8 Speedruns That Have Been Completely Ruined 

In UYA's case I think it's also worth mentioning the new trophy strats (you unlock a PSN trophy and press load in the pause menu, but the load screen lags for about 10 seconds and you can load a file in a place you're not usually supposed to). Back when they were first about a year ago pretty much everyone agreed it was a big improvement, since the only implementation in runs skipped a very boring 6 minute arena mission. Since then, there's been a bunch of research and now there's massive skips in almost every category (e.g. blackwater early mission 3) which sounds nice at first, but in the long run I think it makes the game worse. If you want to be competitive, you now have to close the game after every run past the first 9 minutes to reset the trophy using a homebrew tool, which makes doing attempts a lot less fun for me. We've been looking for a way to do these strats without trophies for a while now but haven't had any luck, and the new skips are way too fast to just not go for, so it's not a great situation. Anyway, if there's any PS3 homebrew developers reading this, there is a $50 bounty if someone can add a trophy lock/unlock feature to racman 😅

The irony of speedrunners optimising a game so intensely that they ruin it, kinda silly when you think about it

The Wind Waker is very much still alive, but people usually run other categories. The most competitive one is Any% No MSS which bans manual superswimming and puppet ganon skip, leading to a difficult but fun and doable run !

In skate 2, there is a category for completing every career challenge. The problem was ppl were running the category for years without realizing they didn't beat every career challenge. The game gives you a very linear set of challenges. And eventually no more challenges pop up meaning you beat every challenge. However there are 7 pools in the game you can find. The game only requires you to find 4. The remaining 3 were left out because it wasn't required to beat the game (any%). No where in the game was it incentivised to get the remaining 3. As it turns out, there were more career challenges if you found the remaining 3, invalidating 5 years worth of speed runs.

Pokemon Red is also fucked... You barely leave your room and warp straight to the Credits (Hall of Fame)

Fun fact related to the Majora's Mask ruin (which is called a 'buffer overflow'), that is how Insomniac used to patch RaC3's online mode. Because the PS2 didn't have a HDD by default, they couldn't just upload fixes or balance changes. Instead, they realised that the EULA that you download when you go to connect online, they would download more extra data that eventually overwrote a function pointer, allowing them to then 'patch' the game. I can't find the interview right now but it's such an incredible trick that they utilised a flaw to their advantage

Nice video Xem. Seeing this has reminded me that I once completely ruined a speedrun. Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure is basically Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney skin. The game was a short speedrun which overall was not too difficult for newcomers to get into. It didn't have many skips, exploits or glitches, it was just a clean run which needed strong routing and movement. One day however, I found a trick called menu storage. You can pause the game when a cutscene starts or when you pickup a collectable and it will allow you to skate around during cutscenes while the save menu was open. This would naturally let you skip cutscenes. Originally, it was a very niche trick was not very consistent or applicable but runners eventually found a way to make it consistent, allowing it to be used in a bunch of places. This started off by allowing the player to skip a few cutscenes, you could only really do it in certain places for specific missions but then I came in and caused chaos. I found that you could chain together menu storage across multiple missions which meant that on some levels, you could play the entire level with menu storage. This saved a whole bunch of time, allowing you to skip many cutscenes but the problem was that you only really had one chance to set it up (and if you missed it, you just missed it) and when you got it, you had to play the game while a big menu was overlaying the game and you had to make sure that menu stayed open while you played. It made the run faster but it significantly increased the barrier to entry and it turned veterans away from the game, killing any momentum it had. It was an arbitrary trick which made the game harder and more annoying to play and nobody wanted that. A no menu storage category was made later on which did breath some new life into the game but this admittedly happened way later than it should have and that was my fault. People simply didn't make too much noise about menu storage, everyone hated it in the background but they simply moved on with their lives rather than making a fuss about it (until years later at least). Nobody has ran the menu storage category since I pushed it while the no menu storage run has gotten to a point where the run is shorter than the current menu storage record. And that is the story on how I ruined a speedrun. Out of the many games I have speedran, that was the most detrimental contribution I had made to a run. It was a shame because it is a neat little game and the trick was going to be found eventually but it is still something I feel guilty about. These things just eventually happen to some runs and they are more or less inevitable but it does hurt when you are the one that finds these things and it has a negative impact on the community.

Shift has a stranglehold on BfBB is probably the biggest understatement of this video when you consider some of the crazy stuff he helped discover in that game.

