The Press Box - Ep. 266: 'Achievement Oriented' on Becoming a Meme and Setting Speedrunning Records

Episode Date: February 24, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion briefly consider the future of TV video game adaptations, reacting to comments by 'Castlevania' producer Adi Shankar and 'The Expanse' co-author Ty Franck (3:30). Then they bring on longtime Giant Bomb video producer Drew Scanlon to discuss having a GIF of his face go viral and how long his fleeting internet notoriety will last (9:30). Lastly, they talk to Kotaku staff writer Heather Alexandra about glitching, speedrunning, and the creative ways in which players navigate games (25:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So again, that's podsurvey.com slash achievement, p-od-s-U-R-V-E-Y. Dot com slash achievement. Hello and welcome to Achievement-oriented, Channel 33's gaming podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg, and I'm a writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, NBA trade deadline analyst by night, video game podcaster by later at night, sleeper sometimes during the day. My colleague, Jason Concepcion. Hi, Jason.

What a great NBA trade deadline, everyone. It was kind of good. It was, you know, nothing happened. But it was very exciting. Yeah, you've got a lot of content. Sure. A lot of internet content out of that trade. So lots of people on the internet are getting content out of Horizon Zero done this week.

We're going to make next week our Horizon Zero Done week. We're playing it now, but we don't want to talk about it until the people can play it. That's right. We're not. privileged press people lording our review copies over our listeners. We're going to wait till you all have your hands on it until you've had a chance to try it out and we will talk about it next week. We have a couple of guests today. We're going to talk later in the show to Heather Alexandra, a staff writer for Kataku and she covers, among other things, speed running and glitching

and all the weird ways in which people manipulate games. So we're going to talk to her about that. Before then, we are going to talk to Drew Scanlon, who is a human meme. His face has been all over the internet this week. We will talk about how that came to pass. He is a longtime giant bomb video producer. I just made the face. You just made the face. Yeah, everyone knows the face or they're about to when they hear Drew.

But before we get to that, just quickly, I did a story for the ringer.com this week about the future of video game adaptations on television. And we did a show when Assassin's Creed came out about movie adaptations of video games and why they've all been so bad and where they've gone wrong and where they could stop going wrong. We didn't talk about TV in that discussion. And I started thinking about it because Netflix announced a Castlevania adaptation and animated series that's coming later this year.

And I'm also watching the sci-fi show, The Expans, which is really good. I need to watch that. Yeah, it was originally created. The concept was designed with an MMO in mind. It's sort of set in a not too distant future. Humanity has colonized the solar system, and there are all these different factions,

the UN and Mars and the belters out in the asteroid belt and all these different factions and instances, and it has sort of an MMO structure, and that's not a coincidence because that's how it was originally designed. So I wondered whether maybe TV is the natural home for video game adaptations. And of course, we know there is too much TV. There's peak TV.

There's 500 scripted shows on television this year. It seems like there should be a home for video games. So I talked to Adi Shankar, who is the producer of the upcoming Castlevania show. And I also talk to Ty Frank, who is the co-author of the Expanse Science Fiction book series, which has been adapted to TV on sci-fi. So I'm going to play a couple quick clips from them, and then I'm going to get your thoughts. So first up, this is Ty Frank of the expense. You know, if you try to stuff 10 hours of TV into a 2-hour movie, obviously that doesn't work.

Same thing with the video game stuff. It took, you know, I did all the side quest. So when I first time I played Baldur's Gate, too, it probably took me 120 hours to play the whole thing. Obviously, you couldn't tell the story that I played through in that game in a 2-hour movie. Could you do a 2-R movie in the Balders Gate setting? probably it would not be the story that I had played but it would be in the setting and I think that's the other thing is we you got to know what what medium you're using and what the strengths and what the strengths and weaknesses of that medium are and play the strengths

TV always trails movies on this stuff so if if say Doom had been a gigantic success at the box office you can bet somebody would have tried to make an unreal TV show that's just the way that it works but but they kept not succeeding they kept not doing well and so they kept seeming like a bad risk. And now a quick clip from Adi Shankar. I mean, I think TV allows you to build worlds. And it not allows you, like, in TV, you have to build a world. It's about characters and worlds.

