A good video game speedrun is a marvel to behold. You watch players fly through your favorite games, perform impossible jumps and find shortcuts you never knew existed. It makes you see a familiar game in a whole new light. If you’ve never watched a speedrun, Discover this world record through the original Super Mario Bros., and you will see what I mean. Being, you know, a speedrun, this will take five minutes of your time.
But what are you won’t see (unless you follow the speedrunners on Twitch), these are the hours and hours of work it took to create that perfect race – the thousands of attempts to navigate a game with perfect precision, eliminating every unnecessary move, exploiting every odd glitch. It’s hard work for the player – and for the controller they use, race after race, day after day. And all that “grinding,” as speedrunners call it, has unintended consequences.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we explore a looming crisis in the Nintendo 64 speedrunning community: gamers are grinding their controllers into plastic dust and at such a rapid rate that optimal N64 controllers are becoming rarer. We also chat with Beck Abney (abney317 on Twitch), A Mario Kart 64 speedrunning legend who faces an even more bizarre personal form of controller hell.
This is also the first episode of our “Five Senses of Play” miniseries, so stay tuned every Sunday this month for another play story about another sense. And yes, if you read this sentence and think Really? Smell? Taste!?, well… buckle up.
If you want to dive even deeper into the wild world of speedrunning, here are some links to get you started:
