The industry of people watching other people play video games is serious bucks—and for many people, it's still seriously confusing. Game-streaming has become a pop-culture line dividing one generation from the next. It separates kids who subscribe to PewDiePie's YouTube channel from people who have no idea what a "poo-dee-pie" is.

I think of myself somewhere in the middle—a young-ish man who is savvy about game-streaming services like Twitch and Beam but rarely logs into them. Typically, I'd rather play games than watch them being played, but my major exception is classic gaming. Sometimes, I like to load an old, known game being played by a whiz kid, perhaps as background noise while cooking or getting ready for bed. I like the quick-hit fix of digital nostalgia without having to re-learn the tough classics.

More and more over the past few years, I have watched a particular niche of Twitch and YouTube streamers dedicated to these games: speedrunners.

These are gamers who grab known titles, from the oldest Atari classics to the newest PC and console fare, and beat them as quickly as humanly possible. Up until recently, I thought these were another weird class of nerdy fame-seekers, much like the high-score champions in documentaries like King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. These brave souls etch their names in history by, you know, shaving seconds off the finish time for the original Super Mario Bros.

Surely, that's a part of it. But this week, while binge-watching one of the world's biggest speedrunner marathons, I discovered something amazing. These speedsters share an ethos that's surprisingly similar to another major culture shift—the original hip-hop movement.

For now, he's Mithical9

Over a span of seven days, the annual Awesome Games Done Quick event hosts a ton of speedrun attempts. It's essentially non-stop, 24-hour stuff. Over the course of this event, tons of popular gaming franchises, like Super Mario and Doom, have their completion times eviscerated by the world's most efficient gamers. But the big games share the AGDQ stage with some little-known ones, as well, which can be equally entertaining thanks to their particular glitches and idiosyncrasies. In some ways, it's not necessarily fair to pick just one of these old-game speedruns out as the best; they run the gamut in terms of weirdness and competitiveness.

Still, one stands out for me against all odds: Matthew Hume's run during this year's AGDQ is pretty much the opposite of "prime time" in every way possible. Early Wednesday morning at roughly 3am Eastern, the 29-year-old Toronto man sat sat down on AGDQ's couch to play a relatively unknown game from 1990: Kabuki Quantum Fighter.

If you want a breakthrough, Hume had his work cut out for him.

Hume opens his play session by differentiating himself in a peculiar way—he introduces himself using his real name. Hume then mentions how rarely that happens at AGDQ, an event where people tend to go by their gamer screen names. "For now," he adds, "I'm Mithical9."

But Hume isn't nickname averse. He almost immediately begins listing a litany of strange-sounding nicknames, the way a basketball fan from 1990 might casually mention Jordan, Wilkins, Magic, and Bird. Hume had met his own fair share of impressive players with wacky-sounding names this year, he says, and he lists their handles as both idols and peers.

When it gets down to competition time, it's one thing to say that Hume is quite good at the game. Kabuki Quantum Fighter compares favorably to other NES action-platformers like Mega Man and Castlevania, with the oddball quirk that your hero's primary weapon is a giant mane of hair used as a whip. The game requires plenty of precise action, including jumps and various types of attacks, and Hume tears through the full game. Using a mix of split-second reactions and glitch know-how, he completes it in an astonishing 10 minutes and 44 seconds. (This is shy of his own personal record by about 10 or so seconds.)

All the while, he doesn't just play KQF well. Hume evangelizes the game—and those who have blazed similarly unique trails.

During this wee-hours run, Hume's mouth operates almost as briskly as his button-tapping fingers. Every action-based beat in a level is explained. Every odd thing about the game (including its bizarre plot, in which a samurai loads his physical self into a computer program to "hack" it with his hair) receives a lengthy explanation with the kind of warm-hearted mocking that made Hume's love of the game evident. Perhaps most importantly, most of the game's tricks and glitches, which Hume exploited to get through levels faster, are credited. After name-checking screen names like Vorpal, Dragondarch, TheSeaWolf1, and Tiki, Hume makes his case.