Other games: Has insanely difficult mechanics that can make a run unbearable to play or has insane glitches that makes runs completely boring or too difficult to be enjoyed. DK64: Comically invalidates 9 speedrun categories because of a single missed collectible.

RNG is always the largest issue with speedruns. The moment the fastest time is only available via RNG the run becomes an awful time for everyone.

Dang the OoT part really hit home. I really wish people knew more about categories like MST (Medallions, Stones & Trials), as well as GSR (Ganondorf Source Requirement). GSR is basically a No Major Glitches category that’s been around for a long time, and bans RBA, GIM, wrong warps, and SRM. There is so much variety and community activity like Bingo and DannyB’s OoT Master Series task competitions that unfortunately don’t get much appreciation. I’m very impressed with the research on the OoT part, and I hope people take the time to check out some of the more competitive categories!

The fact that Paper Mario 64 was not mentioned is a crime. The fact that you have to play Ocarina of Time for the majority of time in order to get a world record will always be funny to me.

I think the strongest case for being truly ruined is OoT. There comes a stage where the game is so optimized that you're barely even playing it anymore, so what's even the point? By then, it's practically what philosophers would call a "solved game".

As a semi casual Mario Sunshine speedrunner, the game is incredibly fun to practice and speedrun! The key is to simply have reasonable goals instead of trying to get crazy perfect runs. Probably true for many other games.

over a decade of speedrunning a game really does take a lot out of you if u ever catch SHiFT streams cuz he looks always miserable doing it

"Here's a stick. Get to whacking, ocarina boy." Beautiful. XD

4:55 You don't open the chest, that would stop the glitch By going in front of a chest with GIM you manipulate what item you will get when resurfacing from water

16:30 "You wouldn't expect it from a game made for children" the irony of all the games covered are games made for children (and 99.9% of the runners playing them played them when they were kids) 😂

That DK64 one is nuts. That's like discovering there was a 121st star in Mario 64 or something like that.

27:45 No, the bad news of this route isn't the trades. The trades were only a problem before bastions when you would mine gold ore. This reached it's peak with Korbanoes' sub 15, where he got 12 pearls off of 5 gold if I recall correctly. The bastion actually almost completely obsoleted this, because of the "shit load of gold" you mentioned earlier. There's enough piglins trading and gold to be traded you almost always could exit a bastion with more than enough resources. This rng factor only started coming back with calculated travel, but we aren't there yet. The rng of this category at the time was getting a good nether enter with (ideally) an iron pickaxe, and then actually getting a bastion. There was fortress first world record, but it got to the point where you needed the safety net of fire resistance and the mobility from pearls to get a top level time, so the rng mostly came from getting both a bastion and a fortress close enough to your enter portal, and then the last rng hurdle back then was getting an exit portal near the stronghold.

I'm glad you're getting into content like this. Having general speedrunning edutainment for the masses is something I've been missing ever since a lot of channels decided to niche down into their own respective areas. Very good video homie

ZFG quit any% a long time ago, he mostly ran other categories with 100% being the main one. Only reason he started pumping randomizers was because a couple runners were trying to work out a potential new route for 100% and it was taking a long time so he decided to try to get good at randomizers while waiting since he was decently interested in it with how many tricks and glitches can be used in randos that aren't viable or worthwhile to use in current speedruns. He still plans on going back to 100% at some point. Also missed a chance to showcase how bad memory overload barrier skip in WW was at the start. It saved time overall but there were many spots in the run where the runner would just sit spamming the bow while counting to try and reach close to the amount needed to unload the barrier and finish it off in the castle.

Wind waker really was ruined for me by the introduction of manual superswim. It's bad for the runner, it's bad for the viewer, it's bad for everyone. It basically renders the first couple minutes of the run unwatchable as the screen is reduced to pause buffering and rapid camera switching. Zombie hover is bad for the runner too, but at least it's hype for the viewers. That said, MSS and zombie hover would both still exist even without barrier skip. That could have been presented better.

