In Ocarina of Time, I had beaten the game countless times, I had found every heart pieces, beat every side quest and gotten every item. In Bomberman 64, I had gotten every gold card, every custom costume piece, and beat the whole game on hard mode difficulty. Several other old games I had been playing since childhood fell under this catagory. What else can you do with these games? Sure, I could play through the story again, and for many games like this I have. I had only wished to go back to the day of my first time playing these games so I could experience the whole game from scratch again. It seemed like that was the only way to get something new out of it.
Or was it?
During one of my late night surfing expeditions on YouTube, I was looking up Zelda videos. I can't remember why I was, or what I was looking for, but I do remember what I stumbled upon.
Discovering Speedrunning
This video introduced me to a guy named Cosmo Wright, a very popular person in the speedrunning community. Watching this video for the first time, I had never heard of speedrunning before, and was totally awe struck seeing the game beat in roughly 22 mins. I highly suggest you watch the video.
I was dumb founded. I continued to do more research and look through more of Cosmos videos. I wound go on to find out this speed running thing was not just in Ocarina of Time or just in Zelda games. It was a style of game play found in a grand majority of old school games. I continued to look through Speeddemosarchive.com to look for games I might be interested in speedrunning.
Okay, I just brought up a lot at once. Let's break it down and talk about a few of the things I mentioned in the past paragraph or so.
What is speedrunning?
Speedrunning can be defined as a play-through of a whole video game or a selected part of it (such as a single level) performed with the intent of completing it as fast as possible, optionally under certain prerequisites, mainly for the purposes of entertainment and competition.
In short, speedrunning became a new way for people to play old video games and added replay value to games that have been out for a while. Games like I had mentioned in my introduction to this post.
Speedruns are often broadcasted on Twitch.tv, where viewers watch people play video games.
What is AGDQ?
I later found out that the specific video above was recorded at AGDQ, or Awesome Games Done Quick. AGDQ is a bi-annual gaming marathon, it's summer counter part dubbed Summer Games Done Quick, where a bunch of the famous and world record holding speedrunners get together and speedrun video games. They put up a donation button where views can donate money for charity purposes and is often highly successful. Last January's AGDQ raised $448,423.27 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Just shy of half a million dollars.
I've made it my goal to one day go to this event and contribute, as I firmly believe it is quite possibly one of the greatest things that has ever happened to video games.
Becoming a speedrunner
In early September, I started to practice speedrunning one of my favorite N64 games via livestream on Twitch.tv, Bomberman 64. Within a month I got myself just 4 mins off the world record, and plan to continue until I break it. I still want to speed run other games such as The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX, Paper Mario, Metroid II, and other games I truly enjoy.
Since I started speedrunning I've met a few famous speedrunners. I met Animeowzerz shortly after creating a twitter account around my speedrunning, and FootBigMike during one of my speedrunning broadcasts. Both of which are AGDQ veterans and Bomberman 64 speedrunners, with Mike holding several Bomberman 64 World Records.
For those interested in seeing more of cosmos videos or watching me speedrun, I'll provide some links.
https://twitter.com/Conkadoo Whenever I go live it's announced here.
http://www.twitch.tv/arkizms My Twitch channel where you can watch me broadcast.
http://www.youtube.com/user/CosmoSpeedruns Cosmo's Youtube Channel.
http://marathon.speeddemosarchive.com/ AGDQ's homepage.
Cheers,
Andrew
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