Speedrunning looks simple from the outside: beat a game as fast as humanly possible. But once you peek under the hood, it’s less “guy goes fast” and more “community of nerdy wizards reverse‑engineering a game in real time.”
This is the part of gaming where people intentionally break things, treat levels like puzzles, and turn bugs into features. And it’s weirdly beautiful.
Let’s dig into how speedrunners do it, why it’s way more than just “git gud,” and what makes this corner of gaming quietly fascinating for tech‑minded players.
---
Speedruns Are Basically Live Reverse Engineering
When a speedrunner says a game is “broken,” that’s usually a compliment.
Speedrunners spend hours figuring out how a game actually works behind the scenes—how the physics engine handles movement, where collision boxes don’t quite line up, what happens if you open a menu at exactly the wrong time. Then they weaponize that knowledge.
They’ll test tiny things normal players never think about: how fast you move diagonally vs. straight, whether jumping on specific frames preserves speed, what happens if you trigger two cutscenes at once. Over time, they build an unofficial “technical manual” for the game—except it’s all discovered through trial, error, and a lot of frame‑by‑frame replay.
For tech enthusiasts, speedrunning is like applied debugging. Instead of reading documentation, runners poke at a black box until the game reveals its secrets. The best speedruns look effortless, but behind them are spreadsheets, recorded inputs, community‑shared “lab work,” and a mindset that feels closer to reverse‑engineering software than just playing it.
---
Glitches Aren’t Accidents—They’re Tools
To most players, glitches are annoying. To speedrunners, they’re power‑ups.
A classic example is “clipping,” where characters slip through walls or floors that should be solid. That’s usually because of tiny gaps between invisible collision boxes or rounding errors in movement math. Speedrunners will intentionally recreate those moments by lining up at precise angles, hitting buttons on specific frames, or manipulating enemies into bumping them into geometry.
Another favorite is the “out of bounds” glitch. Once a runner finds a way to escape the normal play area, the game’s world becomes a giant shortcut maze. Floors might not exist, triggers might be visible from the “wrong” side, and entire sections meant to be hours apart can suddenly be step‑neighbors in the void.
There are also memory‑based glitches, where doing things in a certain order confuses the game’s internal state. In older games, that can mean turning a simple save file into a tool that literally rewrites what levels load or what items you get. It looks like magic, but under the hood it’s just humans and code having a very chaotic conversation.
To a developer, these are bugs. To a speedrunner, they’re a toolkit.
---
Timers, Frames, and Why Milliseconds Actually Matter
At the high end, speedrunning is obsessed with time at a level most people never notice.
Games don’t think in seconds—they think in frames. If a game runs at 60 frames per second, everything from movement to animations to physics updates happens 60 times every second. That means pressing jump one frame earlier or later can literally change which platform you land on or whether a trick works at all.
Speedrunners will often use tools or practice modes that show their inputs frame by frame. They’ll lab out whether it’s faster to roll, jump, slide, or spam some weird movement combo because of how the engine calculates momentum. They’ll even time things like: is opening a menu faster than watching a cutscene? How many text boxes can you mash through per second?
For tech‑minded folks, it’s a practical case of real‑time systems in action. The game is a loop ticking along at a fixed rate; runners are trying to sync perfectly with that loop. Miss by a frame, and a glitch might fail, an enemy might spawn differently, or a whole route could fall apart.
That’s why you’ll see timers on speedrun streams down to the millisecond, and why runners sometimes reset a whole run if they’re a couple seconds “behind pace” in the early game. At that level, every frame is budget.
---
Communities Act Like Open‑Source Dev Teams
Speedrunning isn’t just one person grinding a game alone (though there’s plenty of that). Behind almost every famous record, there’s a community acting a bit like an open‑source project.
Each game usually has a hub—often on sites like Speedrun.com or in Discord servers—where people share findings, post route notes, upload test videos, and debate rules. One runner might discover a small trick that saves half a second. Another might realize that combining it with an older glitch shaves off 30. Someone else writes a guide so new runners can learn it faster.
There are also “categories,” which work kind of like branches in a code repo. Glitchless, Any%, 100%, Low%, randomizer, and so on—each with its own rules, strategies, and followers. Communities decide what counts as allowed or banned; that’s essentially governance and standards in miniature.
Tool‑Assisted Speedruns (TAS) push things even further. These use emulators and software tools to input frame‑perfect button presses that humans can’t realistically pull off in real time. TAS runs are like theoretical limits—proofs of concept for what’s possible if you treat the game as pure code instead of a human experience. Sometimes, human runners later figure out ways to adapt tiny bits of TAS tech in real runs.
If you’re into open‑source culture or collaborative research, speedrun communities will feel familiar: shared knowledge, versioned strategies, changelogs (“New WR thanks to route update”), and constant iteration.
---
Charity Marathons Turn Nerdy Obsession Into Real‑World Impact
Speedrunning isn’t just about squeezing seconds off a timer—it’s also become one of gaming’s most successful ways to raise money for charity.
Events like Games Done Quick (GDQ) bring runners from around the world together for multi‑day marathons, streaming wild runs back‑to‑back: classic platformers, broken RPGs, horror games dismantled in under an hour. Viewers donate live, often unlocking bonus runs, challenges, or silly incentives like “play this boss blindfolded.”
Over the years, GDQ and similar events have raised tens of millions of dollars for charities like Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation. These marathons also act as showcases for the “art form” of speedrunning—commentators explain tricks, runners talk through the tech, and viewers get a crash course in everything that makes these games tick.
For people who usually see gaming as solitary or purely entertainment, speedrunning marathons are a nice counterexample: hyper‑technical play, community collaboration, and real‑world impact all happening at once.
---
Conclusion
Speedrunning sits at a weird and wonderful intersection: part esports, part science lab, part performance art. It turns bugs into strategies, turning “broken” games into the deepest playgrounds. For tech enthusiasts, it’s a reminder that under every polished game menu is a living system just waiting to be poked, prodded, and (politely) abused.
If you’ve never watched a run, pick a game you know, search for a speedrun, and let yourself fall down the rabbit hole. The more you understand what’s going on under the surface, the more impressive it becomes—and the more you start looking at every game like a system you could, maybe, just maybe, break on purpose.
---
Sources
- [Speedrun.com](https://www.speedrun.com/) – Central hub for speedrunning leaderboards, categories, and game communities
- [Games Done Quick – Official Site](https://gamesdonequick.com/) – Details on GDQ marathons, schedules, and charity totals
- [“Cracking the Code of Speedrunning” – MIT Technology Review](https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/01/09/154959/cracking-the-code-of-speedrunning/) – Overview of speedrunning culture and the technical mindset behind it
- [“How Tool-Assisted Speedruns Work” – TASVideos](https://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/HowTASWorks) – Deep dive into the tech and methods behind TAS runs
- [Doctors Without Borders – Official Site](https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/) – One of the main charities supported by Games Done Quick events
Key Takeaway
The most important thing to remember from this article is that this information can change how you think about Gaming.
