On 11 June 1997 three Quake players released a recording of the whole game being finished, on its hardest setting, in 19 minutes and 49 seconds. They called it Quake done Quick. It was made of demo files, recordings the game itself could play back, so anyone with a copy of Quake could watch it and check that it was real. Three months later the team cut the time to 16 minutes 35 seconds. At the end of 2024 their successors released Quake done Quickest 2, at 10 minutes 20 seconds.
That is speedrunning: finishing a game as fast as possible, sharing the evidence, and watching other people take the record away. Along the way runners find things the designers never did. By exploiting the Quake engine, PC Zone reported in 1998, “it’s been possible for them to accomplish tricks that iD never even knew about”.
Fast facts
- Roots: games that rewarded fast finishes, such as Metroid, and magazine challenges in the early 1990s.
- First communities: Doom demo collections from 1994; Quake done Quick in 1997.
- Archives: Speed Demos Archive, from Planet Quake to every game; Speedrun.com from 2013 (some accounts give 2014).
- Tool-assisted runs: made with emulators, frame by frame; kept separate from runs played in real time.
- Marathons: Games Done Quick, since 2010.
Before the internet
Some games invited speed. Metroid on the NES had several endings depending on how long the player took, and the faster ones showed Samus Aran out of her armour. Retro Gamer noted in 2004 that finishing in under three hours revealed that the hero was a woman, and that an even faster finish earned a further reward. The same article pointed to Nintendo Power, which in the early 1990s challenged its readers to complete games in record times and printed the names of those who proved they had.
Doom demos
Doom (1993) could record a game as a small demo file, known by its extension as an LMP, which the game itself could play back. Players could now send each other the whole run, not just a claim about how long it took. In January 1994 Christina Norman, a student at the University of Waterloo, set up the LMP Hall of Fame to collect them, and in November 1994 Simon Widlake started COMPET-N, a site of leaderboards ranking Doom demos by completion time. Anyone who owned Doom could watch a submitted run.
Quake done Quick
Quake (1996) recorded demos too. The Quake done Quick team, Yonatan Donner, Matthias Belz and Nolan Pflug, recorded their run in parts and joined them into one run through the game on Nightmare difficulty. Their first piece, The Elder Whirled, was entered in a Quake movie contest in May 1997; the full run followed on 11 June and was soon on magazine cover discs.
The tricks came from the physics. “While running along a corridor, strafe into one of the walls,” Anthony Bailey of the group told PC Zone in 1998. “Doing this can increase your speed by up to 40 per cent.” Add the rocket jump, firing a rocket at the floor to be thrown into the air, and whole levels went by in seconds. The team made two kinds of recording: runs, which went from start to exit as fast as possible, and “100%” movies, which also killed every monster and found every secret. Their articles went deep. In 2004 the Australian magazine Hyper recommended one of them, “Zigzagging Through a Strange Universe”, which set out the laws of Quake’s movement “to a degree ordinarily reserved for science journals”.
Quake done Quick with a Vengeance, in 2000, took the Nightmare time to 12 minutes 23 seconds, using “every known trick, including unrestricted bunny-hopping”.
From Quake to every game
The Quake runs were archived on Planet Quake, and in 2004 Retro Gamer described Speed Demos Archive as “Planet Quake’s speed run archive”, which by then also listed runs of other games, including a Super Mario Bros. run by the record holder Trevor Seguin. The same article found fierce competition on Super Mario Bros., Ninja Gaiden, Metroid and Bionic Commando on the NES, and on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the Super Nintendo.
Twin Galaxies, the scorekeeper for arcade games since the early 1980s, had begun to record speed runs too. Walter Day told Retro Gamer he thought that had started only two or three years earlier. Twin Galaxies refused emulator runs: a player had to record the game on the real console on videotape and post in a copy with a form. Its records were split into categories such as “minimalist”, “complete” and “out of the box”, depending on how freely the player could use power-ups and short cuts. Day believed the speed-run craze explained much of the renewed interest in NES games, which, Retro Gamer said, “had been all but forgotten as little as five years ago”.
