6 Speedruns That Physically Break the Game

A normal speedrun is a person playing a game very well. The runs below are something else. In each case the community stopped treating the game as a set of rules and started treating it as a machine with an exposed control panel.

Fair warning before we begin. Two of these involve maths.

1. The Half A Press

In Super Mario 64, jumping costs one press of the A button. A community formed around finishing the game with as few presses as possible, and one runner, known as pannenkoek2012, pushed a level called Watch for Rolling Rocks down to half a press. Half. The accounting works because the button was already held down when Mario entered the level, so only the release happens inside, which the community counts as a half.

Getting there required parallel universes. The game stores position using values that wrap around, so at extreme speeds Mario can occupy a coordinate the game reads as valid ground in a place that does not exist. The January 2016 explanation video became a genuine internet phenomenon on the strength of one line, delivered with total sincerity, about needing to talk about parallel universes first. Attempt the route on original hardware and the console crashes.

2. Ocarina of Time, Credits Warp

Runners of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time worked out how to make the game load its own ending. The technique involves manipulating what the game remembers about objects it has recently handled, then using that stale memory to point the game somewhere it should never go. Done correctly, Link falls off a ledge in a starting area and the credits roll. A game designed around forty hours of heroism can be persuaded to skip to the applause in a few minutes.

3. Pokemon Red and Arbitrary Code Execution

This is the one that stops being a speedrun and becomes programming. Through a sequence involving a specific trainer, a specific menu, and an item list treated as instructions rather than data, runners can write their own code into a first-generation Pokemon cartridge while it runs. People have used it to jump straight to the hall of fame. People have also used it to make the Game Boy play music that was never in the game. The cartridge is not being played at that point. It is being operated.

4. Minecraft, Random Seed Glitchless

No exploits at all in this category, which is what makes it strange. The world is generated fresh and randomly every attempt, so the run is partly a lottery and partly a display of extraordinary preparation. Top runners identify their location from a handful of blocks, calculate where the endgame portal must be from the flight path of a thrown item, and act on the answer within seconds. The competitive scene developed its own statistical vocabulary to argue about whether a given run was luck. That argument has produced more mathematics than some university modules.

5. Super Mario Bros, the Frame War

The original 1985 game has been optimised to the point where the remaining improvements are measured in single frames, each one twentieth-something of a second. The route has been known for years. What changes is execution, and the difference between a good run and a record can be one input landing on the correct frame rather than the next one. Runners have described spending months for an improvement smaller than a blink. This is a sport now, with all the heartbreak that implies.

6. Portal, Outside the Building

Portal is a game about using two portals to move through a level. Runners discovered that if you place a portal while already moving through geometry in the correct way, you leave the level entirely and travel through the empty space the building sits in. Whole test chambers get skipped. The game keeps narrating cheerfully while you fly past the rooms it built for you, which produces a comedy of manners nobody scripted.

A Note on the People Doing This

It is easy to file all of this under wasted time. We would push back. Working out the half A press required reverse-engineering the game’s collision maths from the outside, documenting it well enough that strangers could reproduce it, and then explaining it clearly to an audience with no background in the subject. That is research. It happens to be research about a plumber, and the resulting knowledge has no application whatsoever, and it is still some of the most rigorous amateur work on the internet.