Video games are inherently interesting. The world are inherently interesting. It allows you to, like, having more time to explore. Like, you can actually, like, populate that world more. All right. So what do you think? Do you think TV will be the salvation? I should mention that Shankar has been incredibly confident about Castlevania

setting a precedent he declared on Facebook when he announced this show. He said, I personally guarantee that it will end the streak and be the Western world's first good video game adaptation. Shoot your shot. Yeah, he is definitely shooting a shot. And the history of video games on TV is pretty short, not very distinguished. Lots of Saturday morning cartoon style shows from the 90s, Sonic and Mario and some anime efforts that were localized and more recently there have been a couple decent attempts.

There was a sci-fi show called Defiance a few years ago that was interesting at least. And there just hasn't been the big breakthrough that we've all been waiting for in movies. But maybe TV makes some sense. I hope so, Ben, because it's a, it is a dire state of affairs out here for those of us who love video games and would like to see them adapted into something more. Yeah. I mean, the TV structure makes sense because. video games are increasingly becoming episodic. We talked about that on the Hitman episode and on the

telltale episode. And even before games were being released literally in episodes, they were always semi-episodic. There were chapters and levels and natural stopping points and cliffhangers. And it just sort of mirrors the structure of TV, I think, more closely than it does movies. And one of the problems we talked about with video game adaptations of movies is people are trying to cram in all this lore and world building that you see in video games that might take dozens of hours to finish and there's plenty of time to sprinkle all that stuff in. Whereas with a movie you have two hours, you can either try to fit it all in and make the fins happy and alienate the people who haven't played the game or you can go too far in the other direction.

It's tough to strike that balance. Whereas in TV, as Shankar said, you have some sort of space to play. Yeah, I think TV of late has been something of a haven for a different kind of sci-fi than what you're seeing on the screen now, which is, you know, either Star Wars or something like, you know, arrival that's kind of very high-brow sci-fi. TV, you get a chance to like, you know, you've got your Battlestar Galactic, which they made for no money and was fantastic. The Expanse, which I hope to watch soon, and I hear is great. I had numerous people to also tell me that the books are great. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, well, there was some discussion of a Zelda show. Nintendo was taking meetings about making a live action Zelda show. And there's been a Halo show, like a Steven Spielberg-held Halo show in development with Showtime for years now. And it's not clear winner if that's happening, but it's not dead yet completely. So they're out there, but we're still waiting for the breakthrough. But I hope that if Castlevania succeeds, maybe that'll set a precedent. Maybe people will start looking at.

toward TV as a solution, as a stop gap until we get that quality blockbuster we've been waiting for. I think there's some potential there. So we can get to the guests now. Our first guess is a longtime video producer for Giant Bomb, although as of this week, he has struck out on his own because let's face it, he is too big for a Giant Bomb or for anyone website, he belongs to the internet now. And if you've been on the internet this week, you've seen his face, whether you knew it or not, because it's the subject of a zoomed-in GIF that's become maybe the most ubiquitous reaction image out there right now. And now you know his name. It's Drew Scanlan.

Hi, Drew. That's me. Hey, guys. So how would you describe the expression that you're making in this gift? Because I've been trying to describe it myself. It's like somewhere between surprised and quizzical and bemused. It's like sort of a laid back, like a laid back excuse. me, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

That's a good one. Maybe incredulous. Yeah. Slightly, slightly incredible. A little less than incredulous, but. Yeah. Yeah. It's not too, yeah.

It's not too aggressive. Yeah. And so it works for many, many, many situations as we've discovered. So just give us the origin story here because like many memes, I think, it's taken a winding route to prominence. This is not actually a new thing that you did. It has just recently caught on. So give us the origin story.

Yeah. So I think it's back from like December 2013. Yeah. And I think it would probably be best to sort of contextualize it by explaining where I work, which is a website called Giant Bomb. It is a website about video games and the culture that surrounds the game industry. We do a lot of reviews, podcasts, things like that. And naturally, a lot of video.

So I currently spend about five hours a week minimum on video, and I'm one of the people that is less on video these days. So I think it was only a matter of time before, you know, one of the many gifts that our audience creates on a weekly basis reached critical internet mass. But yeah, so that's from an episode of a show that we do every Friday called Unprofessional Fridays. and our editor-in-chief Jeff Gersman is playing Starbound and he says, which is a game about farming, you know, you grow your crops and then you harvest them and build structures and things. And he says, I'm farming with my hoe.

