Aiming for ‘Game Over’
They’re the rebels of the gaming world, remastering code, exploiting bugs, then playing a game over and over, all to get to the end as fast as possible. India’s speedrunners haven’t made it to any of the global leaderboards yet, but that’s just another th
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way, Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez said. In the world of gaming, the rebels writing the other way are the speedrunners.
They don’t jump through the hoops they’re given, or wander into side alleys for ancillary quests. They have two aims: to break a game down so they can play it on their own terms; and then to finish that version in the fastest time possible.
They might lose out on some of the fun of group missions, but they often uncover surprising weaknesses in some of the most popular videogames (Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Resident Evil Village, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and now Elden Ring), and have prompted game-makers to issue updates and fix bugs.
When a bug can’t be found, a speedrunner may alter the code to set his own challenges — playing with fewer lives, diminished arsenals. Because of how different game play can look when it has been remastered in this manner, speedrunning has become a popular sub-genre on live-streaming platforms such as YouTube and Twitch.
Speedrunning, incidentally, has been a niche interest in the West since the 1990s. It has become more broadly popular worldwide over the past two years, as bandwidth speeds and access to technology improve, and as YouTube and Twitch made it possible to earn a living off gaming. In fact, speedrunning now offers live-streamers a novel new way to keep audiences hooked.
The first celebrity speedrunner, Dream, first went viral on Twitch in 2020, amassing 29 million subscribers. He was then accused of cheating in-game, in order to sets his world record of playing a version of Minecraft from start to finish in 19 minutes and 24 seconds (the average time taken is 90 hours). “But his videos made us realise that we could do it too,” says 25-year-old Minecraft gamer Hitesh Khangta, whose YouTube channel YesSmartyPie has 3.6 million subscribers.
So what exactly does a speedrunner do? Once they have remastered a game or identified the glitches they plan to exploit, they painstakingly play that version over and over, until some can actually play it blindfolded. Then they start competing against themselves for reduced game times.
The eventual aim is to get onto one of the global leaderboards. The go-to website for leaderboards is speedrun.com. It currently houses a database of nearly 3 million runs across over 28,000 games. No Indian has got onto a global leaderboard yet, so in India the stakes remain fairly high.
“The one thing motivating me is getting the icon of the Indian flag on that board,” says gamer Anshu Bisht, 25, of Haldwani in Uttarakhand. He runs the YouTube channel GamerFleet with 2 million subscribers. His best time on Minecraft is 40 minutes.
Worlds within worlds
While some speedrunners seek to finish an entire game in record time, others look to achieve a certain goal within a game.
On his YouTube channel RawKnee Games, with 3.5 million subscribers, Ronodeep Dasgupta specialises in remastered versions called “Minecraft, But…”. These are challenges where the player must reach a certain objective (such as killing the Ender Dragon) with a handicap each time. So, “Minecraft, But Touching The Ground Will Kill You” or “Minecraft, But I Have Half a Heart”.
It’s not all rebellion and remastering. It takes persistence and hard work to be a speedrunner, speedrunners say. It also takes inventiveness, a dash of sneakiness and craft.
Bisht of Haldwani for instance learned how to build a nether portal without a diamond pickaxe, using lava “treated” in a very specific way. Dasgupta, 26, from Mumbai discovered that, in spectator mode, he could fly over a map and gain crucial perspective.
It takes a fair amount of humility too. More than anything, you must be willing to lose a lot, says Dasgupta. He’s live-streamed speedruns that turned into excruciating twohour exercises in navigating defeat. Then he’s woken up the next day and hit restart.
“It’s not just sprinting through levels,” he says. “There’s failing, laughing at yourself, swearing at yourself, rage-quitting and then trying again and finding sweet victory.”