"The thing about speedrunning is, you're always building on the work of those who came before you," he tells the crowd. And when he finishes the run, he thanks the world of speedrunning for being "a wonderful and fulfilling part of my life."

Speedrunning as an "element"

So, what does this obsessive retro-gaming guy in a hotel lobby at 3am have in common with the world of hip-hop? Quite a bit, if you go back in time a few decades.

In some respects, being clinical and analytical about hip-hop misses the point, but the movement's origins are commonly broken down by describing its "four elements"—MCing, DJing, tagging, and breakdancing. As America's fad of disco music and clubs began to dovetail in the 1970s, urban centers across the country saw a rise in these four forms of expression, most commonly in African-American and Black communities.

Hip-hop stood out as an art form with immediacy and endless callbacks. Rhymes were often about favorite locations and recent pop culture, or lines could copy other MCs' lyrics and reappropriate them to say something new. Sampling became the ultimate tribute to older music reborn anew—melodies and beats were reinvented, not stolen wholesale. Even the forms of breaking and tagging were typically about building on the creations and styles of those who came before. This reverence for previous greats continues today, and it's a big reason why so many fans and artists are excited to embrace generation-spanning comebacks like A Tribe Called Quest's We Got It From Here....

As I watched Hume's play and his emphasis on callback and respect, I immediately thought back to my days immersed in the music scene as a music critic and editor with the Dallas Observer. Of course Kabuki Quantum Fighter had been around and many of the glitches on display were previously discovered, but Hume passionately reintroduced these elements in a new, more-engaging way. The original didn't even register as a blip, but the remix engrossed me in a whole genre.

Ultimately, Hume's effort was perhaps a more compelling tribute to older games than, say, a retro-styled new game based on a classic. Fans know these levels, these moves, this content... but not like this. Now, I see Kabuki Quantum Fighter through new, passionate eyes—and talented, high-speed fingers.

"A sense of precision"

In an e-mail interview, Hume tells me that his appreciation of Kabuki is mostly by accident. A longtime speedrunning fan (back when runs were distributed by VHS tape, he says), Hume began finally trying some of his own in 2013. He had been watching the Speed Gaming League online stream for some time when he decided on a lark to e-mail and enter a competition, which viewers were encouraged to do. His first run, as chosen by other players' votes: KQF, a game he barely knew.

A week of practice led to him beating his rivals in that run, and he kept up with the game to secure its speedrunning world record (which he lost last year).

Hume has grown organically fond of KQF, he says, and he scoffs a tiny bit at calling it retro. "The sprites and level geometry are often well-defined, popping out from the background, so it gives a sense of precision," Hume says. "I know exactly where everything is on the screen, down to the pixel. They never feel dated."

"It doesn't hurt to have a world record, though."

But the world record, the friends he's made, the co-hosting he's started at Speed Gaming League, and the events he's played in, those are likely bigger reasons for his Kabuki Quantum love. Through art, he found community.

Hume's e-mailed responses about the speedrunning world are lengthy and labored, clearly crafted by a longtime fan. Like his videos, the namechecks alone go on and on, with screen names like Mike Uyama, Breakdown, Andrew G, PJ, Feasel, Emptyeye, and Mike89 filling his reply. Credit is important to Hume. And going forward, he wants credit where credit is due—after all, now he's helping to change the Kabuki speedrunning scene, too.

"When people in the community talk about Kabuki, I want my name to come up, you know?" Hume writes. "I just want at least some little piece of speedrunning with my name on it."

Hume says that doesn't mean he has to have the top time of all time—and he admits his early attempts all began from following other players' routes, lines, and "strats" (strategies). He knows he can leave his mark in any number of ways, surely to be passed along to the next runners. And during his AGDQ run, he specifically proselytizes the crowd, describing himself as an average player and telling viewers that "anybody who takes the time to learn" can play just as well as he does.

"I like to think that even if I'm not number one, I've put enough of myself into Kabuki to leave a mark on it, and that is immensely satisfying," Hume concludes. "It doesn't hurt to have a world record, though, and I still enjoy just being with the game, so I think I will continue to run it for at least a little while longer."