So I've been doing some farming with my hoe here. I can kind of till the... And I react to how I did. I mean, Giant Bomb is, because our content is so long form, I think a lot of it is, it's very improvisational and it's a lot of just throwing stuff out and seeing what sticks. So I've worked with Jeff for a long time. So I can kind of tell when he is like just by his inflection when he's, you know, meaning for something to be a joke. And I'm about 50% sure that he meant that.

Like, so the way this works is someone throws out something and someone else picks it up, right? So I was kind of expecting someone else to say something and I didn't want to, you know, I didn't have anything. thing right then to riff off of. So I just reacted with my face. I should add that the rest of your colleagues who are in the picture and picture across the top of the screen for the original video look somewhat dead-eyed and as if they've been marching across, you know, across the planes of internet for an extended period of time, you look quite engaged. And then when he says, farming with my hoe, it actually takes a second You kind of do the blink and incredulous look.

I urge everyone to look up the original video because it's fantastic. What does this experience been like when it started? I think I first saw it sometime last week in conjunction with a tweet, I think about school. Somebody had tweeted something like me. Yeah, I can take biology. That's fine. I can deal with that. first day of biology class

cells and then it's the face and it's got like 10,000 retweets it has like 62,000 what was it? What was your feeling when you started to realize that this was taking off? Well, that was the first one I saw as well and I think it's still my favorite

and like I said before our audience is very adept at using gift making tools and makes them quite often. There are dozens of gifts of me out there before and since this particular one. So I thought kind of like, oh, okay, this one has gotten quite a few retweets, but it wasn't until I started seeing people, you know, mentioned me on Twitter and saying,

here's another one and another one and another one. And it's still tough for me to gauge how large it's gotten because, and I've been trying to think of like an analogy for this, but it's like being in a valley and not being able to see out of it or like being on stage and not being able to see the, play. I imagine it's a lot like, you know, releasing an album or something and you know, you see your album out there, but you don't know how other people are interpreting it because it's yours. It's a strange feeling, but it's, I don't know, it's been really fun. I think the most fun part about it is seeing the giant bomb audience react to the GIF at large. Like people message me and say,

my mom posted this on Facebook. Yeah. She has no idea who you are. So I think, I think it's been even more fun for them. Who's been the best, like, most unexpected, kind of famous person that has used your gift so far? Gosh, I think Terrell Owens was a weird one. Ava, I don't know how to pronounce her last name, Ava. Duverne. DeVernet, yeah.

The director of Selma and an Oscar-nominated director. That was weird. It's gone through quite a few. internet cultures. Do you have a particularly expressive face, would you say? Are you a especially giffable person or are the gifts of you that exist mostly a product of just getting a lot of airtime and inevitably you're going to do something giffable if you're on camera long enough?

I don't know. I think that latter part is definitely true. But I don't know. I think I credit my dad for any mannerisms. People say I move a lot like him. I also watched a lot of Jim Carrey movies growing up. So I don't know, maybe that stuff exudes from me. And the interesting thing is that this expression is applicable to many, many different contexts.

And people have used it in all sorts of situations. And most of them are just very innocuous. But there are a lot where your face is sort of standing in for large groups. Like you are white people or you are like Christian. or something. Like you are just the, the avatar of these entire groups that obviously in real life

you don't actually speak for. So how does that make you feel? Are you kind of uncomfortable with being the face of like white people in a tweet basically? You know, it's weird. I think with the sort of magnitude that it's reached

comes this realization that people don't necessarily associate people like Terrell Owens has no idea who I am. So that is kind of, I can kind of hide behind that, right? But I personally don't have a problem with it being appropriated for things that, you know, I don't necessarily stand for as long as, you know,

they're not mean-spirited. Like that kind of bums me out, but I haven't seen a whole lot of those. But it's, yeah, it's weird. But so far I haven't had people get mad at me for being associated to things, you know, via my face. So, right. Obviously, it's taken a couple of years to kind of reach this critical viral mass.

What are your thoughts on how long this might last? I mean, like, it's interesting now to kind of like measure popular culture in memes. Like, I think that the meme that kind of broke through right before yours was the Rolls Safe meme, which is black gentleman pointing. at his head, which kind of like blew up maybe a week to a week and a half before yours. It's like, I think of the Arthur Fist meme feels like it happened five years ago. And really, that was just like August. How long do you think this one can last? Oh, I don't know. I asked my coworker Jeff, actually, who has himself been a part of a number of different animated gifts and memes. Like,

hey, how, what's, what's your experience been like with this? And, you know, he pointed out that, you know, I am, I'm being inundated with messages from my audience who are seeing it and then pointing me to it. So once they have all exhausted, you know, their desire to do that, to send it along to me, then I will probably stop seeing it. But, you know, things on the internet never die. Yeah. fully. I think, you know, this is sort of of the moment and it'll, it'll disappear, but, you know, it'll never fully go away. I expect my 15 minutes of gift fame to last maybe another two minutes. But by the time this podcast is out, you might be obsolete. There might be a new reaction image out there.

