“The most important thing to know about this game is what’s called the frame rule. Starting from power on, every 21 [frames], the game checks to see if you’ve completed the current level so that it can load the next one.”

46:35: “We’re inside this pot, and this pot doesn’t have a destination assigned to it when you drop down it ’cause you’re not supposed to be able to drop down it. It just so happens that Ganon’s room is room 0, so if you don’t have a room assigned to it, you’re going to room 0, and that’s Ganon.”

When I was very young, games were magic. Plugging the brains of a Missile Command cartridge into the body of an Atari 2600 and turning it on seemed to create a soul that I could see onscreen and touch through the controller. In some sense the game seemed alive and not fully knowable to me. There were secrets hidden within. I remember my father excitedly showing me how if you did just the right thing, a thing that defied the logic of the game itself (not scoring points, wasting missiles), initials would appear, the mark of the game’s creator. 

Over time, my sense of a living soul in games faded. Games seemed to lay themselves bare, wanting to banish any sense of true mystery, wanting everything they had to offer to be apparent and visible and easily found by the player. Technology became mundane to me rather than magical. The sense of a soul, or of a real world being created, TRON-like, in the circuits of a computer or game console evaporated. When I did encounter “secrets” in a game, I was usually just dismayed by their banality and complete absence of magic or mystery. Often they were secrets in plain sight, marked on maps or indicated in other ways, their meaning spelled out so that players wouldn’t be confused or mystified. But sometimes I want to be mystified. Rather than letting me feel like I was glimpsing something raw and real, “secrets” like this made me feel like I was being kept at arm’s length, like there was nothing but a facade to engage with.

This is what speedrunning does for me. It gives life back to video games. Speedrunning reveals to me just how little I know and understand about the games that I thought I knew and understood so well, games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There’s an intimacy to it, a breaking past the surface. Speedrunning reveals to me that almost every game is full of secrets; not the kinds of secrets that designers place in games for players to find, but secrets that the designers don’t even know about or intend, secrets that are the game’s own, things borne out of the process of its creation. Through speedrunning, these games continue to live and be explored; there are still mysteries to be discovered. There may be a new Super Mario Bros. world record by the end of February, they said at AGDQ last week.  

When I watch a speedrun, I have that same sense of wonder that I did as a child, which comes from the feeling that somewhere in the code of a game resides something that is almost alive, a glowing core that we can observe and try to understand and maybe, in some sense, touch.