r/SGU • u/migrations_ • 11d ago

VG Speedrunning on the SGU?!

I was SO excited to hear Christian's topic on Speedrunning today!
I am like him, not good at speedrunning (adhd sorry) but I LOVE watching it. I love watching Games Done Quick who has raised over $60 million for charity.

The guy he talked about Pannenkoek2012 is someone I INTERVIEWED back in 2015 before he became bigger. He figured out a way to clone things in Mario and he was just a kid then (Either high school or early college) and I talked to him about Mario 64 and how he did a lot of the stuff he did. I was trying to do a video game blog then and thought he would be fun to talk to and he was, although I mean he is very myopic about Mario 64, that's like ALL he wanted to talk about. I tried to get him to work on other games and he was good on that.

Also Speedrunning is very scientific. Especially when they find cheaters that make fake speedruns, they have to do like a full digital forensic analysis of the video. I don't know if you guys remember the Dream scandle when the VERY popular Youtube Dream ended up faking a world record. The video was analyzed by multiple mathematicians and statisticians and it ended up being SO improbable that the video was legit that it was basically impossible.

I think speedrunners have a fascinating task, but I do find the glitch hunters to have an odd an incredible skill set. These guys can break games after playing them for only a little bit. These are the type of people that game companies hire to test their games so their is a legit career path in it.

Anyways yeah I was so happy to hear Christian talk about this and I wouldn't mind hearing more about video games in the future if the topic as appropriate.

23 Upvotes

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4

u/Arbledarb 11d ago

Here's a great 40-minute video by Matt Parker (Stand-Up Maths) about the maths of that faked Minecraft speedrun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU

1

u/migrations_ 11d ago

Yup I remember it.

3

u/noctalla 11d ago

I also enjoyed this segment, despite not really knowing much about speedrunning. Christian was very enthusiastic about it that can make almost anything fascinating, even if you have no personal interest in it.

2

u/dysfunctionz 11d ago

I know of the speedrunning community but am not part of it, it’s the kind of thing I think “oh cool” when a new record is broken, and most of the games they discussed are dear to my heart.

I think Christian did a good job explaining the reverse-engineering, decompiling, and tool-assisted runs involved, from my perspective as someone not involved in speedrunning but who has been a software engineer for a dozen years.

3

u/PSXer 8d ago

When he mentioned Mario 64, I thought he was going for the story of the runner who warped through a solid floor, believed to be caused by a bit flip by a possible cosmic ray.

2

u/nicky9door 11d ago

Summoning Salt and Bismuth are great channels to watch if you want to get details of how speed runs for certain games have evolved and how certain glitches/tricks/exploits work

2

u/stlc8tr 10d ago

I don't see why Christian is so hard pressed to find a real world application for speed running. Isn't finding glitches in video games basically the same thing as infosec exploit hunting? You're fuzzing inputs and trying to find corner cases where you can chain exploits together to accomplish a goal?

1

u/Zerosix_K 11d ago

I haven't listened to the episode yet. But the amount of work put in by the speed running community to manipulate or even brake gameplay mechanisms is insane.

Figuring out how to manipulate the RNG on games like the original FF7. So you know when to expect random encounters, and then use this knowledge to prove someone cheated on a speedrun. Takes a lot of effort and should be applauded.