Exactly. But, you know, I, memes are fluff. They are fun for the most part and they make people, you know, for the majority of memes, they're very positive and they're weird, but people enjoy them. So I am happy that my face can provide more jokes than the original joke. So has anybody recognized you? No, not yet. I do look a little different. My hair is longer and I have more of a beard. But I don't really expect it to happen.

I think because, I don't know, I feel like there's some kind of disconnect between. what a meme is and what real people are, that people would not expect to see me ever in the wild. Like, I'm not, like, it's almost like I'm not a, not a corporeal human. So do you think there's anything about this moment in time that made this gift take off today? Because it seems curious that would happen all of a sudden. Maybe it's completely random and they're just all of these potential viral gifts bouncing around on the internet and it just takes one tweet by the right person to make them break through. But this happened in 2013.

It was according to your page, which exists on know your meme.com. It was first gift in 2015. So it's been out there. Like, is this a reflection of the culture or is it making too much of it to say that this is in some way a response to our kind of mass confusion? right now? Yeah, I don't know. I think it's tough to say for sure, but I think, you know, some of the spread would probably be, you know, a result of the fact that it's just kind of, I think people are kind of getting tired of, if I could play, you know, amateur sociologist here. I would expect people are getting tired of being outraged all the time and like a subtle reaction. I've heard the

GIF called Relatable because it's just like, hey man, I don't, I'm just going to sit here and react like this, I don't need to get up in arms about things. So I think maybe from that perspective, the climate has accelerated it. I'm just happy that people are having fun with it because I think in this day and age, we could all use a little more positivity. Yeah. How did you broach, or did you at all, how did you broach the subject of your memedom with family members or people who aren't so versed in the internet? You know, how do you even, do you just let it go or do you not mention it? Or does you say, hey, you know, you might see my face on Facebook for no apparent reason, you know, just to prepare you? Yeah, I actually had a very conversation very similar to that with my mom.

I was calling her one day and mentioned, oh, by the way, I think I phrased it like, are you familiar with the concept of internet memes? And then I described what was happening. And she said, oh, okay, so I'll be able to Google your name and see that. And that is now the case. For better or worse, the know-your-me page is called the Drew Scanlan reaction. So that will affect my search engine optimization for some time. And there's no direct benefit of this, I suppose, right? Like, this isn't really one of those viral videos you can monetize and get a certain amount of money for each click on YouTube or whatever.

It's a gift that people are sharing on Twitter. I assume there's no way to make that work for you, really. No, not without losing your soul, I think. I could, you know, do a commercial for somebody like, hey, this is that mean guy? And I blink and awesome. But nobody actually wants to see that. And that would just be weird. But I should say that I really admire people that really go for that.

Like the pen pineapple apple pen guy from Japan, he is milking it for everything that it's worth. And he's like unabashed about that. And, you know, more power to that guy. Yep. All right. Well, I think we have plumbed the depths of this thing. And given the typical life expectancy of a meme, I don't know how much longer you'll have to keep going to Twitter and running across your face all the time, has to be somewhat jarring to see that even after having it tweeted this many times. I don't know.

It's still fun. And I hope that, you know, my one hope with all this stuff is that that giant bomb gets a little more exposure because, you know, it's a team of some really funny dudes who work really hard. And I want more people to know about them. Yeah, Giant Bomb is great. Toma start reacting a little better. Yeah. Make more funny faces. And you guys considered blinking more.

Yes. All right. You can find Drew Scanlan everywhere on the internet, but specifically at Drew Scanlan on Twitter. And, of course, working and being videoed at Giant Bomb. Thank you, Drew. Thank you. All right. We'll be right back with Heather Alexander from Kotaku.

