Think about your favorite game.

How much do you really know about it?

Have you memorized the boss patterns, and do you know the shortcuts and secrets like the back of your hand?

Do you remember where to find all those hidden collectibles better than you remember your co-workers' names?

Because there's a fair shot that you might not know that game as well as you thought, and you haven't quite cracked it open until you've played it like a speedrunner.

Friends and folks, welcome to Flyover Culture, your guided tour of pop culture and entertainment in the Midwest.

I'm Payton Knobeloch.

Video games are good.

But they could be faster.

That's where speedrunning comes in.

Runners from all over the globe work together to find new routes and techniques to complete their favorite games as quickly as possible and then compete against each other for the world record.

To a filthy casual like myself, it's witchcraft, I say!

But to a runner, it's - you know - practice and dedication and focus and all that boring stuff.

When you watch a run and you see something like... You might be thinking - okay, well I'm definitely thinking - what is this?

So we spoke with four very talented runners across the midwest to hear what got them into the practice of making the rest of us look bad.

A common theme: take a game you loved as a kid and really dissect it.

The first game that I ever speed run was I think Luigi's Mansion.

Which I did not do for very long but I did do it.

I would just like look up, you know, a random run.

Like, I didn't go for the world record run but I just looked up, like, a run and then, you know, I just kind of watched the whole thing, took some notes and then walked through the game and tried to replicate it.

And then when I couldn't do anything of that sort, you know, you just - you hop in the forum and you see if anyone's like, you know, able to help you or anything like that.

LilAggy from Central Indiana runs the 2019 hit Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and, at the time of this recording, is the world record holder and the only person to ever complete the game in under 20 minutes.

I think i actually just got it.

(gasps) Oh my god.

This game's so hard that I'd personally argue there's no real casual way to play it, but Aggy says the speedrunning skillset is totally different from beating the standard game.

I would say Sekiro is almost harder casually than it is to speedrun.

I mean they're two entirely different beasts, but like you know with speedrunning you at least have an idea of what's coming at you and what you need to do.

Whereas casually, you know, you have no idea what's happening and you're just desperately trying to get through the game.

In just one game, there are a number of ways to run it.

Glitchless is exactly what it sounds like.

100 percent runs are for the completionists out there.

And Any% typically means rolling credits by any means necessary.

YES!!

(Celebrates in French) Other runners focus more on level- and score-based games, like Helix.

They're a runner from the Twin Cities area who runs a few games, but especially Super Monkey Ball.

The skill ceiling is absolutely massive.

It is so precise and you can always go just a little bit faster.

It also has a extremely robust practice mode.

You know, every level in the game you can access from the practice mode and just play it over and over and over.

It's way ahead of its time in that, because this is a game from 2001 and it has a practice mode like that.

Like, you could retry instantly.

The first two are the main ones I run.

Super Monkey Ball 1 will always be my home.

I think I like the level design on that one a bit more.

It feels like it's easier to go faster without sort of having your run completely ruined by different smaller things.

Platformers and action games and games about apes trapped in plastic spheres are big with speedrunners because they tend to be low on something called random number generation, or RNG.

Essentially you want to mitigate as many unwelcome surprises as you can.

But theurbandear, a runner from Bloomington, IN, leans into it with his game of choice: 2004's Pikmin 2.

A lot of speed games that you see, that are really popular, don't have a lot of RNG.

So it's kind of just what we use to refer broadly to luck in speed games.

And so the other two games in the Pikmin series, Pikmin 1 or Pikmin 3, also are kind of more in that that vein of the regular speed game.

where there just isn't a ton of luck.

There is some.

Pikmin 2 is completely different.

The caves though are where it gets really interesting, and where I think you see the biggest divergence from like a standard speed game.

And that's because those layouts are procedurally generated so the game kind of goes through, you know, has a set of, essentially, puzzle pieces that it kind of tries to fit together.

And so obviously, you can never have everything memorized.

So what we'll do is we'll have kind of like a game plan on each sub level.

And so we try to execute that as best as we can.

But if RNG or, you know, placement of treasures is in a weird spot, then we've got to figure something out on the fly.

