Original Comment by: Jon Rimmer
Excellent article, it's nice to see speedrunning getting some coverage, as it's an often overlooked phenomenon compared to deathmatching. One thing not made clear in the article is how heavily competitive speedrunning, particularly for Doom and Quake, has been. Both Compet-n and the Speed Demos Archive award points for each world record in the various categories, with harder feats, such as beating the entire game, being worth multiple points. Players are ranked in league tables based on their points tally, their position rising and falling as they score new records, or others beat theirs. While the competition is almost always friendly (the often frustrating nature of speedrunning probably rules out players with fiery temperaments), it is intense. Oftentimes a player who beats a record will find the previous holder immediately strikes back with an even faster time, and repeat back and forth exchanges can often see a record that might have stood unchanged for some while drop precipitously in a short space of time.
This kind of competition encourages enhancements in routes, tricks and tactics, and drives down times to near optimum levels. Yet more than that, it also provides a truly level playing field for multiplayer comparsion. Back in the bad old days of modems, and even now broadband is commonplace, speedrunning provided a way for two places from anywhere in the world to pit their skills again oneanother in a truly fair way.
I'll admit a personal interest in the topic: I played at Compet-n for some time, and still hold a few world records in fact. For me though, the most rewarding aspect of speedrunning was in finding new tricks and shortcuts, and ways to beat the game engine. I discovered more than a handful of tricks and "rocket jumps" for Doom and Doom 2, and while I was never the fastest at executing them, I took pleasure in seeing better players use them to good effect. In my experience many modern games, with their far more complex worlds, physics and scripting are even more susceptable to finding tricks and shortcuts than their predecessors, although the switch from well partitioned levels to a more seamless experience has probably rendered the Compet-n style league tables obsolete.
One last thing I will say, I hope any games developers reading this might consider including built in support for demo recording in their games. While recording and distributing as mpg (or on youtube) is a more viable option nowadays, the kind of refilming and machinima that took off with Quake benefits hugely from having support for recording and playing demos within the engine itself. Internet ready demo compeitition itself could even be included in the game itself. It's easy to see how a service like Valve's Steam could be extended to include competitive speedrunning for their singleplayer titles. Players could opt to record attempted runs of either the entire game or specific sections, their results being transmitted back to a global leaderboard, with the fastest demos available for download right off the service. Now wouldn't that be something?
