Not Your Average Run

Jacob Davis, 24, is an Industrial Hygienist residing in Iowa, USA. He protects workers from harmful hazards in the day, and breaks world records in Super Mario Odyssey by night. Welcome to the world of video game speed running.

Super Mario is one of the most commonly speed run games.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, you’re not alone. Niche and mostly underground, speed running is a small sub section of competitive video gaming. It quite literally is the act of completing a game as quickly as possible, competing for the top spot on the leaderboards. Though speed running has been around since the original ‘DOOM’ days in the 90s, it’s not until much more recently that it’s garnered more considerable traction.

Jacob – known as Bayleef online – has been speed running a selection of games since getting hooked while watching a Games Done Quick event in 2012. These speed running marathons are held semi-annually all in the name of charity fundraising, raising over $2 million in a one-week period at the start of this month.

Jacob, clearly still shocked after appearing at 2019’s GDQ event, told AD_HOC: “I never thought I’d be good enough to do something like this, but I’m constantly proving myself wrong”. His speedrun of Super Mario Odyssey was watched live by over 200 thousand people. “It’s always been a thing on my bucket list to get to perform a run in the hot seat, and I’m very grateful towards GDQ for giving me that opportunity.

“I first found out about speed running in late 2011 by watching ‘Portal Done Pro’” Alex French, 25, known online as BloodThunder, told us: “Right after watching the ‘Portal Done Pro’ run, I started speed running portal where I did a bunch of categories like inbounds, Out of Bounds and Glitchless, before branching out to other games”.

Since GDQ 2014, he’s attended eleven events and completed 15 runs. Alex explained how each game has its own set of categories, based on rule sets agreed upon by their respective communities. Some of these categories are shared across a wide range of titles, including Any%, 100% and Glitchless. The runs based on a percentage are generally for games that have collectables or upgrades and indicate what percentage of those you need to collect before beating the game.

“100% means you’re doing a speed run of collecting everything then also beating the game. Any % is the category you’re most likely to see, and it means beating the game with any number of collectibles gathered”. To put these runs into perspective, the Any% category world record for the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - one of the greatest games to bless our games consoles - is 17 minutes and 4 seconds.

A casual player would probably spend around 30+ hours to achieve the same result. An obvious question would be: why? Why beat the game in 17 minutes when you could be getting over 30 hours of entertainment out of it?

For Alex it’s: “being able to take a game and take it from a linear/ narrative driven experience into more of a sandbox experience. You get to learn so much more about the inner workings of the different mechanics within the game and how things like the physics engine handles different situations.

Then you get to add the competitive nature of constantly wanting to get better and improve as the speed run evolves, it just makes it something truly special”. Jacob told me a story of similar attractions, adding that the evolution of a game once it has been broken down adds another level of replay value that’s completely community driven.

Getting to a competent level of competitive speed running is no easy task. Jacob juggles his 9-5 with practice time and streaming on Twitch. “I try to commit 4-6 hours a day on it. I’ve logged around 1200 hours into Super Mario Odyssey. Others with more free time in my community have logged over 2000”. He’s currently looking to go back to college to get a degree in Chemistry – all the meanwhile working towards becoming a full-time streamer / content creator.

Unlike competitive eSports – League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Dota 2 – there isn’t much money to be made in competing for the top times. Many runners, like Jacob, work towards becoming a full time Twitch streamer or YouTuber in order to monetise their work. Alex has already made the step to full-time, earning himself over 17 thousand followers on twitch with over 250 of those paying £4.99 to subscribe to him (receiving special privileges and emotes in his live stream chat).

Alex and Jacob spoke highly of the speed running community, praising GDQ for the work it’s done for charity, and subsequently attracting more people to the scene. They both showed a real, honest passion for their chosen games, and for the community overall. Alex told us: “I foresee myself speed running games for a long time to come. Gaming has always been something I’ve enjoyed growing up and speed running has just reinforced that enjoyment. Unless some life changing event happens, I don’t see a stopping point anytime soon”.

Links to their Twitch channels below.

Jacob ‘Bayleef’ Davis: https://www.twitch.tv/Bayleef

Alex ‘BloodThunder’ French: https://www.twitch.tv/BloodThunder

By Adam Kirkman