a very
"do it yourself" sort of mentality.
There's not really many people that are sponsored by big companies.
But I think there's really a beauty to that.
That maybe the way of the future.
That's the way a lot of things are going.
I'm already older than most speedrunners,
so I'm not sure exactly how long
I'll be able to keep doing it, at least at the top level.
But I think in ten years I'll still be streaming and speedrunning,
at least in some sense.
You can't really judge how long people are gonna be interested in something.
And if you see a chance...
...you just have to go for it sometimes.
[cheerful electronic music]
[Summoning Salt] The world of speedrunning is filled with interesting people.
From all walks of life.
But perhaps no one has been more influential...
...controversial and famous
than Narcissisa Wright.
I never use this thing when it's not docked.
Some people think of video games as an escape
from reality or something, but I kind of feel like...
...video games are this very hard reality of math and numbers
that is governed by this unchanging code that is very real.
It's not really an escape.
This is about the only speedrun I do right now.
Pokémon Shieldis my newest thing I'm really into.
I go on this thing called the Rotom Rally.
You ride your bike, and it's the speedrun challenge.
I'm quite sure no one's ever done this route faster than me.
Press B right now to get the boost,
then I immediately get the boost when it comes back
that way, it runs out the moment I hit the balloons,
then I get another boost charging.
Then here's the RNG section, I have to avoid the pokémon.
And then I found another exploit right here.
For this balloon, it actually keeps circling while you have this menu open
so you can wait until it's on top of you,
and then you can get a more direct line to the finish.
[chuckles] I just like ended up discovering all these little tricks to save time.
I know I can beat it by probably around two frames, if I get a really clean run.
There's stuff like the Rotom Rally
that, like, hooks me. [chuckles softly]
Even without a community or audience or anything, just...
...you know, grinding this bike route or whatever.
It's just really fun.
[Summoning Salt] Long beforePokémon Shield,
Narcissa was a pioneer
at playing what is most commonly referred to
as the greatest video game ever made...
...The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time.
[The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time music playing]
Not only wasOcarina of Time a monumental accomplishment
-in 3D gaming for Nintendo... -Hello.
...it was also really important for speedrunning.
[screams]
[Summoning Salt] Largely because it's
a very broken game.
Meaning there are lots of places
to exploit glitches and to perform sequence breaks.
In the early 2000s,
Internet forums were still a new way of collaborating.
And the obsession and intensity
on theOcarina of Time threads was unprecedented.
[Narcissa] The community of Ocarina of Timewas huge.
It was a really popular game. And then it was also
the most discussed game on Speed Demos Archive.
That led to a lot of collaboration within speedrunning
I started ZeldaSpeedRuns,
then we had more focused discussions,
and so it really got looked at.
[Summoning Salt] In a traditional playthrough,
the character Link ages as the game goes along.
Link needs to become an adult before he can save Zelda
and defeat the evil king, Ganondorf.
But speedrunners, after years of investigation,
figured out a way to beat Ganon while Link is still a child.
[Narcissa] So Ocarina of Time is a game all about time travel.
It's kind of ironic that the speedrun
not only doesn't go forward in time,
but ends up meeting adult Zelda as child Link
and completely messes up the timeline and everything.
It's kind of poetic.
[Summoning Salt] Of course, for this to happen requires
incredibly complex movements.
Figuring it out has spawned generations of devoted experts.
I've been speedrunning this game for basically 12 years now.
[Summoning Salt] Zfg is known for speedrunning
the 100% category ofOcarina of Time,
which takes hours to complete.
And means that he needs to get every single item in the game.
Casual players will almost never run into a single glitch in their entire playthrough,
but if you know what you're doing,
if you know how the game is working,
then you can start abusing that really fast.
While I'm in the basement here, there's a bunch of invisible water.
All the water in the game extends downwards infinitely.
And there's supposed to be just like shallow water around bottom of the well.
But this shallow water, you know, extends downwards all the time.
And I can swim through this water to get to this chest early and get Bombchus.
[Summoning Salt] Another notable Zelda runner named Torje,
is a phenom and has held the Any% world record several different times.
Start in three, two, one, go.
The first time I got the record, I was 16.
