

at 4 minutes, 57 seconds, 260 milliseconds. A few months ago, he secured the world record for Super Mario Bros.
#SPEEDRUNNERS GAME CH SOFTWARE#
On average he speedruns about 10 hours a week while also working full-time as a software engineer. (last name omitted by request), known as darbian on his Twitch channel, started speedrunning three years ago and focuses on games from the NES/SNES era. “When I come back to my apartment and I have groceries, and I have to go to the bathroom, and I have to charge my phone, I’ll do everything in the order of which is closest to me because the end goal of the night is going to sleep.On the elevator rides going up to work I’ll try and answer as many emails as I can and that’s like a 16 second ride.”įellow speedrunner Brad M. “I definitely do things more efficiently now,” Olinsky says. Since he started playing, Olinsky has noticed some overlap into his normal day-to-day. When Olinsky began speedrunning six years ago, he focused on Bethesda games and now speedruns for approximately 35 hours a week, regularly streams to his Twitch channel, and has even traveled globally to participate at speedrunning events. According to the timer he uses while speedrunning he has approximately 750 attempts and around 100 completed runs for Fallout 4 so far.

Tucker “BubblesDelFeugo” Olinsky currently holds the world speedrunning record for Fallout 4 at 49 minutes and 12 seconds. This poses the question: If speedrunners are always getting better at solving shortest path problems and regularly exercising parts of their brain that usually go disengaged, do they see any benefits cross over into their everyday lives? They feel rewarded for working through problems related to optimization and efficiency most others would find too mentally taxing to be considered a hobby. Speedrunners find pleasure in something that would normally come at a cognitive cost for others. Games that normally take dozens of hours can be completed in mere minutes, and uncovering the glitches that allow speedrunners to finish games so quickly are often discovered as a whole within the larger speedrunner community rather than by just one individual player. Mastering the optimal routes in games requires often hundreds of hours of playtesting and note-taking if you want to come even close to current world record-holders. Knowing and mastering tricks like these takes regular and repetitive practice. Since your character loses speed when breaking their legs and healing allows you to gain it back, you can trick the game into thinking you just healed your broken legs despite them being perfectly fine, thus allowing you to walk at 165% of your walking speed. Once you jump off a nearby cliff, follow up by immediately saving and reloading. In Fallout 3, a speedrunning trick requires you to break your character's legs in order to get a speed boost.


Speedrunners will do anything to get a better time, even if it means exploiting glitches or undermining game systems. Any distraction can shave precious seconds off, destroying a run for record completion time. Since the goal of a speedrunner is to finish a game in the quickest time possible, stopping to collect an item like a fireflower is as wasteful as pausing the game to take a sip of water. Fireflowers make the game easier to complete, but take a few seconds to actually collect. For speedrunners, however, doing so comes at too high a cost. players wouldn’t think twice about picking up a fireflower during their playthrough.
