There are two distinct flavors of speedrunning:

• completing a game as fast as possible through feats of extraordinary mastery, timing, and precision,
• completing a game as fast as possible by finding all sorts of bugs and exploits in the game (commonly known as “glitches”) that allow the player to find eerie shortcuts between areas without having to play them.

Watching the first one feels like watching the Olympics. The second one is absolutely incomprehensible without someone narrating over and explaining things.

This video by Marblr is such narration and explanation of a particular glitch in Portal that significantly shortened a few speedrunning moments:

It’s an hour-long video, and I think it’s a really well-made one, and one you can learn a lot from.

The video has some nice history of strafing – similar in some way to Scroll Lock – and motor memory accommodations. It also shows the source code of Portal to explain things. This is fun on its own, but on top of that, Marblr layers some really cool visualizations – watching how one value “infected” by infinity proceeds to infects the others is riveting.

Even the levels and their geometry are presented in a really beautiful and informative way, too:

I’m still not fully onboard with this branch of speedrunning – if the entry point to your effort is changing mouse sensitivity to an abnormally high value, or if you have to pick a very specific version of the game that just happens not to have patched the glitch you care about, then perhaps things have gotten too esoteric and maybe even academic? But at the very least we get videos like this one – or one I linked to in May – going under the hood of software in some particularly enthralling ways.

I linked to a bunch of speedrunning videos before, but this 43-minute video by hbomberguy from 2018 is a good introduction to the whole concept and why people care:

It’s really funny, romantic (maybe a bit too romantic), and it has a few great examples and explanations of the different kinds of speedruns that exist.

This 22-minute video by Karl Jobst describes a pretty wild discovery of a glitch called Crystal Storage Glitch, allowing to skip a certain level for much faster completion times in Mega Man X2:

I won’t spoil the glitch because it’s a fascinating combination of a corner case, a race condition, and even a dose of dumb luck. Its finding unveils almost like a scientific discovery over many years – first a theoretical possibility, then a first sighting done in a modified emulator, then confirmation made by a machine via a tool-assisted speedrun, and eventually actual performance by someone by hand. And a lot of this achieved by relative newcomers to the community, too.

There is certain poetry here in having to go slow to go fast – you’ll see what I mean.

I mentioned speedrunning before in the context of mastery, but there is the other side of speedrunning that’s equally interesting: that utilizing bugs (or, glitches) to get the fastest possible time.

This 17-minute video by Msushi covers “one of the most loved and broken glitches in Portal 2” and the strange relationship the community has in following a bug to its conclusion – which, in this case, is not fixing it, but creatively using it to shave of speedrunning time. (There is an element of mastery there too, with spawning and despawning, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.)