A lot of people called me a prodigy, which is really cool. [chuckles]
There's one trick in particular, sort of near the end of the run, called Wrong Warp.
With that, we sort of do everything before that
to build up to that trick, just to be able to do that trick as fast as possible.
I'm from Norway, and there's a lot of Zeldaspeedrunners,
specifically from Sweden.
The glitches are just so deep in the game.
Like, there's so much you can do, there's so much variance.
Anything less than 90 degrees, with high enough speed, you can go right through it.
It gives you a lot of freedom.
The act that Ganon knocks your sword out
and then re-equips it automatically,
even though you're child Link during the fight
is what makes the run possible to complete entirely as a child.
[Summoning Salt] But it was Narcissa who very early on
had a unique ability to both perform
and articulate these complexities.
This angle is really strange.
Still got the ruby. Okay, no problem.
[Summoning Salt] All the work that had gone intoOcarina of Time
was on display in a breakthrough run
that was responsible for introducing lots of people to speedrunning in 2013.
[Narcissa] Uh, right there, I did a Navi Dive to get out
of the forest early without beating the Deku Tree.
This run depends on me getting the bottle,
which is the reason I'm leaving the forest.
The frame Link's feet hit the ground,
which would trigger Ocarina Items,
is also the same frame that triggers the Blue Warp, carrying me up.
-Got it. -[audience laughing]
[Narcissa] It was really worthwhile. It felt like a lot of people who saw that
ended up kind of feeling really inspired or interested in speedrunning,
or thought it was like a, a marvelous story.
[Summoning Salt] By the end of that year, they had driven a run
that took the best players more than seven hours to complete,
down to almost 19 minutes.
Then, with 7000 people watching live...
...Narcissa took the time even lower.
Oh, f#*#*#*.
It's over. Ocarina of Timeis dead.
Any% is done.
That's it. That's it.
It's over. It's f#*#*#*#*#*#* over.
I'm never playing Any% again,
unless some crazy new s#*#*#*
gets found, dude. That's it.
18:10, man. That's gonna stand for so long.
That's gonna seriously stand for a long-ass time.
I have no intention of improving it.
[sighs]
It's over. [chuckles softly]
[dramatic synth music]
[announcer] Welcome to the Nintendo World championships!
[Summoning Salt] The following year, Narcissa was one of just 16 gamers
to receive the Golden Ticket.
[announcer] How about Cosmo, everyone?
[audience cheering]
This is about our 16 competitors and their journey to be crowned
the Nintendo World Champion!
-[audience cheering] -[announcer] Yeah!
[Summoning Salt] Nintendo is iconic,
and this was the first time they were having their championship
in 25 years.
[announcer 2] Live from Universal Studios Hollywood.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your host, Terry Lee Torok.
[Terry] Whoo! Yeah. You ready?
Whoo, thank you. I don't get this at home.
Welcome to Universal Studios Hollywood.
This is the playing field of the future.
The unprecedented 1990 Nintendo World Championships.
[audience cheering]
[Summoning Salt] After four stages of competition...
...battling through games likeSplatoon,
Mario Kart 8, Balloon Fight
andSuper Smash Bros....
[announcer 3] You guys ready for some Smash Bros.?
[audience cheering]
...Narcissa made it to the finals.
This is it. This is the final round of gameplay.
One of these guys is going to be your next
Nintendo world Champion.
[audience cheering]
[Summoning Salt] The finals were custom levels
of a game that hadn't been released yet,
Super Mario Maker.
[Super Mario Maker music playing]
[commentator 1] Oh, my! What? Cosmo!
-[commentator 2] You're an animal! -[commentator 1 hollers]
[Summoning Salt] It started out okay.
But then, not so much.
[commentator 1] See if Cosmo get through here.
[commentator 2] Cosmo's still trying to make his way past the saw blades.
[Narcissa] I didn't know the new Super Mario Bros.physics at all.
And so the final round became a bit of a meme.
[commentator 2] Having trouble with the first set of jumps though.
-[commentator 1] Not quite there. -[commentator 2] No.
[commentator 1] John Numbers is blazing this right now.
[commentator 1] What's he gonna do right now?
