In November 2003 a Quake player called Nolan Pflug, known online as Radix, posted fifteen videos that together showed Metroid Prime finished with every item collected in 1 hour 37 minutes. The run was picked up by Slashdot, and Ali Campbell, who later helped run the site that hosted it, remembered the effect: “Many people were blown away, and I was no exception. I ended up downloading the whole thing on a 56k dialup modem!” The site was Speed Demos Archive, until then a collection of Quake runs. After Metroid Prime it took runs of any game, as long as someone could check them, and for the next decade it was one of the main places where speedrunners published their work.
Fast facts
- Founded: April 1998, by Nolan “Radix” Pflug, as a Quake speedrun archive on the PlanetQuake network.
- Opened to other games: late 2003, with Pflug’s Metroid Prime run; open submissions from March 2004.
- Rules: every run checked by a verifier before publication; no tool-assisted runs, homebrew emulators or glitches that take the player outside the game world.
- Offspring: the Games Done Quick charity marathons, started in 2010 by its administrator Mike Uyama.
- Today: still publishing runs in 2026.
A Quake archive
Speedrunning on the PC grew out of demo files, recordings that Doom and Quake could play back, so anyone with the game could watch a run and see that it was real. Pflug ran a site called Nightmare Speed Demos; Nightmare is Quake’s hardest difficulty setting. In April 1998, by the archive’s own account, he merged it with sites run by two other players, Gunnar and Jesse, to form Speed Demos Archive. It was hosted on PlanetQuake, and Retro Gamer noted in 2004 that the network had been hosting “downloadable videos of speed runs, but only for the original Quake game” since 1998. Pflug was also one of the runners behind Quake done Quick, the 1997 team run through the whole game that first brought speedrunning to a wide audience; the speedrunning entry tells that story.
Metroid Prime and every other game
The Metroid Prime run changed the site. Nintendo World Report announced it on 11 November 2003, with a link to the fifteen video files on PlanetQuake. Pflug opened an “Other Games” section with it, and in March 2004 began accepting runs from anyone. By the time Retro Gamer surveyed speedrunning sites that year, the archive’s front page still focused on Quake, but an “other games” link led to runs that included a Super Mario Bros. run by the record holder Trevor Seguin. In September 2004 Pflug bought the speeddemosarchive.com domain, and in January 2005 moved the whole site off PlanetQuake.
Checked before it was posted
What set the archive apart was its insistence on checking. Edge described the rules in 2007: runs of “a vast number of games” could be posted “as long as a verifier can be found for a run”, but “no game-ruining glitches such as stepping outside of the gameworld, tool-assisted runs, or use of homebrew emulators are allowed”. Runs made frame by frame in an emulator had a home of their own at TASVideos; the Vault’s entry on tool-assisted speedruns covers them.
The archive was not the only hub. Edge named four: “the Speed Demos Archive (SDA), TASvideos, Metroid 2002 and Twin Galaxies”, the last of which recorded arcade and pinball scores, “numbers rather than methods”, and posted no footage. At SDA the footage was the point. Campbell, by then one of its administrators, told Edge that “it’s nearly always a single individual that performs a particular run, but the end product usually ‘belongs’ to the community as a whole in some way, because many people will have had input into it. I strongly believe that keeping everything open is by far the superior choice, not least because there’s actually something to watch at the end.” Edge singled out some of the runs worth watching: Super Mario World with all 96 exits in 1 hour 31 minutes 30 seconds, Metroid Prime in 1 hour 3 minutes 50 seconds, Deus Ex in 43 minutes 20 seconds.
After the streaming era began
Live streaming came out of the same community. Mike Uyama, the archive’s main administrator, organised Classic Games Done Quick in January 2010, a charity marathon streamed from his mother’s house; it grew into Games Done Quick, which has since raised tens of millions of dollars. Leaderboards moved on too. Speedrun.com, started in 2014, gathered records for thousands of games with looser submission rules than the archive’s verifiers had applied, and became the main home for them.
Speed Demos Archive did not close. Its front page still carries new runs, with the strapline “Playing through games quickly, skillfully and legitimately”, and its update of July 2026 introduced a run of Max Payne 2.
Sources
- “Speed Freaks”, Edge issue 179, September 2007, pp. 79–83: SDA founded in 1998 as a Quake site and expanded after Pflug’s 2003 Metroid Prime run; Slashdot and Ali Campbell’s recollection; the verifier and the banned techniques; the four hubs and Twin Galaxies; Campbell’s quotation and the example runs (all p. 80).
- Alicia Ashby, speed-run and challenge-run feature, Retro Gamer issue 11, 2004, pp. 47–49: Planet Quake’s speed-run videos from 1998; speeddemosarchive.com as “Planet Quake’s speed run archive”, the “other games” page and Trevor Seguin’s Super Mario Bros. run.
- “Metroid Prime Speed Demon”, Nintendo World Report, 11 November 2003 (web, secondary): Radix’s 100 per cent run in 1 hour 37 minutes, fifteen videos on PlanetQuake. https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/9121/metroid-prime-speed-demon
- Speed Demos Archive, “Site information” (web; the archive’s own history): Nightmare Speed Demos; the merger with Gunnar’s and Jesse’s sites in April 1998; the “Other Games” section in late 2003; open submissions from March 2004; the domain bought in September 2004 and the move in January 2005. https://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/siteinfo.html
- Speed Demos Archive front page, as seen in October 2026 (web): the strapline and the July 2026 update. https://speeddemosarchive.com/
- For Quake done Quick and Pflug’s part in it, and for Speedrun.com, see the speedrunning and Speedrun.com entries and their sources; for Classic Games Done Quick and Mike Uyama, the Games Done Quick entry and its sources, among them Nicole Carpenter, “The Origins of Awesome Games Done Quick”, EGM.