Speed Running for Beginners: Fast Completion as an Art Form

Speedrunning transforms familiar games into technical challenges where optimization, routing, and execution replace casual exploration. The community around speedrunning is one of gaming’s most welcoming, built on shared knowledge, mutual improvement, and the understanding that personal best times matter more than world records. Whether you want to shave minutes off a beloved childhood game or push for leaderboard positions, speedrunning provides a rewarding skill-based challenge unlike any other form of gaming.

Understanding Categories

Speedruns are organized by category, each defining what completion means and creating fundamentally different challenges from the same game. Any percent means reaching the end credits by any means, including sequence breaks, glitches, and skipped content. The any percent category showcases the most creative route optimization and often uses the most impressive glitches. One hundred percent requires collecting all items, completing all objectives, and visiting all areas, testing comprehensive game knowledge and consistent execution over longer runs. Glitchless prohibits exploiting programming errors, testing pure execution and routing skill. Low percent completes the game while collecting as few items or upgrades as possible, often making the final boss dramatically harder.

Some games develop unique categories that emerge from community creativity. Dark Souls All Bosses requires defeating every boss rather than just reaching the credits. Celeste has categories for completing specific chapters without dashing, a punishing restriction in a game built around dashing. Zelda Ocarina of Time any percent exploits wrong warp glitches to reach the credits in under 7 minutes, while the hundred percent route takes over 3 hours of methodical completion. The variety means every game offers multiple speedrunning experiences at different skill levels and time commitments.

Getting Started with Your First Speedrun

Choose a game you know well and enjoy replaying. Speedrunning requires hundreds of attempts at the same content, so genuine enjoyment of the core gameplay is essential for sustained motivation. Short games with clear start and end points make excellent first speedgames: Celeste, Hollow Knight, Portal, Super Mario 64, and Hades all have active communities and extensive learning resources. Watch existing speedruns on Speedrun.com, the primary leaderboard and community hub, or YouTube to understand the basic route and key strategies.

Your first runs should focus on completing the game start to finish without pausing to look things up. Time yourself with a basic timer or LiveSplit and record the result. This baseline personal best becomes your benchmark for improvement. Do not compare yourself to world record holders. A first-attempt Dark Souls speedrun might take 3 hours while the world record is under 20 minutes. Your goal is improving your own time, and the satisfaction of cutting your PB from 3 hours to 2 hours is every bit as real as the satisfaction a top runner feels cutting from 25 minutes to 24 minutes.

Key Skills and Improvement Strategies

Route optimization provides the biggest time savings for beginners. Understanding the optimal order for completing objectives, which items to collect and which to skip, and which paths are fastest through each area provides minutes of improvement without requiring any advanced mechanical techniques. Watch top runners and note where their routes differ from yours. Small routing changes, like taking a different path through a level or skipping an optional pickup, can save 30 seconds each and add up to minutes over a full run.

Movement optimization, mastering the fastest way to traverse each area through techniques like bunny hopping, slope boosting, or animation canceling, provides the next tier of improvement. Many games have specific movement techniques that take hours of practice to learn but save seconds throughout every run. Super Mario 64’s BLJ, backwards long jump, lets players launch up staircases at absurd speed by exploiting the game’s backward momentum calculations. Half-Life 2 bunny hopping chains maintain and build momentum through precise strafing and jump timing.

Execution consistency comes from targeted repetitive practice. Speedrunners often practice individual sections in isolation, called practice splits, before attempting full runs. Split timers like LiveSplit track your time through each section of the run, displaying whether you are ahead of or behind your personal best at every checkpoint. This data identifies your weakest sections, allowing focused practice where it matters most. A runner who consistently loses 15 seconds in a specific boss fight should practice that boss rather than running the entire game repeatedly.

The Speedrunning Community

Games Done Quick, a bi-annual speedrunning marathon, introduced millions of people to speedrunning while raising over 50 million dollars for charity. AGDQ in winter and SGDQ in summer feature runners completing games live with commentary explaining techniques, and the events have become gaming cultural events streamed to hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. Local communities connect through game-specific Discord servers, Speedrun.com forums, and regional meetups. The community ethos celebrates personal improvement over competition, making it one of the most supportive gaming communities.

For competitive mindset, see Competitive Gaming Mindset. For streaming your runs, check Streaming Your Gameplay.