Our next guest, as it happens, just profile. filed our last guest by complete coincidence, but maybe that just goes to show that we are interested in similar subjects, which I think is something that Jason and I knew already. We are talking now to Kotaku staff writer, Heather Alexander. Hey, Heather. Hi, guys. How are you? Hey. All right. So we wanted to have you on because many of the times that I go to Kotaku, which is a lot of times, one of the most interesting things that I'll see on that visit will be something you wrote. I won't even necessarily realize that it's something you wrote until I start reading it, but it often turns out that way. And I think one of the reasons for that is because you, I don't know how

strictly Kotaku writers are assigned to certain beats. I know you all do many things, but it seems as if you are sort of on the speed running slash glitching slash people breaking games and manipulating games in interesting ways, beat. And I'm curious about how you gravitated toward that type of story. Sure. So in terms of being assigned to a direct beat, it's not anything that happens through a broader editorial mandate. I'll just say that. It just happens to be that this was an area that I had knowledge of, that I was enthusiastic about. It's a very interesting area that ties into stories about people, which are always the most interesting stories. Stories about games are interesting. Stories about people and what they are doing with games are absolutely like 10 times more interesting. But when you look at speed running and glitching, I think I always enjoyed exploring games when I was younger. And I think I enjoyed the notion before really understanding what it was of something like a GameShark, which isn't quite the same as what Speedrunners do. But for anybody who's listening who doesn't know Game Sharks, it was a branded hacking tool that you could use to alter like hexadecimal values. games to give yourself infinite health or anything like that. And there used to be these giant ones.

There was also another one a little bit before that time called a game Genie, which I just remember my cousin having this big book full of these codes, these strings of numerical codes and sort of hex codes and whatever they were. And I think that was always interesting. And the more I realized later on getting exposed to as YouTube really developed, people who are finding ways to play games than just playing the games themselves, I really gravitated towards speed running. Plus, it gives you stuff to try. Like, you see people do cool stuff in games and then you can try it. And then you can fail at it for, like, three hours.

And then you can watch them do it, like, their first try, like, with their eyes closed. You can watch somebody beat Punch Out with, like, a blindfold on. Yeah. I feel like those devices that you just named, I mean, they really are sort of ahead of their time kind of, I think of them in the ways that we consume media now and we personalize everything. And if we want to just listen to one song, we listen to one song instead of the whole album or we can stream a single episode of a show or we can manipulate the things that we like so that they are exactly the way that we want them. And that was not the case before where you just kind

I had to take things as you found them. And GameShark and GameGee, they kind of allowed you to manipulate your entertainment, I think, in a way that we weren't used to at the time. It felt like a very personalized experience. And it also just felt like cheating at times. But it was a different way of consuming entertainment, I think, than a lot of the other things I was doing at the time. Yeah, of course.

And then I think the lateral movement for me going from my interest and that sort of stuff, I still like talking about people who hack ROMs or find old games or curiosities like that, but speed running. The cool thing is, like, you can arbitrarily through flaws that are left inside of a game, go straight to the credits by, like, putting a Gumba in Mario in a certain position, and then knocking this thing over here. So it goes off screen at the right point because basically you're doing that same sort of game shark, game, genie stuff in game. That's a category of speed running called arbitrary code execution, which is actually really, really weird because I don't know how it works, but they know how it works. And when they explain it to me, I'm like, okay, you just do a bunch of random stuff until magic happens. For me, the most fascinating thing about speed running is it's kind of like skateboarding in the sense that it treats games as a physical space that can be manipulated in ways that weren't foreseen by the people who built the space. You know, the way like a skateboarder might use a park bench, you know, like as a rail.

Could you talk about some of the ways that these speed runners manipulate the digital space to, you know, create the effects that they want? because some of them are really fascinating. You know, like I remember reading about Narcissa Wright's various world record runs in Okina of Time and just having to use, like, I think it was the Japanese version of the game because, like, there's something about the movement speed was set up a certain way. You know, it's just really fascinating. Sure. So a lot of things go into speed running that can be things that runners will want to consider.

You mention playing on certain versions of a cart. back when Narcissa Wright was running, she was actually playing on a system called the IQ, which was a Chinese-only Nintendo 64 kind of console. And the reason behind that, sometimes with certain consoles, it's loading time. So if you're doing what's called a real-time attack, which is you are recording in real-time, you're not trying to do it in segments or anything. Sometimes runners will choose games that have faster loading times or shorter text, Japanese characters can contain a lot more nuance than simple alphabetical letters.

