Sequence Breaking
Playing out of order
A speedrunner's term for taking a route the game's makers did not intend: the ice beam before the bombs in Metroid. Edge defined it in 2007 as "the use of a route other than that intended by the game creators"; Retro Gamer used it unexplained the same year. No earlier use is held.
Sequence breaking is a speedrunner’s term for reaching a part of a game by a route its makers did not intend — collecting an item early, skipping an area, entering a room from the wrong side. The name was in ordinary use by 2007, when Edge devoted a feature to speedrunning and Retro Gamer scored Super Metroid’s longevity on it without explaining the phrase. No earlier use is held in the library.
Fast facts
- Definition (as of 2007): “the use of a route other than that intended by the game creators” — the working definition Edge gave, noting that runners “don’t agree on a single definition”.
- The canonical example: Metroid, where “a playthrough can be altered dramatically by finding the ice beam before the bombs (which should be impossible)”.
- Where the community lived: the Speed Demos Archive, TASvideos, Metroid 2002 and Twin Galaxies were the four “hubs” Edge named; SDA “was founded in 1998 as a Quake site”.
- Where the practice came from: Doom’s demo recording, then Quake Done Quick (1997), per the same feature.
What the term means
Edge’s September 2007 feature on speedrunning separated two skills. One is execution: Contra and Mario, said runner Mike Uyama, “have no route-planning to speak of, so they depend on better execution, and in some cases luck”. The other is routing, and sequence breaking belongs to it:
Given that basic standard, however, the tricks are fascinating — particularly ‘sequence breaking’. Though runners don’t agree on a single definition — thanks largely to an odd application, of all things, of the intentional fallacy — most take it as meaning the use of a route other than that intended by the game creators.
The “intentional fallacy” aside is the magazine’s own: whether a route is a break depends on what the designers intended, which runners can only infer from the game. The examples the feature gave were Ocarina of Time, where “incorporating all known shortcuts gives a chance of completion in 4h 46m”, and Metroid, where the ice beam can be found before the bombs.
Which games reward it
The feature singled out one series: “The Metroid series in particular seems to have been made for route planning, with sequence breaks and hidden tricks abounding in the series.” Uyama said the same of Zelda, which “has a lot of tricks, shortcuts and sequence breaks that are discovered every month, so it’s important to establish a good route and make sure you know all of the tricks.”
Nathan Jahnke, who founded the Metroid 2002 site, put the general case: video games, “being completely free of any kind of real-life physics or other common-sense rules, lend themselves well in many cases to imaginative ‘outside of the box’ solutions” — unlike pinball, where “all pinball games have more or less the same mechanics.”
By 2007 the phrase needed no gloss for a general readership. Retro Gamer’s review of Super Metroid on the Wii Virtual Console that year gave the game 99% for longevity: “The sequence breaking and perfect score challenge, yup ages.”
Where the practice came from
Edge found it “difficult to trace the origins of speedrunning to a single game”, but named Doom as “a major forerunner thanks to one particular feature: the ability to record a demo file” of a play session. Quake turned recording into a collaborative project. Anthony Bailey, a computer-science graduate student, saw a run by Yonatan Donner and suggested improvements; with Matthias Belz and Nolan Pflug they formed Quake Done Quick. Finishing Quake on Nightmare in 19 minutes 49 seconds “was unheard of, yet by September 1997 Quake Done Quicker had improved this run to 16m 35s”, and the record stood at 12m 23s when the feature was written. QDQ was also, the feature said, the first segmented run, “whereby different players contribute different levels of the overall” recording.
The Speed Demos Archive, founded in 1998 as a Quake site, set the rules under which sequence breaks were admissible: a run could be posted once a verifier was found, “but no game-ruining glitches such as stepping outside of the gameworld, tool-assisted runs, or use of homebrew emulators are allowed.” That line — a skipped area is a run, a clip through the world’s boundary is not — is the boundary the term still sits on. Ali Campbell, one of SDA’s administrators, described the result as collective: “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”.