If you’ve been reading Power Action! for a bit, you know I enjoy speedrunning—or beating a video game as quickly as possible—as a concept, along with the whole wonderful, sometimes bizarre culture surrounding it. But I’m not a Speedrunner with a capital “S,” really. I just greatly admire the art, full of pros who grind out and deeply research games to figure out the exploits that get them onto the various Internet halls of fame.
The truth is that I’ve only ever tried to master quickness on one single level on one single video game—which happens to be the first video game I ever owned: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Sega Genesis. For the past 32 years, I’ve attempted to beat Emerald Hill Zone Act 1 as quickly as I can. Sonic 2, with its level clock at the top-left of the screen, practically begged to be speedrunning long before the term itself was coined.
And off an on over a few decades, I developed my own strategy to get my time below 30 seconds, then 29, 28, 27, and finally, 26. I started on the Genesis, and then had a PC emulator years later before moving on to a version ported to the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console platform. Today, I play on the Nintendo Switch’s Genesis platform. No matter the device, for many, many years, :26 is as low as I could get it using my particular “strat.” Here’s what it would typically look like for me to get through the level:
I purposefully avoided watching pro speedruns of the level just so I could see if I could ever get my particular one to sub-26 seconds. I knew there were probably ways to use boosts and micro-movements to make a quantum leap in my gaming, but I also knew there was still some potential inside of my goofy little way of doing it. And finally, last week, it happened:
I reached sub-26. And then it dawned on me during this revisit of the game: If took me this long to get just a second faster, would I have to wait another three decades to get to :24?
So I finally did it: I watched some Sonic 2 speedruns to see just how much I was missing. Turns out, it was a lot. Here’s one pro getting it done in 19 seconds, which for the uninitiated, is an enormous gulf of time in the speedrunning world that’s akin to a Formula 1 race leaderboard:
OK. So what I could see from the jump is that dashing and spinning are being used here in ways that are beyond me. There are hundreds of forums dedicated to these mechanics. But what I was most interested in is how, 20 seconds into that video, tucking Sonic back into his rolling form at the right spot leads to a series of item boxes and baddies you can bounce on to cut through the level. Within an hour of utilizing that trick, I landed here:
One movement, mixed in with some calibrated timing, and I added two more seconds to my record. That’s one small section of one level—of a game with 20 levels and thousands of micro-decisions that lead to world records.
On one hand, this has taught me that I could never, really, be a speedrunner and commit myself to what it would take to keep moving further into the labyrinths of games I love. But here’s the thing: playing with pastels won’t make you Edgar Degas. It will, however, make you appreciate his masterpieces in new ways.
So, I’m perfectly happy over here playing with my pastels.