Why I love Speed Running

Very recently I've been speed running Silent Hill, or at least learning how to but if you watch the stream at all you already know this.  One thing I find when I talk about speed running to a few of my friends is that sometimes they say that they don't get it.  "Why would you want to beat a game as fast as you can? why not just enjoy it?" is the most common thing I hear from various people so now I just want to take a moment and explain why I love doing it so much even though I'm terrible.

Reason #1: Game Longevity

With some games people may complain that replayability is an issue.  They beat the game once and then have absolutely no desire to go back and attempt to beat it again because it's just not as fun as second time round.  What speed running does, for me at least, is makes games that have that issue a lot more fun to play over and over again.  For example, Hotline Miami is the kind of game that originally I had no interest in playing through more than once.  I'm not the kind of person who is interested in high scores or anything like that outside of the shmup genre so after I beat it once I didn't have much desire to go back and play.  But since discovering speed running I've played the shit out of Hotline Miami, just because the idea of beating my own time to the end of that game is really fun to me.

Reason #2: Knowledge of the title

I think that one misconception that people have about speed running is that it's JUST "getting to the end as fast as you can", but really it's a little more than that.  Let's say I go and pop in Metal Gear Solid 3 right now, I've played that game A LOT but there's no way I could do an effective speed run.  That's because the knowledge required to simply beat a game and the knowledge required to speed run it are 2 entirely different things.  Usually speed running will require quite intimate knowledge of the title and not just the route through each stage.  You have to know basically every little thing there is to know about not only the game itself, but all the technical things surrounding that game such as how many frames of animation something might take or how the hit boxes function.  It's something that I find fascinating to "study" and kind of goes hand in hand with the whole game longevity thing that I mentioned before

Reason #3: The community

It's weird, I've entered quite a few gaming communities over my many years and I'm sorry to say that the vast majority of them are filled with complete twats.  This isn't true for 100% of them though, and the speed running community are one of those few groups that aren't heavy on the twats.  One thing that people worry about when they are new to speed running is that "oh I'm bad, it would be embarrassing to even try when there are already so many good players".  But this is a load of crap because generally speaking people who speed run stuff are really nice.  I'm terrible at Megaman X but when I've done races on Speed Runs Live for it, people don't come into my chat to mock me, they come to give me advice and help me to improve my times and that level of friendliness is hard to find when it comes to strangers on the internet.

So, that's the big 3 reasons why I love speed running so much.  I know most people reading this probably don't care about why I love speed running so much, but it was something I thought I'd share so that maybe I could inspire a few others to take it up.