Speedrunning Explained: How Gamers Finish Video Games in Record Time

A speedrun is an attempt to finish a video game, or a defined part of it, in the shortest possible time. Runners record their attempt, submit it to a community leaderboard, and other players verify that the run followed the agreed rules for that category before the time is accepted as official.

Categories: any%, 100% and glitchless

Speedrunning is organised into categories that define what 'finishing' the game means, because a run with no rules would always be fastest. According to gaming blog Displate, the most common categories are any%, 100%, glitchless and low%, each setting a different goal for what a runner must accomplish before the clock stops.

• Any%: reach the ending by whatever route is fastest, including exploits, glitches and sequence skips — speed is the only requirement.
• 100%: complete every objective or collect every item the game offers, which usually takes far longer than any%.
• Glitchless: reach the ending as quickly as possible while avoiding glitches and unintended shortcuts, using only the mechanics the developers built into the game.
• Low%: beat the game while collecting or using as little as possible, often the hardest category in progression-heavy titles.

These first two labels, any% and 100%, were already in use by 1994 when programmer Simon Widlake launched COMPET-N, an early leaderboard dedicated to full-game Doom speedruns, according to Inverse. The split between 'fastest possible' and 'most complete' runs has structured the hobby ever since.

The techniques behind the record times

Within a category, runners shave time through sequence breaking (skipping content the developers intended players to go through), exploiting bugs, and frame-precise menu tricks that save fractions of a second on loading or inventory screens, Displate reports. One widely cited example is a Super Mario 64 run that reaches the ending without collecting a single star, using a chain of glitches to bypass the game's normal requirements.

Top runners typically dedicate themselves to a single game to master its tricks, and speedrunning communities maintain detailed guides so newcomers can learn established routes, according to Displate.

Tool-assisted runs versus real-time play

Not every speedrun is played live. A tool-assisted speedrun, or TAS, is built with software such as BizHawk or libTAS that lets a creator pause a game, advance it one frame at a time, save and reload positions, and test different inputs before keeping only the optimal result, according to TASVideos, a site dedicated to the format.

TASVideos describes its purpose as showing how a far more precise, superhuman player might beat a given game, since frame-by-frame control and rewinding let creators manipulate random number generation and execute input combinations no human could perform on a controller in real time. TAS and real-time speedruns, often shortened to RTA, are treated as separate disciplines with their own leaderboards.

From Doom demo files to a worldwide hobby

Recorded speedruns trace back to Doom in 1993, whose built-in demo-recording feature let players save and share playthroughs, Inverse reports. In 1994, programmer Christina Norman built an early online hub for these recordings, and Frank Stajano created DOOM Honorific Titles, a set of structured challenges such as finishing a level without taking damage. Widlake's COMPET-N, launched that November, turned full-game completions into an organised competition.

The practice spread to other games such as Quake after its 1996 release, and in April 1997 Nolan Pflug founded Speed Demos Archive, described by Inverse as having been the world's top multi-system speedrun competition ever since, with categories covering hundreds of games. Tool-assisted runs emerged in the following years and reached a wider audience in 2003, when a TAS of Super Mario Bros. 3 by a runner known as Morimoto spread online and helped establish TAS as its own recognised category.

Charity marathons took speedrunning mainstream

Speedrunning's biggest public showcase is Games Done Quick (GDQ), a nonprofit that grew out of the Speed Demos Archive community. Its first event, held in January 2010 during the MAGFest 8 convention and originally called Classic Games Done Quick, ran into technical problems and relocated to founder Mike Uyama's mother's house, where it still raised more than $10,000 for the charity CARE, according to Wikipedia.

GDQ now runs two flagship week-long marathons each year — Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) in January for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) around midyear for Doctors Without Borders — plus events for underrepresented groups in the community, such as Frame Fatales, Back to Black and Games Done Queer, Wikipedia states. As of January 2026, GDQ marathons had raised more than $59.8 million through over a million individual donations since 2010.

AGDQ 2026 in Pittsburgh featured a Resident Evil 2 Remake run played entirely on a Guitar Hero controller, a 70-person relay race through Super Mario 64, and a free-roam challenge in Mario Kart World, before closing with a Pokémon Emerald speedrun, Games Press reported.