So that tends to be one of the reasons. In games themselves, so let's talk about the Legend of Zelda, Okerine of Time specifically, a little bit Majora's mask, games that people probably remember from their childhood or remember giving to their children at this point. There are things in there that aren't necessarily intended that you can do to go fast. there's a very common thing called a super slide. And what that is, it's, there are a couple ways to do it, but it's basically a massive burst of backwards momentum where you are able to launch Link, the character in the game,

blazing through the landscape faster than he is when he's on his horse in the game. And there are a couple ways to do that. One way is that you plant a bomb and you roll into it and you put up your shield at the right time and something about, it's not like they programmed, hey, you're getting the kinetic energy from a bomb and pushing you back. It's something about the way that the systems are interacting, that forces link to move backwards. And then by manipulating, like, where you place your thumb on the stick,

you can hold a position where you will slide backwards. There are other ways to do it. You can jump slash into water. That's called a water extended super slide, depending on how you do it. There's all sorts of interesting stuff. in that game. That's one of the more basic ones. That's basic enough where like if I want to do a super slide, I can actually do that. I can't do it well, but I can drop a bomb and kind of do it. A lot of

these tricks are things that are surprisingly accessible. The thing that is very difficult is optimizing your route through the game, knowing the space really, really well. So another example of that is just in terms of raw movement in Okorina of time, specifically one thing that will happen to is people they'll move backwards constantly. They won't run forwards. And if they do, they'll roll because rolling is a little bit faster than running. But moving backwards, the way that the character moves just so happens to be faster than when they are moving forwards.

So then you essentially have to know the landscape pretty perfectly because that way you don't run into walls, you don't accidentally go off a cliff. So you really start to learn the boundaries and the constructions of the digital space, which is really cool. One thing that struck me when I was researching speed running for a story that I never wrote was just how the kind of bedrock of core techniques that speed runners use are kind of built, discovered, and then passed on down through generations of speed runners. You know, like one person will find an exploit, you know, a few others will push it further,

discover more things about it. Is there, you know, is there like a patient zero? Is there a first speed runner or like the most famous? first speed runner? So that gets into a broader history that I don't know if I fully have the best sort of grounding

to provide an idea for. I would say that a lot of that would come from arcades and the notion of scores to begin with. I think a lot of the competitive things that you find in games can be tied to the fact that they start in arcades.

It's one of the reasons why game overs were so prevalent and games were so difficult when they were first made. It was because they wanted to find ways to have you pay more money. By adding competitive components to that,

people would be compelled to try and beat their old scores, try and beat their friends. So I think that's part of it. I would probably say that it actually ties back to literal racing games. I can't think of what would be historically the first speed run. That's actually a very good question now that you asked that. Well, thank you. Yeah, no, it's a really good one.

I do know that you're definitely right that there is a sort of a lore and a history and a progression to the game. games that builds. For instance, you talked about Narcissa, right, for Ogrina of Time. I'll just use Ocarina of Time as the baseline because I think it's a game people are familiar with and I know a little bit more about compared to other games. That run was, it was a very good run at the time. It was 18 minutes and 10 seconds to complete the game in a category that's called any percent, which means just getting to the end of the game as fast as you can. There are different percentages and different categories in speed running, kind of the same way that there's a,

you know, a 100-yard dash or a marathon. Now that speed run is down to 17 minutes and 13 seconds. It's down almost an entire minute from where that was at. And some of that is smaller optimizations, and some of that is experimentation. So people found out that one of the things that you do need, because it helps you warp to the end of the game in a really obtuse and hard-to-explain fashion, you need a bottle. And so in that game, they would leave the main village at the start of the game in the forest, and they would go to a village and do a little mini game to get a bottle. And that would be their way of getting that item that they needed.

People started experimenting. They found out that if they timed a jump into the water at a certain point after doing all sorts of different stuff, they could program the game into believing that they already had a bottle so they could skip out on like. That's incredible. They could drop out like minutes at a time. And in speed running, minutes are not an insignificant amount of time, right? Like some speed runs, the times on their leaderboards, are measured down to the milliseconds because that's really how tight it can get.

