Speedrunning is a mess. It's the dirty work for someone who looks up “Super Mario Odyssey All Moons% World Record Speedrun” (a ten hour long marathon of playing Mario). Speedrunning is where you try to beat a game as fast as you possibly can from start to finish. Your one goal is to beat your own best time. It's a precise and unforgiving hobby. Sure, it's exhausting, but it really pays off. It feels so good when you finally beat your fastest personal time. This is Speedrunning.

“So. What games do you speedrun?” you ask. Well, I do a lot of games, but the game I always go back and run through is Super Mario 64 (I shorten the name to SM64). It is often considered one of the greatest games of all time, and it really shows. Fantastic visuals for the time, memorable stages, and a soundtrack that to this day is still legendary. It's possible you have even played this game before, as it came out in 1996.

There are categories for games in speedrunning; different ways to beat it. You have five standard categories: zero stars, one star, 16 stars, 70 stars, and 120 stars. The one category I do in SM64 is 16 stars. It’s quick at a maximum time of 30 minutes, the perfect length. 16 stars means you have to beat the game with 16 stars. So I'll sit down, do a run, and when I obtain a personal best, meaning I got a faster run than the fastest run I had done previous to that, I post it on Youtube for the populace to see. Then I post the video to a website called SPEEDRUN.COM (I capitalize SPEEDRUN.COM because that's how everyone refers to it). On that website, it categorizes runs into a leaderboard where you can see who has the world record. Over 500 different people have submitted runs to the SM64 16 star category. I place somewhere around 390 to 410th place (I haven’t checked the leaderboards in a while, so I don't know my exact place). My fastest time is 25:05; impressive considering I only started in December of last year (2017).

 If there’s one thing I’ve learned from speedrunning, it’s that speedrunning is a real process. You get tired, angry, but you feel the need to do better. You get angry after you have done the same level 300 times in a row and have not gotten better at it. But once you get better and faster at it after all of those attempts, you feel like the world is at peace. You feel you are at peace with yourself. It gives a pretty long lasting amount of dopamine. Of course though, there are the less relaxing moments of speedrunning.

Most people say that air traffic control is the hardest, most stressful job ever. But in reality, it's the second most intense job, with the first being speedrunning. After a while of speedrunning, you don’t need to beat the game, you need to PERFECT the game. One missed jump in a normal gaming session (where you’re not speedrunning) would be no problem. But in speedrunning it’s catastrophic. The world record holder for 16 star in SM64 is Weegee14 (that's his username; no one knows what his real name is). HE made a living off of playing that one game really well. He got his name out there all for the low low price of free. He once said that every second counts in a run, and he is so right. One missed jump could mean the loss of several seconds, which is awful. Anymore than that would mean a reset (where you restart the game completely) for me. Of course though, the more intense parts are toward the end.

Picture this. You just got to the end of a 30 minute marathon of SM64. You are on personal best pace. You haven't had a run like this in months. You pop out of the pipe, emerging from the ground (as Mario) on an epic battlefield hundreds of miles in the sky. The sky is dark. Slowly from the shadows, Bowser emerges, anger in his face, from the shadows of the dark stormy clouds behind you, laughing menacingly. It’s raining hard. This is the final fight. You can't mess up. Everything needs to be perfect. You run and dash and dive over and seize Bowser by the tail and swing him into one of the bombs on the battlefield. It makes a menacing explosion as Bowser growls in agonizing pain from being thrown into a bomb. You rinse and repeat again. One more throw to go. Then, even just for a second, everything is silent as Bowser lifts himself off the ground. But that moment is suddenly crushed as you feel a slow rumble beneath your feet. The stage slowly crumples away into a star pattern. You are so close. You’re over 30 seconds ahead of your personal best.

Now obviously, none of what I described is real. You're not really in Super Mario 64. You're sitting in a room with a very sweaty game controller in your hands. You feel this though. This kind of immersion you wouldn’t feel in a normal casual playthrough of a game. In a casual playthrough of the game, if you die you can just retry until you get it right. But that doesn’t exist in speedrunning. You mess up once, you restart all the way back at the beginning. Your run is on the line. “You can't mess up. You won't mess up,” you tell yourself. Two different things could happen. In one case, you throw Bowser straight into the bomb. He flies back onto the playing field due to the explosion. Kaboom! You've done it. You beat the game. You grab the final star and end the game. You press the timer button you had next to you to time the run. 32 seconds ahead of your PB. You jump up and down as if people were throwing you into the air in excitement as Mario flies off the stage (using a wing cap) and the credits roll. But then there's the other case. You throw Bowser- and you miss. Bowser gets back up. You just lost the chance to beat your personal best. You are angry. You walk away, curse, or maybe even throw the controller at the wall.

          I don't throw controllers at the wall anymore for two reasons. One was once I was watching someone play a game online, and they lost and got real angry. They threw their controller at the wall and the controller just SHATTERED into pieces, and that made him even angrier. The other time I was playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe online. I was in first place. So close to the finish line, and then I got hit by a blue shell. I came in sixth. I threw that controller at the wall, and by that I mean I THREW that thing with some real force. Unfortunately, this one was one of those controllers. Built like a tank. Needless to say, it dented the wall. Anyway, that's the kind of intensity a run puts you through. It’s an edge-of-seat-experience. Losing a run makes you feel awful. It’s the game kicking you in the back. You get angry. But then, when you finally complete a run that beats your personal best, it makes you feel like you’re on top of the world.

And that's my experience with speedrunning, and why speedrunning is important to me. I love to speedrun so much because, like I said earlier, speedrunning gets you invested and excited. It is really competitive, and it makes me happy. That burst of dopamine from completing a run is exciting, and that feeling doesn't go away fast. It gives you energy to keep going because you know you will eventually beat your record. But most of all, I feel Speedrunning is important because anyone can do it for free, and if they practice enough, they can break records, make a name for themselves, and even get paid a little, all for free, like Weegee14 did. In tennis or football, it’s so unlikely you will ever make it to the big leagues. And in order to get into some matches, you have to pay. But that is non-existent with speedrunning. That is why speedrunning is so important, and therefore my special and unusual hobby. I still think that speedrunning is a mess, but so what? It’s fun!

-Enzo McLauchlin