[Narcissa] So I got second place.
But it was such a magical experience
[announcer 3] Let's hear it for Cosmo as well.
What an incredible fighter!
Man, you battled, man. Great job.
Great job, Cosmo. And John, congratulations.
[Summoning Salt] To cap off the evening, there was even a surprise guest.
Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto.
-[audience cheering] -[fanfare music]
[Miyamoto laughs]
Hello. Hi.
Hi.
Hello, everyone.
[chuckles]
[gentle music]
[Narcissa] Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Zelda, Mario.
Kind of this grand figure in gaming, an absolute legend.
It was really amazing to be able to meet him briefly,
and I'm really happy I was a part of it.
[in-game voice] All right!
[Summoning Salt] Around this time, Narcissa had withdrawn
from a graphics design program at a college in Chicago
and was making a living streaming full time.
Am I at 100K followers?
[chuckles] Am I at 100K followers?
Wow, Look at that.
[dramatic music]
I can't believe I was playing this game...
[chuckles softly] and I reach 100K followers.
[chuckles] And I'm doing, like, nonsense.
Look at what I'm doing in this game right now.
[Summoning Salt] But she wasn't playing Ocarina of Time anymore,
and in general, had become disillusioned to speedrunning.
[Narcissa] It kind of tore me apart,
but I decided I was done at that point.
I could kind of just see the void.
As you pour more time in, you get diminishing returns.
Like, most runs are not good. But then, like,
"Oh, one in 10 rounds is good. Oh, one in 100 runs is good.
One in a 1000 runs, one in 10,000 runs."
You start asking yourself, "Why am I doing this?"
[soft dramatic music]
This enormous time sink for no gains...
...where it becomes meaningless.
Like, the meaning just disappears.
It wasn't so much about discovery,
and it didn't even feel like it was about story anymore.
It felt like it was the void.
So that's where I stopped.
And...
...I went through some pretty big changes in my life shortly after that.
I was pivoting away from a lot of things that I had been deeply involved with before.
And I had also undergone the beginnings of hormone replacement therapy,
and that whole process.
Finally, it came to a point where...
..."This is a step that I want to take.
I'm taking this step, And carpe diem."
So I just posted that.
I'm gonna be moving next month. I think it's gonna be okay.
I think once I get situated, I'll be able to be really comfy,
and do lots of good streams, and do lots of good stuff.
And thanks for watching this video, YouTube.
Even though my YouTube account is filled with tons of trolls.
Obviously, I'm gonna be awkward at first.
And I'm just, like, struggling. And you know what it really is?
Oh, my God. [chuckles nervously]
It's just like reading all the garbage.
I'm, like, addicted to reading garbage comments.
There's a lot of places where people talk about me.
And I read all of it. Like, everything anyone says about me,
I just read it.
Like, I was depressed before I started hormones...
[sniffs]
...and then I started them, and I felt good about that,
and I still feel good about it.
But I still feel constrained and stuck.
I'm not free.
Everyone equates me to speedrunning, and, like,
speedrunning is, like, a dead end. Going for records,
it's just like this endless repetition
of this simple... It's, like, simple. It's so stupid.
[music continues]
[chuckles softly] My brain was, literally, like, addicted
to the dopamine of the past success.
I wasn't doing anything with speedrunning.
I was being abrasive,
and I was being kind of unpleasant. [chuckles]
So there was a, a kind of unpleasantness kind of back and forth,
that that was going on.
[sighs] I feel frustrated.
I feel frustrated.
During that process, I kind of lost
everything that I had built up over the last several years.
At the moment, I'm still sort of surviving off of...
Back when I was a Twitch superstar...
...I saved up money,
and I'm still using it.
And it's like whittling down, but...
Um...
I hope that my stream can, like, be rebuilt up.
I was just in a horrible mood all the time.
[laughs] So streaming wasn't very good.
Yeah, that's true, actually.
The glasses make it harder to see the eye makeup.
I could do something like this, but that's like a little bit...
I don't know, isn't that kind of silly?
Those were the hardest years of my life, actually.
I kind of feel like it may have been better to really tone down
anything public around that time,
but I didn't. I had felt such, like,
unanimous love in the past.
