Speedrunning and Its Inception

With over a decade in the entertainment industry, Julian Conroy is a streamer with a channel on Twitch.tv and YouTube. Julian Conroy streams live three times a week, plays video games, and focuses on speedrunning content.

A speedrun can be a recording or a play-through of a selected part of a video game or the whole video game. Speedruns are performed to complete a video game as fast as possible. The players who perform speedruns are known as speedrunners.

Although speedruns have existed since the dawn of the internet, it was in 1993 when the seminal shooter doom arrived. A group of courageous players discovered a software feature that allowed players to record their gameplay. Two years after the Quake release in 1996, the Speed Demos Archive became a hub for the promising speedrunning community. The number of games explored continued to grow even as the speedrunning community grew.

Today, many people speedrun through games for various reasons, such as the hope of setting a new record while enjoying a favorite game. Others do it simply for the challenge.