Tool-assisted runs
Emulators made a different kind of run possible. With save states and frame-by-frame control, a player can retry every jump until it is perfect, and the result is a demonstration of what the game allows rather than of what a person can do. In 2003 a video of Super Mario Bros. 3 finished in just over 11 minutes, made by a player known as Morimoto, circulated widely on the internet. Retro Gamer noted that it had been made with save states and glitches and assembled from several sessions, yet many viewers had taken it for a real performance. Sites such as Bisqwit’s, later TASVideos, published these tool-assisted speedruns openly as emulator work, to show off what a game allows.
Marathons and leaderboards
Streaming video changed who watched. In January 2010 Mike Uyama held Classic Games Done Quick, three days of speedruns streamed online, and raised $10,532 for the charity CARE. It became twice-yearly: Awesome Games Done Quick in January, for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and Summer Games Done Quick, first held in August 2011, when it raised over $20,500 for the Organization for Autism Research; later summer events raised money for Doctors Without Borders. Viewers donate to choose what the runners do, such as naming a character or asking for a harder route. By January 2026 the events had raised more than $59.8 million.
The records moved too. Speedrun.com, started in 2013 by the site’s own account (other accounts give 2014), with looser submission rules than Speed Demos Archive, became the main home for leaderboards, and by 2021 it hosted boards for more than 20,000 games. Old games stayed at the heart of it. Quake is still being run: Quake done Quickest 2, in December 2024, beat the 2011 record by more than a minute.
Proof and cheating
A record is only as good as its evidence, and the community has had to deal with false claims. The best-known case involved a time from 1982. Todd Rogers’s 5.51 seconds in Activision’s Dragster for the Atari 2600 had stood for decades until a speedrunner who studied the game’s code argued that the fastest possible time was 5.57 seconds. In January 2018 Twin Galaxies removed all of Rogers’s scores, and Guinness World Records removed his records the next day. Rogers wrote that he disagreed with the decision. The Twin Galaxies entry tells that story and the dispute over Billy Mitchell’s scores.
Sources
- Speed Demos Archive, “Quake done Quick: Movies” and the Quake done Quick release page (web, secondary; the runners’ own archive): release dates and times of Quake done Quick (19:49, 11 June 1997), Quake done Quicker (16:35, 13 September 1997), Quake done Quick with a Vengeance (12:23, 13 September 2000), Quake done Quickest (11:29, 29 December 2011) and Quake done Quickest 2 (10:20, 29 December 2024); the runners; runs and 100% movies; The Elder Whirled. https://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/qdq/
- PC Zone issue 69, November 1998: Scourge Done Slick, Anthony Bailey on strafing, the rocket jump, “tricks that iD never even knew about”; the cover-disc movies.
- Hyper issue 134, December 2004: “Zigzagging Through a Strange Universe” and the Quake done Quick site.
- Alicia Ashby, speed-run and challenge-run feature, Retro Gamer issue 11, 2004, pp. 47–49: Metroid’s endings, Nintendo Power‘s challenges, emulators and faked runs, the Super Mario Bros. 3 video, Planet Quake from 1998, Speed Demos Archive and Trevor Seguin, Bisqwit’s site, Twin Galaxies’ rules and categories, Walter Day’s comments, and the most contested games.
- Wikipedia, “Speedrun” (web, secondary): the LMP Hall of Fame (January 1994), COMPET-N (November 1994), Morimoto, TASVideos, Speedrun.com (2014) and its 20,000 games by 2021, and the Dragster analysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedrun
- Wikipedia, “Games Done Quick” (web, secondary): Classic Games Done Quick in January 2010, CARE and $10,532, the two annual events and their charities, and the total raised to January 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Done_Quick
- “Gamers raise over $20,500 for autism research”, press release, Newswire, 23 August 2011 (web, secondary): Summer Games Done Quick, 4–6 August 2011, for the Organization for Autism Research. https://www.newswire.com/news/gamers-raise-over-20-500-for-autism-research-97648
- Speedrun.com, “Speedrun.com joins Elo.io”, site news, October 2020 (web): “first started by Pac in 2013”. Archived copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20250726050649/https://www.speedrun.com/news/wlvm3812-speedrun-com-joins-elo-io
- Kotaku, “Guinness Officially Nixes Todd Rogers’ Dragster Records”, 30 January 2018 (web, secondary): the Twin Galaxies and Guinness decisions and Rogers’s reply. https://kotaku.com/guinness-officially-nixes-todd-rogers-dragster-records-1822568394