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Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend one of the "original" speedruns - Quake Done Quick (on Nightmare, naturally). It's less about glitches and more about playing extremely well. If you have ever played a fast-paced FPS, you'll appreciate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiNDxssUL0

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Quake Done Quick is an ultra classic, and it's awesome it's gained enough fame to get its own Wikipedia page . It was amazing way back in the day, but it's still no less amazing.

My little claim to fame is I used to play QuakeWorld quite regularly with one of the founders of QDQ. Before it was called Quake Done Quick, it was called "Nightmare Speed Demos" (http://web.archive.org/web/19970719050959/http://www.planetq...). Radix (who at the time, went by "Lord of Radix") was a member of the "Deadly Venom Clan", and was one of the last keyboard-only holdouts in Quake, and despite using the keyboard for everything in Quake, was still a force to be reckoned with in deathmatch.

Anyway, I always smile when I see QDQ mentioned on the internet. Every few years, I dust it off an watch the whole thing and amaze myself in how precise all those actions are. Quake was such a fantastic game mechanically, and I wax nostalgic over the long-lost sense of community it bore, compared with the ridiculously disrespectful nature of internet nerd assholes these days (It probably doesn't help that I mostly play League of Legends these days).

I like "Quake done 100 quickest" much more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhzXKMqZBBc

In most speedruns, player runs away like a sissy little girl. In this speedrun, players aim for 100% kills and 100% secrets. Secrets actually make it more interesting to watch, as they often store the Quad Damage powerup.

Funny, I just watched that run again last night. My favorite stages are the ones where enemies are killed after the stage is finished. That technique shaves a few seconds off the overall run.

"sissy little girl"? You sure you don't mean "scared little boy"? Why use such antagonistic gender language?

If you're going to make that point, it should probably be "scared little child".

If we're going all the way, "little" may be offensive to people with a growth disorder, and "child" is age discrimination, the whole combination implying that only children can be small and scared.

tl;dr, stop being so politically correct everyone, sheesh.

It obviously wasn't intentional. Why do you speak with much violence?

Because it's important for us to root out sexism where we find it, for the same reasons we pull up any obnoxious weed. The fact it wasn't intentional makes it all the more obnoxious.

Yes. Sexism is terrible and must be eridacated. I thank you for your hard work making the world a better place (for yourself), and suggest the following to make sexists even easier to root out:

Make all sexists sew a yellow male-sign onto their clothing.

Sexism... by replacing "girl" with "boy"? Equally sexist.

By replacing "boy/girl" with "child"? Ageism.

By replacing boy/girl/child with "person"? Humanism.

Yes I can go on.

> By replacing boy/girl/child with "person"? Humanism.

Obviously idiotic.

"Violence"? (a) that's not verbal violence and (b) we're in the context of Quake, which is not exactly a nonviolent activity

I think he technically meant to say 'sissy little boy.' The word sissy is not necessarily 'antagonistic,' at least according to its accepted definition of "weak and fearful."

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sissy

I found the half life speedrun to be way more impressive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk4kX9WEcZA

And SMB3 is my second favorite one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz3BuYYhnn0

Thanks for the Half Life link -- hadn't seen that one before; definitely most impressive one I've seen :)

Edit: Love how he finished with 1 HP

Also loving the SMB3 :)

There is actually a new Half-Life speedrun being done, the current estimate is sub-22 minutes. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AivfAnPipM1cdEV...

To be honest, I think I prefer learning about how people have discovered and exploited the underlying mechanics of a game. I really enjoyed reading the Pac Man Dossier, for example:

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html

Does anyone know of any other similar things?

There are a lot more than that one, too! QDQ is the original, but Quake done Quicker and the Rabbit Run are also required viewing. And then you move on to things like Super Metroid... It was this stuff that got me into the Speedruns (and TAS) scene. Your two main resources for this are:

http://speeddemosarchive.com/

for "real" speedruns (the rules are complicated, but often on original hardware, captured on video) and

http://tasvideos.org/

for "tool-assisted" speedruns or time attacks, meaning using emulators and often doing truly insane frame-by-frame optimization and memory-state-manipulation.

One of my favourites; not technically a speed run, but a festival of glitches being used to corrupt memory in a very specific way, using only the regular gameboy inputs :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UnB1fomvAw

Even though it's not the fastest, I still love this version "Quake Done Quicker", in which the recordings were edited to show the player in third person and includes "snappy" dialogue and slow motion sections.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rwz6Pr2UTE

You should also try watching Scourge Done Quick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSG3JStYMuY), it's funny and done more as a Machinima.

It's more about having memorized every map, including the locations of all enemies on the map. I wonder how well someone could do in a game where enemies were so predictably placed.

Apparently, people have been doing this with Eldritch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83fJI3JOdf8&noredirect=1

he leaves so many monsters active that one pass he is looking at the stats and kills jump from 9 to 10 out of nowhere. it's awesome.

Also, i now realize i've always played quake wrong. this way makes much more sense!

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