F*ckin' sanity effects...
In my misspent youth, I remember trying hard to get low times in Super Metroid, especially any% (before I knew what that was) but also 100%: nothing too impressive, I was happy when I got it around 1:40 for any%, but I was like 11, so whatevs.
In college early in freshman year, I made a bet with a friend that I could get 120 stars in SM64 in under 7 hours. That's...not great...by a speedrunner's standards, but I got a bunch of people coming into the dorm and cheering in the last hour or so (I did it with about 15 minutes to spare).
I've always tried to play very well and quickly with games I know and love (not always or anything, mostly I play very casually), but the next time I really devoted time to it was in my senior year of college (2002/3). I didn't have a senior project or thesis, but I kinda made one of my own in writing a relatively casual Banjo-Kazooie speed guide. It's on GameFAQs still, but is of course horribly outdated and not a source for good info AT ALL (I listed it as "under 4 hours" which is sort of hilarious in light of recent runs, but at least even in the guide I acknowledged that as I worked on it, sub-3 seemed a better goal). Still, I hope it helped (and maybe even occasionally continues to help) a few people who wanted to do B-K quickly, but not uber-quickly. I don't usually play with the intent of getting the very best time I can, just doing very well.
Then I became a game tester a few months after graduation, and it quickly became evident that, among the group I worked with, I was one of the most suited to finishing the game fast (whatever the game happened to be--finishing quickly isn't always, or even usually, a good idea in testing but it's helpful to quickly find out if anything is very obviously broken), blowing away some of my co-workers' best efforts and such. Luckily even after playing lots of average/terrible games over the years at work, I still like videogames.
I don't remember how or when I ran into SDA (2004, probably?), but the fact that it was good work done by humans was appealing.
One day, after watching the SDA Eternal Darkness run again, it occurred to me just how many mistakes there were, and I started planning to do something of my own (though I had no recording equipment). Then I noticed a dude on Youtube had started doing practice runs on the game with the intent of improving on the SDA run, and I relaxed because I knew someone with skill was handling it and I wouldn't have to put in all that effort myself, just enjoy the fruits of his labor...well, sometime later when there had been no progress for some time, I went ahead and looked at the forum on SDA (something I don't think I'd ever done before--this was probably in 2010) and it turned out he had given up gaming for the foreseeable future. So the damn gears in my head started turning again and I knew if anyone was going to do it, it had to be me. I spent about a year off and on planning the run, acquiring a DVD recorder in there on my birthday, and then my son was born. That really kicked my butt into gear, as it was clear to me that time was just going to get tighter and tighter for me to devote to purely-recreational activities, so starting when my kid was 2 months old, I spent 8 months executing the run, and it's now up on the site as of a few months ago!
I don't think I'll do many runs to actually get up on SDA (I don't feel as skilled as many of these amazing players on here, and I tend to enjoy relatively glitch-free runs), but if there are other great games I love that deserve a good run and don't have one, I'll consider it. I'm still thinking about a self-improvement on the segmented category of Eternal Darkness...and one day I will DEFINITELY do a single-segment run of that game... I feel like if my wife and I have another kid, I can more or less write off that first year for doing ANYTHING speedrun-related, as I adjust back to life-with-newborn...but now with a toddler in tow...
In college early in freshman year, I made a bet with a friend that I could get 120 stars in SM64 in under 7 hours. That's...not great...by a speedrunner's standards, but I got a bunch of people coming into the dorm and cheering in the last hour or so (I did it with about 15 minutes to spare).
I've always tried to play very well and quickly with games I know and love (not always or anything, mostly I play very casually), but the next time I really devoted time to it was in my senior year of college (2002/3). I didn't have a senior project or thesis, but I kinda made one of my own in writing a relatively casual Banjo-Kazooie speed guide. It's on GameFAQs still, but is of course horribly outdated and not a source for good info AT ALL (I listed it as "under 4 hours" which is sort of hilarious in light of recent runs, but at least even in the guide I acknowledged that as I worked on it, sub-3 seemed a better goal). Still, I hope it helped (and maybe even occasionally continues to help) a few people who wanted to do B-K quickly, but not uber-quickly. I don't usually play with the intent of getting the very best time I can, just doing very well.
Then I became a game tester a few months after graduation, and it quickly became evident that, among the group I worked with, I was one of the most suited to finishing the game fast (whatever the game happened to be--finishing quickly isn't always, or even usually, a good idea in testing but it's helpful to quickly find out if anything is very obviously broken), blowing away some of my co-workers' best efforts and such. Luckily even after playing lots of average/terrible games over the years at work, I still like videogames.
I don't remember how or when I ran into SDA (2004, probably?), but the fact that it was good work done by humans was appealing.
One day, after watching the SDA Eternal Darkness run again, it occurred to me just how many mistakes there were, and I started planning to do something of my own (though I had no recording equipment). Then I noticed a dude on Youtube had started doing practice runs on the game with the intent of improving on the SDA run, and I relaxed because I knew someone with skill was handling it and I wouldn't have to put in all that effort myself, just enjoy the fruits of his labor...well, sometime later when there had been no progress for some time, I went ahead and looked at the forum on SDA (something I don't think I'd ever done before--this was probably in 2010) and it turned out he had given up gaming for the foreseeable future. So the damn gears in my head started turning again and I knew if anyone was going to do it, it had to be me. I spent about a year off and on planning the run, acquiring a DVD recorder in there on my birthday, and then my son was born. That really kicked my butt into gear, as it was clear to me that time was just going to get tighter and tighter for me to devote to purely-recreational activities, so starting when my kid was 2 months old, I spent 8 months executing the run, and it's now up on the site as of a few months ago!
I don't think I'll do many runs to actually get up on SDA (I don't feel as skilled as many of these amazing players on here, and I tend to enjoy relatively glitch-free runs), but if there are other great games I love that deserve a good run and don't have one, I'll consider it. I'm still thinking about a self-improvement on the segmented category of Eternal Darkness...and one day I will DEFINITELY do a single-segment run of that game... I feel like if my wife and I have another kid, I can more or less write off that first year for doing ANYTHING speedrun-related, as I adjust back to life-with-newborn...but now with a toddler in tow...
