Back in 2012, I had just found out about speedrunning. It was AGDQ 2012, short for Awesome Games Done Quick. It was the second official AGDQ event and speedrunning was popping off in a big way. A ton of the guys on my dorm floor would gather in the lounge to watch the stream. Someone brought in their big TV so all of us could watch it. We were enraptured. The feeling that permeated the room was one of awe, tinged with an undercurrent of “Well, I could do that.” I mean, at least I thought that.
I like to pretend I’m good at video games. Compared to my six year old, I am really good at video games. In 2012, I had a Let’s Play channel to show off my incredible mediocre talent. It has since been scrubbed from the internet but I decided to use it as a starting point for my speedrunning career. Initially, I did it as a joke. I played through Mega Man II with the emulator speed at 150% during the levels and 50% speed during the boss fights.
Get it? Speedrun. It was faster than normal. Like, the game itself. I was still really bad at the game, but I did it in a quick way. Honestly? I’m hilarious.
Let’s just forget the fact that it would be more impressive if it was always at 150% speed. I did it. I did a speedrun. Sort of. Now that I had a one speedrun under my belt, it was time for me to try something harder. I was ready to take on a much longer game that is one of my absolute favorites: Link’s Awakening DX. Couldn’t be too hard, right?
If you’ve ever seen a speedrun, you know that there are tons of tricks and technique involved. For example, when you have the Roc’s Feather, you can clip in a wall or tree and jump over some rocks. It’s an easy way to skip over several different barriers and save those precious minutes. You can also skip the text that comes up when you open a chest by opening the save and quit menu at just the right time. How neat!
On top of that, speedrunners spend hours every day playing their chosen games to know them inside and out. In Kurtis Conner’s video “I Somehow Got a World Record Speedrun,” he interviews runner SmallAnt about running and how he prepares. SmallAnt says that most runners play the game for about eight hours a day. Eight hours! That’s a whole work day. It’s literally a full-time job for a lot of them. They dedicate themselves to the craft, playing for long and repetitive hours to achieve the perfect run.
You’ve read this far into the article, I feel like you know me well enough. Do you think that I learned any of that tech? Did I, you know, do any research about skips or anything that can make my run go faster? Oh, of course not. Not even kind of. My preparation was walking down to the lounge, turning on the game, and pulling up a guide to Eagle’s Tower. That’s it. Oh, also, I figured I’d start at, like 10 PM. That’s when the mind is at its sharpest, of course.
Going back to that dorm floor, it was electric in the lounge. I had been hyping this up for a while. It was our dorm’s first actual speedrun attempt and several of the guys wanted to see it live. The only speedrunning we had ever seen was from AGDQ, the cream of the crop. Boy, were they going to be disappointed. I booted up the game and began my run.
If you go to the leaderboards for Link’s Awakening DX on SpeedRun.com, you won’t find my name on any of them. No, surprisingly, my time of six and a half hours was not an acceptable entry to make it. Honestly, I didn’t even finish the game. Funnily enough, I finished up Face Shrine and the thought of going to Eagle’s Tower was too much for me. So, around 4 AM, I turned to the one guy left in the lounge and told him I decided to call it quits. Not only on that particular speedrun, but on speedrunning in general. I’m just not cut out to be a speedrunner. Playing the same game for hours and hours a day seems like a unique form of torture that I do not want to endure.
Of course, my six year old thinks that six and a half hours is an incredible time, so I’ve got that going for me.