For perspective on how obnoxious wind waker runs are: After doing a whole run of complex tricks requiring insane dexterity, you would skip puppet ganon. There's a vertical climb after the boss, then you go fight the real ganon and win the game. To get to the top of the arena the puppet ganon fight without fighting him, you used to need to execute a zombie hover. This trick requires a lineup, and high speed button mashing for an exhaustingly long time. As you get to the top of the room with no HP, you can't land on the platform with 0hp or you'll get a game over. Luckily there's a pot with a fairy in it up there, so if you can make contact with it during the hover you'll be able to fight ganon and finish the game. I remember the video of the dude zombie hovering in wind waker just before the final boss at WR pace, and the fairy doesn't revive him because it flies in random directions every time. He quit the category. I don't blame him at all, polishing your skills at something to a ridiculous degree and just having to accept that most runs aren't very lucky and you wont get your prize must feel horrible.

One thing people seem to struggle with is thinking they need to able to learn every trick that the world record does in order to enjoy speedrunning a game. There's nothing stopping people from playing the game however they want, with a timer, then trying to beat that time. And that's speedrunning, and it's fun, it really doesn't need to be more complicated than that, people get so muddied up in "official rules"

boxxy, my queen, absolutely ruined RaC3

Damn, you cooked with this one 🔥

i remember xem talking about this video a while back in a stream of his, so glad it finally got done, and HOLY is it a banger, nice one xem, so glad to be part of this community!

Honestly so glad to see a vid on this topic was talking to friends about why speedrunning fell off so hard on twitch and I truly believe the most popular games all getting optimized to the point they're unapproachable as a fan and a new player is the biggest reason

Hi Xem! Thanks for buying cigarettes for me and my little brother last friday from that gas station. You really saved our weekend!

28:35 In his sub 10 run, Brentilda used a method called divine travel which uses the coordinates of a fossil to teleport directly to a stronghold. The luck was instead getting a seed that had the potential for divine travel, which requires a fossil in specific chunks.

supprised to not see elden ring and its blinking here, went from flying horse to "i saw, i came, i conq- i hit the credits ggwp".

As someone who lives for long form explanatory content this was a great watch. It's clear you put a ton of work into this and it shows, great video Xem!

Damn xemmy this is good as shit this is cool as fuck this is speed as run

when you are now practicing entirely different stuff then the mechanics of the game itself you have crossed over into the threshold of a run being ruined, because you are no longer speedrunning the game you are speedrunning a set of tasks

Loved the video. Outside of the games you typically play, but a few years ago a trick was found in San Andreas that cut the WR down from 4 hours to 10 minutes

i remember hearing about how golden got completely ruined something to do with staring at your feet the entire run made you go faster

I used to speedrun Outlast, a horror game from 2013 that was pretty popular. once a glitch was discovered that let you go from the literal beginning to the endgame was when the game was ruined in my eyes

Ngl I chuckled a bit when UYA was the second one you mentioned, very entertaining video Xemothy

This video shows why sometimes it’s important to create new categories for a game.

23:40 I knew about the DK64 one and the next closest one I know of was from a video about how something like this happened in portal. Portal No Out of Bounds seems like it speaks for itself. You cannot shoot portals out of bounds so as long as the player doesn't go oob the run can be validated. However there was a slight incident where they realized that a whole bunch of runs had to be retroactively invalidated. Basically the normal run included players entering a chamber in a glitched state and using said glitched state to beat the chamber while legitimately staying inbound. However they have to shoot a random portal to remove the glitched state at once point. It is only important that any portal is shot and location the portal lands is entirely irrelevant and nothing ever passes through it thus most people don't think much about it. However people eventually realized that a lot of runs were inadvertently shooting this portal oob thanks to a side effect of the glitched state and it was regularly being overlooked in the validation process since again, nothing ever passes through it. Thus they had to retroactively check which runs had shot that portal oob and reject them.

Man, its been a hot minute seen I originally heard about Boxxys but Im impressed woth the current optimization found. Banger video!

Ratchet: Deadlocked was a ruined speedrun, for me personally. A new trick had been found called "air swings" which were sick as hell, but the setups were frustrating for me to figure out. I had gotten one PB in NG+ No LC with air swings, but I only utilized 2 super easy ones (out of 7 that were known at the time). Nowadays, I have figured out the setups (as have many runners of the game), and we even found an extra one for No LC. I also used them during my short time in the Any% category and now I realize that air swings did nothing but improve the game. Very grateful to have them in the game. Also for the few people who might read this comment, UYA has a category that bans boxxies so that the old strategies are still preserved in the game's future. It also has a skip that is optimal EXCLUSIVELY in that category (on Marcadia) and it's mind blowing.

