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Speedrun.com

One site for every game's leaderboard

Culture & CommunitySource-checked

Speedrun.com is a website of speedrun leaderboards, where each game's community sets its own categories and rules and its own moderators check the videos that runners submit. Peter 'Pac' Chase started it as a volunteer project in 2013; Elo Entertainment bought it in 2020. By 2026 it hosted more than 50,000 game communities, where in 2007 the scene had been split across a handful of separate archives.

In 2007, anyone who wanted to know the fastest time for a game had to know where to look. Edge listed the speedrunning scene’s “major” hubs as “the Speed Demos Archive (SDA), TASvideos, Metroid 2002 and Twin Galaxies”, each with its own rules: the Speed Demos Archive took a run only once a verifier had checked it, and refused tool-assisted runs; TASvideos did the same for tool-assisted runs; Twin Galaxies posted “numbers rather than methods” and no footage at all. Speedrun.com set out to bring the leaderboards together on one website with one format. Every game gets its own page, its own leaderboards and its own moderators.

That model let the site grow from a volunteer project into a large one. In 2026 it described itself as hosting “communities for thousands of games, each with their own leaderboards, rules, moderators, and participants”, and counted 53,800 game communities and 6.2 million speedruns.

Fast facts

  • Started: by Peter “Pac” Chase, in 2013 according to the site’s own history; other accounts give 2014.
  • How it works: runners submit a time with video; each game’s own moderators check it before it goes on the board.
  • Owner: Elo Entertainment, a data and analytics company, since 2020.
  • Size in 2026: 53,800 game communities, 2.9 million registered users and 6.2 million speedruns, by the site’s own count.

Every game its own rules

Speedrun.com does not decide what counts as a fast finish; each game’s community does. That suits a hobby whose categories vary from game to game. Edge explained the basic ones in 2007: “Any%, means simply completing a game as quickly as possible and skipping as much as is needed”, Low% means finishing with as few items as possible, and 100% means collecting every item and killing every enemy, with other “specified conditions which can vary from game to game”. Runs could be done in one sitting or in segments. On Speedrun.com a game’s moderators write those rules down and split the board by category, runners record their attempts on video, and the moderators check each submission before the time appears. The site’s own example of a speedrun is Super Mario 64 with all 120 stars collected.

The looser format was the difference from what came before. Where the Speed Demos Archive had accepted runs only after a verifier had checked them against strict rules, Speedrun.com, as the Wikipedia account puts it, “had less stringent submission guidelines than SDA and was intended to centralize speedrun leaderboards for many different games”. The Speedrunning entry tells how the scene moved there.

Volunteers and a buyer

For seven years Speedrun.com was run by volunteers. In October 2020 the site announced that it had been bought by Elo Entertainment, a data and analytics firm. “When Speedrun.com was first started by Pac in 2013, it was a labor of love created by volunteers passionate about the speedrunning community,” the announcement said, but with “the recent boom during pandemic it became harder than ever to keep up”. Elo would pay for full-time engineers to stabilise the site, which had been showing visitors its error page, while “the community will continue to be run through the expertise of the Full Mods, Content Mods, and Game Moderators”. Chase stayed involved and set out plans for better moderator tools, faster search and backups of the boards. He told PCGamesInsider he had decided Elo were “the right people for the site”.

The leaderboards also sit awkwardly with something runners themselves said about their hobby. “It’s nearly always a single individual that performs a particular run,” the Speed Demos Archive administrator Ali Campbell told Edge in 2007, “but the end product usually ‘belongs’ to the community as a whole in some way, because many people will have had input into it.” A board of names and times records the individual; the routes, tricks and glitches that made the time possible came from everyone.

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