No run is ever going to be the same as the next.

Sekiro, Monkey Ball, Pikmin - these are three very different kinds of games.

But what makes a game particularly good to speedrun?

Anything where you have, you know, a good healthy set of movement options where you can actually get creative with it and you're not just, like you know, walking in a straight line.

Anything that has skippable cutscenes is automatically a big bonus, obviously.

I mean, glitches and exploits help, but they're not really necessary.

I think I'm naturally drawn to the more level-based format and I can sort of practice those individually as I need.

Which I think helps me a lot.

A high skill ceiling like I said, which is what makes Monkey Ball so good.

I think that is really important for me.

Just having really like fun and satisfying movement, and having some some sort of unique tricks, but maybe nothing too terribly complicated.

So it kind of depends.

But you might want to follow theurbandear's cardinal rule.

I also have a pretty hard and fast rule where i won't speed run like any of my favorite games.

So much like anger can get tied up in a run not going well, and I don't want to ruin some of my like favorite childhood games for things like that.

Kind of like the speedrunning equivalent of "Never work in your favorite restaurant."

You'd think a hobby where you're constantly beating each other by milliseconds would make the runners resent each other.

But that's not true!

They really only hate Jared, and he knows what he did.

In fact, speed running is as much a collaborative effort as it is competitive, if not more so.

No, I think overall it's pretty healthy.

Most people in the community you know are really happy when people get these these great times.

I find this in most speedrun communities where it's not player versus player, almost ever.

It's always "players" plural versus the game.

We're actively working together as a community to achieve the best possible time.

Yeah you want to be the person to get it, but if you're not, ah that's alright, because you can always still get it.

You know, you can keep playing, get it for yourself.

But when someone, when you see someone finally break that barrier it's always exciting because one, you know it's possible, and two, it's a great moment for them.

Most of us are friends here.

They say practice makes perfect.

They also say nobody's perfect, so I think what they probably meant was if at first you don't succeed, have a robot do it for you...

I've lost my train of thought - TAS!

Or tool-assisted speedruns are different from what you might think of speedrunning in general.

Instead of relying on twitch reflexes and frame-perfect button presses, TAS runners spend months writing scripts for a computer player to do all that stuff for them and show off exactly what an absolutely perfect run looks like.

Confused?

Me too.

I'll let Travis McGheean, aka TiKevin83 explain it better.

TASing, being just playing speedruns of video games but instead of playing them in real time with my hands, I use a script on a computer to like outline line by line what I want to do on every frame.

And it kind of works like - the way that a lot of the people like to describe it like it's a player piano.

If you've ever used a player piano where there's like a roll of inputs that go to the keyboard.

It's just like that but you're sending them to like a virtual keyboard for a computer or controller for a game console.

Travis is based in Michigan and runs classic games like Pokémon, Runescape and Backyard Baseball.

And with something like Pokémon that feels random, it's less about avoiding RNG entirely and more making it work for you.

The Pokémon speedrunning in general, it uses RNG manipulation.

It's very similar to how you approach information security, actually.

So if you are, if you know anybody who's interested in like computer hacking or other sort of like computer security it has a very similar aim to that, where you're looking at the game instead of just like how do I beat this quickly, but also how do I defeat its way of trying to make things actually feel random and make it not random.

There's probably some people who see a TAS run and think, well, they're not touching the controller or testing their reflexes.

Where's the draw?

And to Travis, those people are missing the point entirely.

Usually what they're missing is that it takes months and months and months to build that script.

Because they're - in their head they're thinking, this is just an AI.

They hit a button and it played the game for them and they're not realizing it's like, oh this person sat down in front of a computer for five or six months played this game frame by frame and picked the input to do on every single one of those frames themselves.

If you didn't need an oaf like me to explain speedrunning to you, there's a 100 percent chance you're probably familiar with Games Done Quick.

GDQ is by far the most popular speedrunning series in the country.

Each year, Awesome Games Done Quick in January and Summer Games Done Quick in July raise millions of dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders, respectively.

And they bring in some truly wild runs to do it.

Down-right, up-right, up, right, up-right, grab.

