Lament

When I first got interested in speedrunning seriously back in 2009 and 2010, it was always about creating a final product. It was about taking a game you knew well, learning how to play through it as quickly as possible, and eventually creating a video of a run through the game that demonstrated the game pushed to its limits. Speed Demos Archive (SDA) was a site that hosted and archived these speed run videos; it was the ultimate goal of a serious speedrunner to get a run posted there. For the serious runner, speedrunning was like a project: the goal of it was the create a final product that would serve to represent the game on SDA, something that you were proud of and that would really mean something. And it was fun - while the process could be frustrating at times, it was still fun to do, and you knew that your efforts would pay off in the end when you had your final result. Sometimes there would be more than one person working on the same run at once (usually a single-segment run), but it was always in the spirit of healthy competition to push each other to create a better product. And once runs were finally finished and posted on SDA, they would usually stay there until enough new stuff was found to warrant trying to improve them. I was fortunate enough to have the privilege of being the author of the Majora's Mask single-segment run currently on SDA, one of the last big runs that was finished and posted before the speedrunning paradigm fully shifted. It was one of the best experiences of my life so far, and the feeling of accomplishment when I was finally finished was amazing.

Shortly after I finished my Majora's Mask run, I finally took the time to play through Twilight Princess, and having absolutely loved the game I decided I wanted to try to improve the SDA run of that, seeing as a lot of new stuff had been found. For a while, things were going well; though it could be infuriating at times, I was still having fun with it, and I was confident that I was going to be able to do the same thing with Twilight Princess as I had done with Majora's Mask. But as time went on, the speedrunning paradigm started changing. Thanks to sites like SpeedRunsLive and Twitch.tv, speedrunning was attracting a plethora of new people, and many of those who had already been around for a while started to move away from SDA and gravitate toward the new sites. And as speedrunning got more popular and SDA became less relevant, the old spirit of speedrunning began to disappear.

Speedrunning was no longer about getting a lasting final product; it was now about competition for world records (a term that had been virtually non-existent in the speedrunning community up until this point). Runs were getting beaten left and right, and the idea of a "final product" started to lose its meaning completely. SDA pages for popular games became more and more out of date, and people no longer seemed to have any interest in fixing that. As speedrunning went from being almost like an art form to being more like a sport, more and more people started simply going for personal bests, without any interest in putting in the enormous amounts of effort now required to get world records. And as this enormous paradigm shift occurred, I suddenly found myself out of a job.

The old form of speedrunning that I had "grown up" with, the kind I had come to know and love and had been a part of myself, seemed to have phased out of existence. I was no longer able to simply work at my own pace; I now had to keep up with relentless competition at all angles. I could no longer see myself as someone who was doing something important by working on something that no one else could create; there were now dozens of others doing the exact same thing as me, many of whom could do it much better than I could. And nothing I produced could ever be seen as a final product; at most, it would end up being a temporary "world record" that would likely be beaten within a week, and that was if I was even able to catch up to the levels of optimization necessary to even *get* a world record these days. I either had to work against intense competition that I might not be able to beat for a world record that wouldn't mean anything, or settle with playing casually for mere personal bests and fade into irrelevance. My old hobby as I had known it was gone, and I felt completely powerless. Speedrunning for me had always been about contributing to something bigger than myself, and now that I no longer could, doing speedruns just felt like a waste of time.

I recently came back to the general speedrunning community after taking a long hiatus due to personal life issues, and during that time speedrunning has only drifted further and further away from its roots. There's nothing left for me to contribute; no matter what I do, I'll never be able to have another experience like I did back in the Majora's Mask days. I'll never again be able to work on a speedrun and feel that what I'm doing really means something, that I'm making something that no one else could and that my final product will be what represents the game in the speedrunning community for the foreseeable future. Speedrunning for me will always mean the old way that it used to be, and now that the old way is for all intents and purposes dead, so is speedrunning in my eyes.

I can't keep pretending that speedrunning as I know it is still alive, that I can still somehow squeeze in a contribution like my old Majora's Mask run for Twilight Princess or any other game. I can't keep living in denial; I have to accept that my old hobby is gone forever. I have to move on and get on with my life.

That's not to say I won't keep grieving for a while. I miss the old way of speedrunning a lot; until recent events in my personal life, it was all I knew. I'll still stick around in the SDA community, and I'll still try to contribute whatever I can. But unless I can find a game I enjoy that still has a bit of the old speedrunning spirit in it, my days of doing actual speedruns are over.