LOOKING TO INCREASE THE LONGEVITY OF GAMES? SPEEDRUNNING CAN MAKE YOUR FAVOURITES PRACTICALLY IMMORTAL.
Going faster doesn’t mean it’s over for good more quickly
When I was around 16 my favourite game got shelved for good, put into retirement. Long before the day of trophies, my PlayStation 2 favourite, Resident Evil: Code Veronica X, had driven my entire family to insanity, to the point they could recite some of the script off the tops of their heads. Five years later I dusted it off and brought it back to life.
I didn’t realise there were thousands of people who, like me, loved a game way too much to let it go, not until the day I found Games Done Quick, a charity marathon of speedrunners finishing games they knew inside-out as fast as possible to make money for charity. And that’s when it happened; like magic I knew it was time for my games revival – and maybe it’s time for yours too.
Speedrunning is no easy feat. Learning enemy patterns can take hours or even weeks, depending on the game. You need to remember who takes a left lunge here or a step forward there, and on top of it almost every single game has an element of RNG (Random Number Generator), a term often used in speedrunning to describe unpredictable factors within a run, such as randomised passcodes (take Resident
Evil 3, where every passcode has at least three or four options to choose from, something I’m really hoping will feature in the remake that’s arriving in April). Re-learning all of this about a game you loved stretches its limits and pushes your time with it as much as humanly possible – that’s why I say speedrunning offers a sense of immortality. Even if you were to top the leaderboards and set a world-record-winning time, there’s almost always someone who can come around and beat it, giving you the opportunity to learn all over again.
There’s even an extra element introduced by this entirely playerdriven community: challenge runs.
As if getting from A to B weren’t a complex enough process as it is, some speedrun challenges make things extra-difficult. Take, for example, Resident Evil 2’s remake. That game has so many different options speedrunners had to offer a category extension section, which includes hardcore Knife-Only speedruns (play the game on the hardest difficulty, only using a knife – yes, that’s boss battles included), Handgun-Only runs, and the option for players who honour the storyline too to complete a True Ending speedrun. Many game series offer a similar choice of run types, and really allow you to extend your love for your game in whatever way you think is best.
GOTTA GO FAST!
Like any concept that crops up in videogames, speedrunning is not exempt from dissenters – some people claim pushing through games as quickly as possible spoils the fun, or limits the amount of time people are able to spend with content, skipping storyline or additional content such as files or collectibles. But I offer you a different view: find the collectibles, learn to love the storyline, and when you know you’ve found a good (maybe lifelong) favourite game and you don’t know what other direction to take it in, try to battle it out with the best of them. The challenge of speedrunning is a lot more fun than you might think.