Running With Speed Documentary Delivers Breezy Intro to Speedrunning

This weekend marks the latest installment of the Awesome Games Done Quick charity speedrunning marathon, a week-long round-the-clock event that showcases the best of the best as they absolutely demolish all kinds of games, both new and old. Games Done Quick has raised over $41 million for charity over the past 13 years, with proceeds going to organizations like the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. Whether you’ve been keeping up with these twice-yearly feats of aspiring perfection or you’re just now hearing about it, a new documentary film called Running with Speed: The Fastest Gamers on Earth is here to provide a brisk yet wholly informative overview of the ever-expanding hobby from which it spawned.

Patrick Lope (MTV’s True Life) and Nicholas Mross (The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin) are at the helm for the feature, with the heart of its careful and knowledgeable narration lying within a famous speedrunner known as Summoning Salt. In the world of speedrunning you’ll often see people either competing or training on stream, but Running with Speed offers an even more intimate look as runners practice on their own to perfect the finest of details to round out their runs. The games featured throughout run the gamut from the original Super Mario Bros.—which speedrunner AndrewG has broken down to pure science—to Super Metroid‘s dismantling courtesy of Zoast and beyond. Most of the titles are retro gaming mainstays and will be familiar to anyone who is even casually interested in video games. This serves a dual purpose. Not only are these the key games that the best runners in the world have mastered, they’re also the perfect entry point for anyone who wants to learn about speedrunning without having to simultaneously pick up some esoteric knowledge about more obscure classics. 

Thus, Running with Speed is very welcoming to newcomers, taking the time to explain concepts that may seem commonplace to those closer to, or within, the community. Staples like RNG—which deals with the randomized aspects of certain games that can make or break a run based on pure luck—are outlined in a way that anyone can understand, setting the stage for viewers to sit back and enjoy the rest of the doc as speedrunning balloons in popularity along with the meteoric rise of Games Done Quick as an event. 

In addition to all the runners featured throughout, one of the through-lines of the documentary is Games Done Quick itself, which started back in 2010 in founder and owner Mike Uyama’s mother’s basement. Coincidentally, Uyama just announced plans to step down from his roles in the organization following an incredible 13-year run. Even here there’s a heavy focus on Mario games, both regular and Kaizo home brews, but it all serves to ground Running with Speed and maintain some form of consistency throughout as these all-star runners attempt to best one another’s world records and show off their skills on the world stage that is GDQ. The live aspect of the week-long marathon provides the perfect backdrop for high-stakes milestones. Even if you’ve seen some of these amazing runs before—either live during a stream or in archived form—you’ll cheer along as races end in narrow victories and new, previously unthinkable records are shattered in games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Despite a runtime of nearly two and a half hours, it would be impossible to please everyone and cover all the bases of this sprawling subculture. Lope and Mross still manage to fit in a varied suite of personalities, though, from the humble ambitions of AndrewG to the Red Bull-sponsored heights of GrandPooBear and the relative notoriety acquired by the likes of Super Mario Bros. 3 runner Mitchflowerpower. The crew even takes the time to zip over to Tokyo to profile another pioneering runner, hotarubi, who has quite a few influential speedruns under his belt.

If aspects of the storyline make it seem like speedrunning is all fun and games, though, it eventually explores the downsides that come along with it. There’s burnout. There’s defeat. And at the end of the tale there’s the then-looming COVID-19 pandemic which threw a lot of plans and events out the window for the following years. One of the last runners to get the spotlight, Narcissa Wright, made waves with her next-level discoveries in Ocarina of Time, for instance, but what happens when there’s nothing else to prove? Moreover, what happens when your life changes so fundamentally that you find yourself unable to engage with something you’ve spent so long building up over the years? 

It’s a fascinatingly open-ended question to close out on, but it’s not as grim as it sounds. There is clearly so much good and so much hope in the speedrunning community, and features like this will no doubt attract more aspiring runners into the fold. Even if it just inspires someone to dust off their favorite game and see if their old go-to moves are still intact, that’s a pretty big win in my book.

Running with Speed: The Fastest Gamers on Earth is available digitally today on major VOD platforms including Apple TV, iTunes, Amazon, Google, YouTube Movies, Vudu and Microsoft. From January 6-15, in conjunction with Games Done Quick 2023, a portion of the proceeds from each download will be donated to the Prevent Cancer Foundation.