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Comment by vinkelhake | Hacker News Reader

I love speedruns. There's a vibrant community of speedrunners and fans out there. With fast Internet connections, they can now stream their attempts live.

Some resources:

http://speedrunslive.com - who's playing right now?

http://twitch.tv - service for live streaming of games.

http://twitch.tv/cosmowright - Cosmo, the speedrunner in the article.

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Just a heads-up to anybody interested -- there are generally two types of speedruns, tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) and unassisted. Searching for "$GAME TAS" (eg: Super Mario World TAS) usually results in very impressive videos so they're usually easier to find.

There are a variety of other terms as well, for example sequence breaking, no-glitch, 100% completion, and so forth. Understandably there are numerous videos on Youtube for pretty much every console game that can be played on an emulator.

By far my favorite kind of speedrun to watch is a non-TAS with commentary. Often, these runs are done by teams. There's typically one player who is good at executing, and then you might have someone responsible for planning the route through the game, and another person responsible for researching glitches and how they can be used most efficiently, etc.

Hearing these people discuss their craft, and hearing the dynamics between their interactions (personal and practical) is fascinating. The best example I know of this is the ingx24 speedrun of Majora's Mask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85k0fo1qnyo

Humans are amazing animals. The fact that this level and coordination is possible even when the stakes are, ultimately, pretty pointless, is a testament to that.

Also, http://tasvideos.org has a nice, large library of TAS submissions.

Also, see Speed Demos Archive (http://speeddemosarchive.com/), one of the best places to watch existing runs on a variety of games. The forums are still a good community, although as vinkelhake mentions most people use twitch to stream practices and runs.

Yeah, and one of the biggest value-adds of SDA is that the runs you see up there are verified by other runners. It takes a long time for a run to get up there, but once it is, you know it's the real deal.

I like watching http://www.twitch.tv/crumps2 He runs a tournament where two people speed run The Binding of Isaac to see who can beat it first.

Unfortunately Season 2 just wrapped up for the year. They won't be going again until Binding of Isaac: Rebirth comes out. Here's the website though.

http://boilr.org

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