And what happens in speed running communities is that it does tend to overlap with glitch hunting communities and things like that because there are always big skips that are really important. There's something in the Wind Waker, another Zelda game called, barrier skip. There is a magical barrier that is blocking players' ways to the end of the game, that if they could go through, they would be able to cut out, depending on the run that they are doing, dozens of minutes, hours, well, not hours, maybe an hour. Someone found it. Somebody found a way to get through it. They just don't know how to completely replicate it. So even though there's a

competitive spirit in speed running in terms of like, oh, I want to beat this person who just beat my score who just got the better time than me, much as there would be competition in any sort of sport. You also have that collaborative communal effort where people sit down and say, oh, crap, you, you just did that? Well, tell us everything about what you did. And we will all sit down together, like, as a group of games detectives and just solve it and find different ways to optimize it. It's competitive, but it's also kind of like group problem solving or, like, law, logic puzzles sometimes. Yeah, I was going to ask you how you cover this, how you stay apprised of the latest runs

and the players who are doing interesting things. Is there a centralized repository for every game that contains this whole community? Or is it splintered into different segments? And also, a second part to the question is just how quick is the progress? I would assume that it varies based on how long the game has been out and how popular the game is and the longer it's been out and the more popular it is, the smaller and smaller the incremental improvements are. But if you could give us some sense of how heated that competition is and how quickly people are able to keep pushing that envelope. Yeah, of course. So much like

anything that you would expect from video game players, Reddit, social media, things like that, are where they tend to gather Discord chat rooms as well. Communities will maintain their own Discord chat rooms. There will be different leaderboards sometimes for different games. There's a speedrun.com that has general leaderboards, but there's also Zelda speederuns.com that has more specialized leaderboards. Those are the scores that will get sort of confirmed and validated as times that are legitimate. So there is some fragmentation within the community in the sense that, you know, sure, you are a speedrunner,

but, you know, you are a ocarina of time speed runner. you are a RIGAR speed runner. You are a whatever speed runner. Sometimes there's cross-pollination in terms of maybe individual runners that will do things, but sometimes communities can feel a little constricted and tight-knit and removed from each other. But I think that's okay. I think having AGDQ and SGDQ, which is awesome games done quick and summer games done quick, big charity events every year, I think that gives everybody a chance to sort of confer

and meet up again, which is nice. In terms of how quickly games are sort of iterated upon and cleared, it varies. So when a game first comes out, there's always that rush to be like, who's the first one who can get the record, right? And who can have something that's kind of really impressive. Those scores will change within days. They will sometimes go back and forth within the same day. Sometimes when I'm writing about a new game that just had a very impressive. Speed Run. For instance, there is a game out right now called Neo, a game that I really like,

took me when I was reviewing it about 60 hours to finish. I believe this speed run took just over an hour, or excuse me, two hours in 35 minutes. Absolutely shocking when I read your story. Yeah, it's absolutely wild. And it's so fun to watch because you get to see people sort of apply all this logic to it. There's a lot of mental focus, too. I think sometimes people look at video games and they see them as idle curiosities or, you know, sort of child's toys. And the fact that people are pushing themselves to this level, it requires a lot of situational awareness. It requires a lot of memorization. It requires a lot of manual dexterity. There's a lot of things in speed running that just, I think, is really impressive on a practical level. I, when I was younger, had trouble with

scissors. I can't imagine what these people are doing with their controllers. Like, are you kidding me? In terms of optimizations, though, you would be surprised because sometimes the longer that a game is out, the more and more people will suggest that like, oh, that game has been optimized, right? Like, that game is in its optimal state. That run cannot get any better, right? We've broken it down to the exact frame. You cannot do any better than this. And that's because there are also tool-assisted speed runs where people will use... computers to make what is the best possible time while also being the most entertaining. But let's talk about Super Mario Brothers. So Super Mario Brothers, there's a speed runner there by the name

of Darbion, who his current time right now for the original Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo is four minutes and 56 seconds, so many milliseconds. He kept on improving that over and over in a span of like three months. And for a while, that game, wasn't even underneath five minutes. It wasn't sub five. And so even games that have been around, some of the games that have been around the longest are the ones that people find ways to break. And it's not always because they find a big glitch that cuts off hours of time. Sometimes it's just because they are doing their damnedest to perform at peak levels of just like raw coordination. There's always a human factor involved to speed running. And I think that makes it very, very

compelling? What is it that makes a game good fodder for speed running or glitching? Are there games that no one likes as actual games that are good material for speed running because of the way they're designed? I mean, is there like a level of programming aptitude? Like, do you want a game to be sloppy in certain ways so that it can be exploited? And some games just can't be exploited in that somewhat in that way? Like what are the characteristics of a game that is really embraced by the speed running or glitching communities? I think I think speed runners definitely do prefer games that can be easily broken. The better like the more well put together your game is, the more of a headache it can be. But also some people do longer runs. So the 100% speed runs of Okerina of

