Aiming for ‘Game Over’: Meet India’s top gaming speedrunners

They don’t jump through the hoops they’re given, or wander into side alleys for ancillary quests. They have two aims: to break a game down, deconstruct or rebuild it so they can play it on their own terms; and then to finish that version of the videogame in the fastest time possible.

They might lose out on some of the fun of ancillary quests and group missions, but they often uncover surprising weaknesses in some of the most popular videogames (Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Resident Evil Village, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and now Elden Ring), and have prompted game-makers to issue updates and fix bugs.

When a bug can’t be exploited, a speedrunner may alter the code to set his own challenges — playing with fewer lives, special handicaps, diminished arsenals. Because of how different game play can look when it has been remastered in this manner, speedrunning has become a popular sub-genre on live-streaming platforms such as YouTube and Twitch.

In fact, speedrunning now offers live-streamers a novel new way to keep audiences hooked.

The first celebrity speedrunner, Dream, first went viral on Twitch in 2020, amassing 29 million subscribers. He was then accused of cheating in-game, in order to sets his world record of playing a version of Minecraft from start to finish in 19 minutes and 24 seconds (the average time taken is 90 hours). “But his videos made us realise that we could do it too,” says 25-year-old Minecraft gamer Hitesh Khangta, whose YouTube gaming channel YesSmartyPie has over 3.6 million subscribers.

So what exactly does a speedrunner do? Once they have remastered a game or identified the glitches they plan to exploit, they painstakingly play that version over and over, until some can actually play it blindfolded. Then they start competing against themselves for reduced game times.

The eventual aim is to get onto one of the global leaderboards. The go-to website for leaderboards is speedrun.com. It currently houses a database of nearly 3 million runs across over 28,000 games. No Indian has got onto a global leaderboard yet, so in India the stakes remain fairly high.

Worlds within worlds

While some speedrunners seek to finish an entire game in record time, others look to achieve a certain goal within a game.

On his YouTube channel RawKnee Games, with 3.5 million subscribers, Ronodeep Dasgupta specialises in remastered versions of Minecraft called “Minecraft, But…”. These are challenges where the player must reach a certain objective (such as killing the Ender Dragon) with a different handicap each time. So, “Minecraft, But Touching The Ground Will Kill You” or “Minecraft, But I Have Half a Heart”.

Khangta plays Minecraft Survivor, where he speedruns against other gamers who try to attack him or create obstacles in his path. Khangta discovered a glitch in the game that was later fixed by the game’s developers: X-ray vision that let him see through underground tunnels. It helped him escape his attackers last year. But even so, his best time so far has been 55 minutes, against a world record of 9 minutes and 36 seconds held by Brentilda of Scotland.

It’s not all rebellion and remastering. It takes persistence and hard work to be a speedrunner, speedrunners say. It also takes inventiveness, a dash of sneakiness and craft.

Bisht of Haldwani for instance learned how to build a nether portal without a diamond pickaxe, using lava “treated” in a very specific way. Dasgupta, 26, from Mumbai discovered that, in spectator mode, he could fly over a map and gain crucial perspective.

It takes a fair amount of humility too. More than anything, you must be willing to lose a lot, says Dasgupta. “A speedrunner is a person who can accept failure, not once but many times.”

Dasgupta has live-streamed speedruns that turned into excruciating two-hour exercises in navigating defeat. Then he’s woken up the next day and hit restart to do it all over again.

“It’s not just mindless sprinting through levels,” he says. “There’s failing, laughing at yourself, swearing at yourself, rage-quitting and then trying again and finding sweet victory.”