So I, like, believed in the kindness of strangers.
But I underestimated the harshness.
♪ I'm not here to start a fire ♪
♪ I'm here to keep you warm ♪
[melancholic music]
[traffic humming]
[mechanical keyboard clacking]
I feel like, over the last couple of years,
I've been able to get past the harder parts of everything.
I kind of stopped being interested in speedrunning
and started developing interests and other things.
I'm not out trying to be a pro game dev. This is a hobby for me.
But I think I could be pretty good at this
if I'd spend more time on it.
I keep getting stuck on, like, what is the purpose of what I'm doing?
I keep, like, asking myself these really fundamental questions about it.
And sometimes I get in my own way.
A lot of times, I don't care so much,
and I just sort of, like, start building stuff,
which is probably healthier, honestly.
All right, so this is my main project.
I worked on this for, like, six months.
The eventual idea is to bring it into the game engine,
and then be able to control it with my pro controller.
I did write some cool scripts to, like,
make the dead zone on this feel really comfortable,
and, like make the camera feel really smooth.
[upbeat music]
Games are not infinites.
They are specific a size.
There's so many bytes.
[Link grunts]
[Narcissa] Part of the reason that Ocarina Of Time
and Mario 64, for example,
had such passionate communities
is because of nostalgia growing up with these games.
These games were magical experiences.
The kids of today are having different experiences.
-[kid squealing] -[man laughing]
It's Iron Man!
[man] You have the Iron man game in there too?
The nostalgia window is closing.
[upbeat electronic music]
[YellowKillerBee] We have $25 from Red Echidna, who says,
"Doing my part for the donation train."
Thank you so much.
We have $25 dollars from Turamitsu.
"Only a little over $25,000 to go, and I'm donating."
$1 million hype.
[crowd] Hype!
[Summoning Salt] The nostalgia window for older games may indeed be closing.
But it hasn't closed yet, especially
at the 10-year anniversary for Games Done Quick.
[YellowKillerBee] I know this is what you've all been waiting for.
Are you ready for some Destiny 2?
[crowd cheering]
I know I am. Take it away, guys.
[crowd applauding]
Right now, we are standing at Awesome Games Done Quick 2020.
And we're celebrating the 10th anniversary of Games Done Quick.
It's special because it started off as such a small event
in somebody's basement, and it was just a few people
trying to raise money for charity.
And now, it's turned into this.
[lively electronic music]
This man is, basically, turning into like Jimi Hendrix right here, live on stage.
But he's playing Clone Hero, the likes of which I've never seen before.
And this hand movement...
...it's just insane.
This is just blowing my mind.
[beeping fast]
The best player in the world, ladies and gentlemen.
[cheering]
[Summoning Salt] And leave it to speedrunners to keep finding ways
to push things to the extreme.
[soft tense music]
[Sinister1] I used to be in this after-school program,
and they would only let us play video games
if it was raining outside,
and the gymnasium had to be reserved for some other use.
Then they would get out the Nintendo.
And when they did that, I was the only kid that could beat Mike Tyson.
So all the other kids were, like, in awe, of like, "Whoa! You can beat Mike Tyson?"
[Zallard1] For me, in terms of world records,
I've held the record in every Punch-Out!!game at least once.
[Summoning Salt] These two are personal heroes of mine,
and major influences.
InPunch-Out!!, Mike Tyson, to this day,
is notorious for being one of the hardest end bosses to beat
in all video games.
[laughing menacingly]
[Sinister1] Matt Turk was the original world record holder in Punch-Out!!
He was the first person that did a speedrun
from the first fight to the last fight.
And he had all the records.
And I was the first person that ever beat Matt Turk.
And then, of course, Zallard came along.
He eventually beat me. We had some back-and-forth,
and then, Summoning Salt came along,
and he really was the one that started driving the time down,
incredibly low, to places
that we never had thought that it would go.
And his level of execution is just extremely, extremely high
and extremely, extremely consistent.
Which is what you need because in this game you need a lot of luck.
So when you finally get that luck,
you have to be able to execute in that moment.
And that's what he did.