Fantastic video, this is going to pop off for sure.

Pretty good video Xem! I don't really know about speedrunning, but I enjoyed it a lot :)

Goldeneye had look-down where you had to do the entire run staring at the ground, and there was that one Sonic game where you just nonstop paused and unpaused

DK 64's new coin was probably one of the best things to happen to a game that old, in truth if you do some digging the DK 64 speedrun isnt finished since some collectables are "unreachable" with the current tech, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the leaderboards get wiped again for DK 64

I remember the Elden Ring speedruns getting almost immediately ruined when someone figured out how to do the warps to kill Maliketh and Godfrey & skip the final boss.

great vid man Im loving the new era of your vids.

I thought Elden Ring might be on the list, great video

Congrats Xem and Xem's team!! Perfect video, the results are coming ❤

I'd hardly say Ocarina of Time is a ruined game for speedrunning purposes, there are categories out there that don't use SRM/ACE/etc. New discoveries are still being found within the game keeping things fresh for those who more so want to see the game broken in unique ways. Plus there's lots of other speedrun adjacent things that are going on that keep the game very much alive, such as randos. This also applies to Majora's Mask

SHiFT legit is a freak, over 10h a day playing the same game for ages. He has said before that he hasnt slept in 2 weeks. Probably one of the most insane streamers out there honestly. I hope he gets help someday

Bro the subtle rachet and clank part jokes were insane.

Thank you so much for this Xem, been enjoying the informational content

I can watch speed docs all fucking day. So fascinating to see how all these games evolve. BTW this video reminds me: that 20 second Minecraft TAS is absolutely insane.

this is awesome dude

Great video Xem! Had no idea just how much went into some of the speedruns

A long for version of any(or all) of these would sweet! Thank you for the great video 👍

okay 👍

The current windwaker route is carpal tunnel - the run.

Was watching the video and expected to see a pretty large channel because the production quality is just that good. You deserve way more than 50k subs dude, cant wait to see more content!

Xem the GOAT!!! 💙

This was an awesome video! I knew about some of the categories like with BFBB, but for the Zelda games I knew nothing about you made it all palettable and entertaining. Keep it up Xem!

Really cool to see you making content like this bro. Great video :)

It’s always cool to see how optimized and fast a game can be beaten, but it definitely is a bummer where it gets to a point where it can essentially kill running a game. Thankfully many games have multiple categories which helps keep running a game alive.

i like the part where he said breast

I think only two in the list are truly ruined: Wind Waker and Battle for Bikini Bottom. The former because of just the insane strategies required to get a true any% time as well as the fact that people lost interest in giving it any serious thought outside of randomizers. Like the mere witnessing of moving the stick 15 inputs per second is just wild to me. Sure there are other categories but the ceiling for entry is way too high compared to the other games on the list. Then there's BFBB, I like Shift but it is quite sad that he's genuinely the only one left as everyone else a part of that community just moved on. It's ruined in the sense that, there really aren't many playing and the one that's still playing it dominates it harder than any other.

Awesome video man, keep it up !!

great video! just started learning about speedrunning, and this was a great sampler of games to look into

laughed a lot at 13:18 then subscribed

you forgot to mention that the MM one got so ridiculous as it became optimal to play it via virtual console on a VERY SPECIFIC crappy japanese only wiiu model that eventually the community banded together to have the tech banned.

Interesting analysis video! Thanks for uploading! It really is tragic how this happens, often in simply the pursuit of "speed".

Banger video! Excited to see more!

i thought shift stopped play BfBB because he absolutely hated it after playing for so long lol

Slight correction : for the first sub-10 run of minecraft Rsg, Brentilda didn't just find the stronghold, he used a strat called "divine travel" iirc that allows you to know where a stronghold will be using the placement of a nether fossil in the spawn chunk. That strat is still used in runs but having a fossil in the right chunk is pretty rare, wich is why calculators are still widely used and considered more consistent I wouldn't consider the minecraft rsg speedrun ruined, but it is more and more unattainable for the casual gamer Also, Dream didn't cheat in a world record he just did in random runs he played on stream

Love that this vid blew up for you man, well deserved and keep up the hustle 🔥💪🏼

Awesome video! Love this kind of content out of you

I FEEL LIKE OPPENHEIMER

18:10 its probably because shift harassed a lot of members in the community out around the time this WR was set.

