Early days Early days

Wright, 24, grew up in Wisconsin. His first console was the Sega Genesis, but his love of gaming really took off when he received a Nintendo 64 and Ocarina of Time from his parents for Christmas. He later played Super Smash Bros. competitively and even won a tournament in Minnesota.

As Wright was battling Gohma for the first time as a kid, a movement was gathering momentum. The iconic first-person shooter Quake was released in June 1996, and a community of speed runners began playing through the game as quickly as possible. The website Nightmare Speed Demos was founded in April 1997 as a way to organize and archive the fastest times and became Speed Demos Archive a year later after merging with another site.

Speed Demos Archive later expanded to include Nintendo's Metroid Prime in November 2003 and then all games a year later. The space adventure game gave rise to the concept of a "sequence break," in which players got advanced weapons earlier than intended and blasted through the levels.

The site now has over 900 titles and tens of thousands of videos. In the early days, recording such runs was challenging, and some records turned out to be illegitimate. "People were still using VCRs to record stuff," says Mike Uyama, who joined Speed Demos Archive as an administrator in 2006.

Not every game is suitable for speed runs. A single-player option that has a definitive beginning and end point is necessary for an organized run. Runs are typically divided between "Any%," which requires just finishing the game as quickly as possible, and "100%," which involves completing all levels or tasks before ending the game. The only acceptable runs are done on official consoles and no emulators or cheats are allowed. (Wright set the Ocarina of Time record on the Chinese iQue Player and used Japanese text, which moves slightly faster than English.)

A good speed running game also needs to have a measurable amount of player control, whether through controller-based acrobatic feats in Mario or the tactics of move selection in Pokémon. Excess randomness is also the enemy, although small doses can make a game more exciting.

Newer games generally aren't used in speed runs because the optimal path hasn't been figured out yet. And many of the AAA titles, which require millions of dollars and hundreds of developers, focus more on eye-catching graphics or multiplayer modes. "A lot of games that are really big today ... are based about guiding a player through some set pieces and telling a story," says Wright.

Some recent exceptions include Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy, but the mass-market titles of the 1990s and early 2000s remain the most popular, both for their familiarity and potential for glitches. And Ocarina of Time is one of the most intricate and well-documented games for speed running.