Game On: The World’s Fastest Speedruns

Press start to win.

For many of us, we want to eke out as much gameplay as humanly possible from our video games. For these expert players known as “speedrunners”, the name of the game is whittling their time down to be as short as humanly possible. Today, we take a look at some of the most impressive speedruns around.

Tetris – From consoles to graphing calculators, Tetris and its 8-bit Russian jams are such a ubiquitous presence in the gaming community that there are few who haven’t played it. But when it comes to Tetris speedruns, how fast can it be done? One Japanese player, keroco, using the game’s “Clear Mode” in which you need to clear 40 lines as fast as humanly possible, brought down the blocks in just 19.68 seconds. That’s usually how long it takes for us to figure out we just put the “L” tetromino facing the wrong direction.

Ocarina of Time – Given that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is, by nature, about time travel, it only makes sense that players would try to approach lightspeed in their efforts to beat it. Despite having come out in 1998, the game remains a highly contested title amongst speedrunners and the current world record was set just last week by Cosmo Wright who managed to blast through the N64 classic in just 19 minutes and 15 seconds, which is less time than it takes to watch an episode of the old Zelda cartoon. 

Super Metroid – Many old school gamers know that beating Super Metroid in under three hours will net you a swimsuit-clad image of Samus Aran following the credits, but what if you beat it in just 32 minutes? Well, if you’re speedrunner Satoru Suzuki, you probably got a raw hand from giving out a million high fives.

Portal – The cake might be a lie, but YouTube’s Demonstrate beating Portal in under ten minutes is the honest truth. Sure, the run was achieved through making use of a variety of exploits and glitches in the game’s code, but somehow we think GLaDOS would approve.

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