The founder of the emulation website Zophar's Domain, Brad "Zophar" Levicoff, is back with another episode of his ongoing retro video game series, Retro Rewind — this time focusing on the world of speedrunning in the 1990s.
Speedrunning is obviously a huge part of gaming culture nowadays, with live-streamed events like GDQ regularly raising millions each year for charity while websites like Speedrun.com are constantly being updated with new high scores for even the most obscure titles. But back in the mid-to-late 90s, the gaming landscape was a little bit different, with the concept of speedrunning still having yet to become truly ubiquitous among the general gaming audience.
Because of this, Zophar's video represents a fascinating look back in time at some of the early organizing that was going on in the space, as well as a remarkable reminder of how much things have changed over the past three decades.
The video starts with Zophar sharing his recollections of competing in an official "speedrunning" contest for the Sega Saturn Working Designs' title Shining Wisdom back in 1996, before later going on to cover how that encouraged him to host his own events for a bunch of NES games like Metroid, Castlevania II, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Faxanadu, and Solstice.
He discusses the logistics of putting together these competitions in detail, talking about how he used the NESticle emulator and its NSM file format to combat the costly price of bandwidth, and discussing some of the interesting rules he put in place for these competitions. This includes outlawing glitches (which is something he humorously referred to as "cheating" at the time).
There are also references to other influential early speedrunning sites like Speed Demos Archive, which you may already know started as a place to share Quake playthroughs online, before opening up to feature other games in 2004.