And then up-right, and count it down, one two three four.

Done.

And for director of operations Matt Merkle, it is one big undertaking.

We try to avoid running the exact same category of the exact same game multiple times in a row.

It's just people want to see something fresh, and also these runs don't generally develop that quickly to where there's something new every six months.

So we want to try and so - you know we only have 150 hours to present runs, we want to give something new and fresh and we want to give an opportunity for every single runner who plays any different type of game to have an opportunity to get on GDQ.

Just this January, even with everyone still holed up inside, Awesome Games Done Quick raised over 2.75 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

We have a grand total at this point of $2,758,847 and 40 cents.

And that was over 42,000 individual donations, so thank you so much everybody.

And they'll likely repeat that in a couple months with Summer Games Done Quick.

I think it's super important to be able to give back to, you know, the world on a larger scale.

and you know, "Hey here we are.

This is what we're doing."

Yeah I mean it's just awesome it's like basically the speedrunning Olympics really.

But on top of that, GDQ and events like Midwest Speedfest and the European Speedrunner Assembly do invaluable outreach for the scene.

All four runners I spoke with said GDQ was one of their first big exposures to speedrunning.

And it's not out of line to say that GDQ has helped grow the community as a whole.

I like to think that we had at least a small part to play in that.

But also Twitch itself and streaming itself played a massive part of that.

Just you know bringing general exposure to those speedruns to the masses was integral in just how much people got exposed and interested in speed running.

Seeing you know all these runners now even quitting their day jobs to to go full time streaming and speedrunning, and it - you know you can't say it hasn't grown if you're seeing that kind of response from it.

Speedrunning is getting bigger and bigger all the time, both in viewership and in runners.

But what is it about speedrunning that scratches such a particular itch for some people?

If the game that you're watching is one that you played as a kid, I think that is a big a big factor for a lot of people so a lot of people come in to shoot you know someone's stream and say oh this was my favorite game when i was a kid or i loved this game or or what have you um and so it brings up those feelings of nostalgia and then also just to see see your game that you played as a kid and you struggled with you know for weeks and weeks and weeks and then it gets beat in 45 minutes or something like that is i think really interesting to watch.

I do website design and other like app design using web frameworks as my day job and i love optimizing things in those like day job environments the TAS aspect of being able to take something and not just optimize it in the sense of like playing it over and over again as a human but really making the perfect run that you know i can't even optimize this anymore because it's so exact that's what attracts me to it i've always been a bit of a perfectionist so to go through a game that i love and you know literally try to perfect it i think it's really satisfying um especially with the community around it you know it's it's kind of like competitive gaming but you know instead of you know hating each other and yelling at your teammates and your enemies you all get to yell at the game together and you know it's it's fun because you know you all have a common goal and uh yeah you know it's just it's just good vibes so we've hit on types of games to run places to run them and the robo runners who will eventually rise up against us but with such a wide variety of games to run and a skill ceiling up in the stratosphere where do you even start i wish it were a more exciting answer but these runners say it's as simple as choosing your game and getting immersed in the community oh and practice look up the speedrun for your game try to get in contact try to find people and get in contact with people who run it so that if you decide that that's something you want to do you know who to talk to get in the community because that's the only thing though these communities can be sometimes hard to find because they're small they're niched you know if you find the game on speedrun.com there's a link to the discord stuff like that a lot of people think that we're just like complete god gamers that you know are like just way too good at this game and you know we get it perfect every time but no it's really it's like 99 just practice and determination and repetition and you know it just builds up as muscle memory i have about 10 000 attempts at getting a sub 20 minute run you know i got one of them that actually did it but people only see the one so they think okay wow this guy's good but you know i think a lot of people could be better at speedrunning than they think and they should give it a shot if they're interested because really i think anyone can be good at it that'll do it for this first episode of fly agriculture huge thanks to helix little aggie the urban deer and ti kevin for talking with me we've got links to their twitch channels down in the description and a very big thank you to matt merkel and the rest of the gdq team for putting me in touch with those folks if you dug this please like and subscribe and do all those things stick around we will be back soon with more cool stuff bye now