It's nice to see that you are in a better time xem. ❤ Videos like this are perfect and have information from a professional runner is always so interesting

Xem don't you ever get tired of being such a beast? Must be hard to be a living legend like you man 🫶🏻💕

16:28 at first i liked bfbb but SHiFt is so incredibly unwatchable. i know that there are other runners but shift still says to himself that the game is competitive when the player count has only dropped more and more throughout the years. It used to be a fun game back in 2018 or so but it went downhill. The other problem is that he killed his community by being obsessive and power hungry, He wants to make sure he has control over anything bfbb related. He has banned people that didnt like him (for obvious reasons) and even started ranting about people finding out new strategies and tricks without him knowing when the remake of bfbb came out. I really hope someday, in a perfect dimension Rubbertoe gets his place, because shift is one of the most disgusting out of his mind speedrunners/streamers ive ever seen

16:30 SHiFT absolutely ruined the speedrunning of bfbb not only the game is almost impossible but the community is one of the worst ive ever seen. SHIFT is a complete narcissistic guy with 0 charisma and he makes sure that everybody will have the same horrible vibe as his during his streams. He is an example of what you SHOULDNT DO as a streamer. Highly recommend watching the troll videos on him since not only those are way funnier than his own streams but it shows how delusional that guy is

Great video Xem! Every upload gets better and better!

The only game on here with a ruined speedrun is wind waker because the tricks are so difficulty that no one wants to play that category anymore.

I used to watch SHiFT with my daughter, however the stuff he would do and say on stream was pretty concerning. Such as saying that "my kids will get bullied and have character" or some other inappropriate things, incredibly disgusting man, really hope he finds a job in the near future because he already has over 2 years straight of playtime in his game

Used to watch SHiFT until he started acting like a psychopath on stream. Really nasty guy, hopefully other BfBB runners can take his place.

This kind of stuff is why I think the best speedgames are the ones where the devs are involved. There will never be an arbitrary code execution bug in the celeste speedrun, because the devs would patch it out and the community would play on the latest patch. The community has done incredible things while keeping the game a tight, high skill ceiling, movement driven run and I think the most controversial tech has been...what...dash trigger skip (caused a soft category split)?

I beg you make a series of this please I need more I NEED ITTTTTTTT

This is from my own experience not being a speedrunner but being a casual gamer who thought he was good before kids started playing games on the internet all day. Every speedrun is a set of arbitrary rules you impose upon yourself. A nuzlocke in a pokemon game is a similar concept. The point is you want to play the game again because it's good, but you create challenges for yourself, like beat the game as fast as you can, do these specific tricks and try and get under this bar that you set for yourself to make the game more fun. I personally feel like a speedrun turns every game into Mario 1, where the point is run as fast as you can and have those split second reaction. This is why if any speedrun is dead, it's mario 1 because a human beat the game as fast as theoretically possible creating an impassable ceiling. But this is still a room where people have fun. People still run OOT any percent. And when glitches break the game, you just go to the categories that don't use the glitches that make the game not fun. Like in MM no major glitches. There is a marketing aspect of speedrunning in that noobs watch for get good strategies and sometimes its just a community of friends hanging out. So can a speedrun die? only if nobody wants to play it. And some games don't need to be a speed game to be fun or to play. This is why Randomizer and Nuzlocke type content can be just as interesting as a speedrun.

Speed running died because it now feels more like a programmer's hobby instead of a test of gaming skill

Great video xem! Keep up the great work❤

I liked the setup:power discussion. It's a good way of framing why vastly different speedruns end up feeling "good" or "bad".

24:08 I know these videos are hard to research, but god fucking damnit do I hate misinformation. I don't even like dream. I actually hate him due to misinformation he spread, but whatever. He didn't cheat a world record. Please, I know it's not easy, but do your research. I'm so tired of this.

16:34 Bro, literally all of these games were made for children.

great video, great editing, not over edited or anything. Also wouldn't mind more videos in similar topics.

This is crazy fun to watch, been loving the new output my fellow Dutch liver :)

for fuck's sake. do your research properly. the newly discovered rainbow coin didn't invalidate any speedrun, since they are not counted in the %.

20:15 I don't think cosmo deserves the respect you showed him. Not because of the trans thing but because he's an absolute pathological narcissist (kinda fitting with his new name)