You're trying for these really small percentage RNG luck things
that you need to all go right in a row for all 14 fights.
Like, Don Flamenco II. If you get two of these 1-in-16 star punches,
you have about nine chances to get them, and if you get two of those,
then you're able to save, a lot of times, about 20 seconds.
[video game music playing]
The fighters can get up with different amounts of health refill.
Like, Piston Honda II has a 50-50 chance of getting up with more health.
Mr. Sandman has a three quarters chance
of getting up with a smaller amount of health for the third time,
but a quarter of the time he'll get up with about 12 more HP,
and there's no reason they had to program that into the game,
But they did. And I have no idea why,
but it really makes a speedrun in this game interesting.
And it makes it really annoying
because he has to keep grinding for luck.
[soft tense music]
[Summoning Salt] But none of those fights compare
to the difficulty of facing Mike Tyson.
He's lightning-quick,
and his uppercuts will knock you down
in just one hit.
[defeat chime]
In a speedrun, it's all about landing frame-perfect punches.
You have 1-60th of a second
to throw a punch that delivers maximum damage.
And in April of 2018,
luck was on my side, and my gameplay was even better.
Yes!
I just beat the Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!world record.
I don't believe it.
[lively electronic music]
-Wow. Okay, good. -Nice.
So we're probably on five here,
so you're gonna get your two dodges again,
and then I'll drain. It'll be a quick drain.
Okay, cool.
[Summoning Salt] Sinister and Zallard aren't just trying to beat the game fast.
They are trying to do it blindfolded.
While sharing just one controller.
[video game beeping and chiming]
-[both groaning] -Ah, dang!
[Sinister1] All right, we'll start from the beginning, I guess.
[Zallard1] Yeah. That's round three in a nutshell.
[Summoning Salt] Punch-Out!! has a rich, blindfolded history.
Dating back to when Sinister1 was inspired
after seeing AndrewG try a blindfolded Mario run in Mike Uyama's basement
at the first Games Done Quick,
[all groaning and laughing]
Playing blindfolded requires encyclopedic knowledge
of different patterns in the game...
[all cheering]
...mixed with lots of luck.
But no one has ever taken on Punch-Out!! quite like this.
Without any audio cues, we wouldn't be able to do this. Like...
Yeah, the audio cues are critical.
We really need them to know where we are in the fight,
what's happening, how to react,
what pattern we got.
It's all the information that you have
pretty much outside of our general knowledge of what's going on.
But, ultimately, you still need confirmation of your knowledge.
[video game beeping and chiming]
-[both laugh] -[Sinister1] I'm going to try it.
-Nine again. -[Zallard1] Yeah.
[cheering]
[beeps and chimes]
[Summoning Salt] Despite having never completed a full run of blindfolded,
two-player-one-controller Punch-Out!!
without the use of passwords...
[cheering]
...after 14 masterful bouts,
on the biggest stage in speedrunning...
[cheering]
...Sinister and Zallard did the unthinkable.
-[commentator 1] They didn't think they'd do it. -[commentator 2] They didn't--
-[commentator 1] But they did. -[commentator 2] Give it up!
[cheering]
[Summoning Salt] It took years of perseverance to a wildest moment to happen.
It's the kind of thing speedrunners live for.
[upbeat techno music]
[man 1] Hands up! Hands up!
-Everybody, hands up. -Hands up!
[man 2] A force of skill and charisma.
The people's champion, GrandPooBear!
[cheering]
It's been a crazy year, very busy, busiest year of my life.
Guys, thank you all so much for coming. I greatly appreciate it.
I did ten tour stops this year,
It went so good that we're making it a lot bigger.
We're gonna go to more cities, more speedruns, more time, more everything.
[commentator 3] There is some serious communication. And blind readability.
Remember, these players have never seen this before, so they are reacting.
And you can think of these levels much more as a lexicon of skill
than an actual thing to play. Here we go. Oh!
Oh, that was close.
[groans]
[ambient electronic music]
[GrandPooBear] Making a five year plan right now in this industry
is really dumb.
Every year, it's changed and grown and evolved.
[commentator 1] Who is gonna get this first?
-Oh! -[commotion]
That's right, baby! That is right.