time, those still use glitches, right? But the 100% for that game, is still over four hours of playtime because you have to collect everything. So it's not necessarily a matter of length, although that can be it, right? It's an arbitrary fun factor. Are there lots of things to collect? Are there interesting ways to move around the space? Is it fun to watch? If you are going to be speed running, you know, you're going to be pouring a lot of time

and effort into playing through one particular piece of media for hours and hours and hours, right? These people pour days of their lives, weeks, months into perfecting what they do. And if it's not something that's fun, like, even if it's something that you can do incredibly fast, that doesn't matter. And I think that that's kind of a more elusive factor that shifts from speed runner to speed runner. But I do think me personally, when I'm looking at games that I think are fun to look at for speed runs, newer games that tout themselves as being. challenging or difficult are always fun. So speed runs of games like Dark Souls or Neo,

which are intentionally meant to be punishing and intentionally meant to be demanding a certain high level of skill and mastery from the player. Seeing people blaze through those is really amazing. But I also think that older games have a special place in my heart, not just for the nostalgia factor, but because you get to see, with speed running, you get to see tricks and glitches

that completely alter your personality. of sort of how games are constructed, of what's possible in them. Once you understand that the rules of games that you are playing are not the rules that apply to other people, it's like watching somebody do Matrix stuff in real life. It's bizarre. It's wonderful. I'm glad you characterize it like that because that's the way I feel too. It really is like the Matrix.

So as, I mean, this is kind of like a weird question, but I'd like you to put on your future games. amazing hat and look into the future of gaming and technology. And as we, you know, as VR becomes more of a thing and we're going to become embedded more and more and more in technology in ways that are totally immersive or at least much more immersive than they are now, what does, what kind of signposts do speed running and the way people can kind of break down, you know, the digital space within a game in really interesting ways? What kind of things is that bode for our immersive future in virtual reality or whatever comes beyond that? Sure. So I don't think we'll be seeing a lot of VR speed runs anytime soon. And that's just a limitation of the technology. It's prohibitively expensive unless you really, really are somebody who has to deal with it for business or if you're a designer.

Like VR headsets right now, they're good. but they also, they demand a pretty steep upfront investment that I don't know would be returned through speed running. Also, I don't know if there's a lot of compatibility for games that would do very well in VR. Watching them would be very strange as well. So that's a little bit of a thing to consider. Also, with certain VR headsets, something like the HTC Vive, you need room. You need, like, a raw, big, like, I don't have room for an HTC Vive, and I work in games. I have room for a bed. I don't have room for an entire virtual reality playground. The thing that would be interesting, and I don't know what this would look like, and I don't know how it would entirely manifest, but the more that we get augmented reality games, so for instance, Pokemon Go, where you have to go places, where you have to go outside, and you have to interact a little bit more, you know, blurring those lines between what is the digital.

space and what is the real space, I think somebody who finds a way to stream that and speed run that sort of stuff, it would be absolutely wild. But that is the most far flung of fantasies. That's just me spitballing. Yeah. You wrote a good story last year about how the scariest video game monster is time. Time. And that's why you like Majora's mask and you think it's, I think, your favorite Zelda game, right? It is. That's why I think it makes me the most anxious and I don't enjoy that feeling of the ticking clock and the countdown. I agree with you that it's scary, but I don't derive as much pleasure from it, I think. Painfully, painfully obsessed with like the creeping inevitability and ever slow moving march towards my own death. So maybe that's where

the love of speed running comes, right? This bizarre mortality salience where I'm like, where I'm like, oh man, I think I'm going to go to the bar and get like grilled cheese and a beer. Fuck, I'm going to die. I have to beat Mario. All right. Well, now that we got to the root of your issues with mortality, we can wrap up this interview. So you can find Heather on Kotaku. You can and should be reading her regularly.

You can also find her on Twitter at Transgamer Think. Heather, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Thank you guys very much. Okay. So that will do it for this week's show. Jason, I will talk to you over the horizon. Zero done.

That was a good tie-in. I can't wait to watch my legs animate fluidly as I change position on the back of my steed. Those seamless animations will discuss them next week. Yes. Same time, same place. Talk to you then.