Last Saturday, January 12th, one of the year’s largest gaming events wrapped up after raising over $3 million for charity. The event ran for an entire week, brought in prominent members of several different gaming communities, and might just have been the most popular esport event in a week that also featured CS:GO and Smash tournaments.



If you haven’t gotten it yet, I’m talking about this year’s AGDQ, or Awesome Games Done Quick.

AGDQ is unquestionably a big deal in the world of gaming and maybe esports. For a lot of people, that’s a big maybe. And for others, that maybe is a flat out no. Speedrunning may have an unquestionable power in gaming, but plenty of us have questions about how it fits into the esports community.

The first being: Is speedrunning an esport?

I’m not the first to ask or answer that question. Derek Heuer over at The Game Haus wrote, “Speedruns are similar to esports, but ultimately have their own identity that’s quite separate from esports.”

On the other hand, the Global Speedrun Association, which houses leagues and professional competitive events and races, certainly sees it as a competitive sporting event.

If you want to get all bookish, you can look at Oxford’s definition of esports: “a multiplayer video game played competitively for spectators, typically by professional gamers.” Speedrun races certainly fit under that definition, though solo-speedrunning, which is the bulk of it, wouldn’t. “Multiplayer” is the tricky word here.



When most speedrunners break a record, there’s no one in the room there with them.

AGDQ: One of the only times where speed runners compete side by side.

They aren’t sitting on a track or course, right next to their competitors. But viewing them in a vacuum, totally alone, feels strange. It’s a little like thinking golf isn’t a multiplayer sport because golfers don’t drive and putt simultaneously. Speedrunners aren’t in the same time and space, but that’s only due to the advantage the digital medium provides them. They don’t need to rely on physical spaces to prove their skill and get an audience. They can do that alone in their room and in turn, their competitors can step up and try and do better in the same way.



It’s sort of like a great many Masters Tournaments that never truly begin or end, only fluctuate. That’s a patently insane image, but damn it if it isn’t an image of an esport.



I don’t think we should be debating whether or not speedrunning is an esport. At minimum, some forms of it certainly are competitive enough, regulated enough, big enough, and demand enough skill and critical thinking. RNG may play a role, and speedrunning communities may be more cooperative than competitive, but the ugly truth is luck plays a big part in so many esports and all their top competitors improve by hanging out and training with each other. Instead, I think we should be debating where speedrunning belongs in esports and how it should work.



In the IRL world of IRL sports, there are a lot of niches and you see most of them at the Olympics. Curling, wrestling, archery, fencing, running, weightlifting, are all sports big enough to have followings, research, communities, coaches, and organizations, but not quite big enough to have regular competition, the media’s attention, to have tons of money, and have layers of different professional leagues. All these sports and their competitors survive in different ways than the sports we see on TV everyday. Some of them simply aren’t large enough to sustain careers for all but a small percentage of their devoted competitors.

Speedrunning might be esport’s first big niche

In some ways, we could compare any small but resilient competitive scene a niche esport. And there are a lot of examples of those niches in esports, especially in the fighting game world. However, games have curious spill over that make a lot of these niches less well-defined. Pro fighting gamers don’t just hold to one game and branch out in a way that professional curler might not. Then there’s the trouble of views versus payment. Brawlhalla isn’t anywhere close to Smash in terms of views, playerbase, and pretty much most size metrics. But Brawlhalla has developer support and so it has better payouts that keep it thriving.



How do you define Brawlhalla and how do you define a competitor like Stephen “Sandstorm” Myers, who competes at a high level in Brawlhalla and Smash? Is he like a runner who does long and short distance? Is there an analog to him outside of esports?



Speedrunning is a niche like so many other smaller games but it has the advantage of being an entire genre, not just a game. In the way that running includes marathons, sprints, and all things in between, speedrunning includes so many games, so many categories, so many communities, and so many people. It’s niche in how it doesn’t have leagues inside of leagues, big organizations, and pure money and media attention. It’s niche in that plenty of speedrunners also compete in larger esports. But it’s a wide niche, wide enough that it is gradually building its own infrastructure.



The Global Speed Runner Association started holding PACE in 2018. PACE represents one of the first events to take speedrunning to a live competitive format. Unlike the races that go on at GDQ, these events focus more on the competitive side and less on the entertainment side of speedrunning. While PACE is having its third iteration this year, it’s really just getting started. Most other big esports have a lot more time or a lot more developer money under their belt.

Still, PACE’s Super Mario Maker VODs can climb up to over 200,000 views – not bad at all for a niche.

And while GDQ may not have the most competitive format, it’s undeniably important to the speedrunning community and tends to feature a world record breaking run or two. On the other hand, events like the blind, co-op Punch Out run at this year’s AGDQ are as much a sublime mix of skill and spectacle as anything the irl world has to offer. In a sense, you could look at it like a weightlifting exhibition or a Wrestlemania that also featured some legitimately unscripted, truly competitive wrestling matches alongside the pre-planned entertainment.

The wide gap between blind, co-op Punch Out and speedrunning staples like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Maker showcases just how tricky it is to make sense of speedrunning as an esport. At once, the skill and competition are there even if a lot of infrastructure hasn’t been laid yet.

On the other hand, some speedrun categories and styles would simply never lend themselves to the rigor competition demands. Marathon runs of Final Fantasy VIII may never have the same oOympic stage that an actual marathon run has. And some runs are so wildly RNG dependent that they would invalidate most competitive formats.

That duality makes me think speedrunning could easily become simultaneously niche and established in the world of esports, much in the way the fighting game community is. I can imagine a world where Super Mario or Celeste speedruns have a healthy competitive arena of their own. I can’t imagine that world for so many other speedruns that feel too hindered by RNG or runtime or pure, unadulterated lack of an audience.

In my eyes, speedrunning is golf.

Yes, that’s right. I’ve tricked you into reading this very serious article so I could tell you, very seriously, that speedrunning is gamer golf.

Much like lots of serious sports fans like golf and lots of casual fans will turn it on because it’s great in the background, many serious esports fans and casual gamers treat speedrunning the same way. Much like sports can follow the general gist of golf, they do need the announcer and broadcast to help them on the specifics and queue them in on when to clap softly.

Much like golf has obvious ways to work as a sport, it also has ways to be colorful and entertaining. Yes, I’m absolutely talking about mini-golf. There is a key difference in that no serious golfer has tried to absolutely dismantle a mini-golf course in the way speedrunners have dismantled the dumbest games and challenged. But this is entirely golf’s loss because if you told me Tiger Woods was training for ten days to clear a mini-golf course as fast as possible on live TV, The first thing I’d ask is what channel this was on.

As esports grows, I would genuinely love to see speedrunning grow with it. That growth would entail some speedruns and games becoming their own established esports. The less RNG-dependent, more consistent platforms with solidly fast clear times make for a great start. If an infrastructure for speedrunning these games can develop, then some developers might even build or gear new games towards competitive speedrunning. If you build it, they will build, then other people will run it.

That growth wouldn’t have to leave out the colorful, crazy niches of speedrunning either. Those niches might just multiply and grow, as they have in recent years with the rise of helpful tools like Discord and Speedrun.com. Let speedrunning become the golf of esports. Or, if you want to compare apples to apples, another community like the fighting community.