Yes! That is right!
If this is just a for-now thing, it's gonna be the coolest story
to tell to my grandkids. And if it's forever,
that's gonna be awesome as well.
I'm just gonna roll with whatever the future brings me
and take advantage of every opportunity that I can
and hope for the best, prepare for the worst,
and just have fun with my friends along the way.
-Yes! -[cheering]
[commentator 1] Buzzer beater finish.
-[commentator 2] OK, Boom-Boom... -[commentator 1] OK,
-Boom-Boom. -...has won the race.
-[cheering] -[commentator 1] The crowd is going
absolutely wild.
[GrandPooBear] Congrats. Congrats.
We would have popped off if we wanted.
You guys are so calm and demure about it.
You know what I mean?
[inaudible chatter]
[upbeat electronic music]
[indistinct chatter]
[Summoning Salt] As this week-long anniversary nears its end...
[indistinct chatter]
...I can't help but reflect on how far we've come.
Over the past decade, speedrunning has grown to mean so much,
to so many different people
for a variety of reasons.
And the fact that it's helped raise millions of dollars
for doctors and to prevent cancer?
Who doesn't love that?
[Mike] I remember I was just researching
some charities and, you know, you were, like,
one of the three charities they contacted,
and the other two just never responded, and...
-They're kicking themselves now. -I'm sure they are.
-[laughter] -They sure are.
[Kasumi] We have had, for just this event
82 countries, participating
and donating to GDQ.
So thank you so much.
[audience applauding]
This truly is an international event.
[audience cheering]
[soft suspenseful music]
[Summoning Salt] That brings us to the final run of the marathon.
This is a runner named Oatsngoats.
He's an elite Super Metroid player,
and one of the five since Hotarubi
who has held the Any% world record.
[Oatsngoats] The moment I step foot into the door
and I see the crowd, the lights, the nerves kick in.
Always, instantly.
And now, it's really nerve-wracking,
because of the 10-year anniversary.
The finale. I feel like there's a lot of expectations
that hopefully I do meet with the run.
[commentator 2] It is now time
for Super Metroid Impossible
by Oatsngoats!
[audience cheering]
If I die, don't be mad at me.
I'm trying my best. This is hard.
[all laughing]
[Summoning Salt] He's playing a ROM Hack
of the originalSuper Metroid.
It was designed to be so difficult
that it was thought to be impossible to complete in real time.
But that's not the case for one of its best runners.
Oatsngoats! Oatsngoats! Oatsngoats! Oatsngoats!
[Summoning Salt] Less than 45 minutes
into this estimated 2.5 hour run,
Games Done Quick broke another record
for money raised at a single event.
[commentator 2] Ladies and gentlemen, $3.04 million
is a new GDQ record!
[melancholic music]
[Summoning Salt] There's no doubt that older games will continue to fade
as new generations come along.
But like with other kinds of art,
there's a certain appreciation for the classics,
and for the players who master them first.
[upbeat electronic music]
The speedrunners I've introduced you to
are just some of the vanguard who have paved the way
and set the tone for what it takes.
But if records are made to be broken,
then hopefully, there will always be
a tight knit, curiously determined group
working to get underneath games
in ways no one thought possible.
[commentator 2] "Save the animals" is winning by a very large margin,
$144,000, to kill, $107,000.
Stop, Mother Brain!
[Summoning Salt] And on this night, Hotarubi would be happy.
They voted to save the animals.
[commentator 1] Here it is.
[cheering]
[slow upbeat music]
[upbeat music]
[AndrewG] Oh!
World record!
[AndrewG laughs]
We can all play like crazy gods, so that helps too.
[Cheese] I just got world record again.
-This is not happening. -[triumphant fanfare music playing over video game]
[Mario hollers]
[excited breathing]
[screams]
-Yeah! -Let's go!
-We're doing it! -[crowd cheering]
More drinks. More drinks!
[Mitchflowerpower] No hands. Happening right now.
[beeping and chiming]
Ah, yeah! I told you guys!
[characters grunting]
[Summoning Salt gasps]
Oh, my God!
[laughs]
Oh, my God, dude.
[victory fanfare]
[solemn video game music]