Virtual athletes push gaming to its limits

What happens when video gaming is taken to the absolute extremes? A speedrunning marathon is the place to find out.

Here, the world’s fastest gamers, sometimes with tens of thousands of hours of practice behind them, put their well-honed techniques to the test.

Speedrunning is completing a game as fast as possible, using whatever means necessary. This can include everything from exploiting glitches in the software, to tampering with the controls, or just using plain old-fashioned skills.

Despite the common perception of dedicated gamers spending hours alone in front of the computer screen, in reality, in-person events are a big part of the speedrunning scene, including multi-day marathons for the community to meet up, compete and often raise money for charity.

Gidano, founder of the Italian speedrunning community, says: “I think that people get into speedrunning because they love a game so much that they want to play it over and over and learn every aspect of it.”

Learning every aspect of a video game often includes discovering glitches, which are small faults in the programming that the game’s developers did not intend to be there.

International or not, they’re often a nifty way for speedrunners to ‘break’ games and complete them even faster. Glitches can be used to trick the game into taking you to a place you're not supposed to be, for example by jumping through a wall, or to help you kill a foe by disabling its weapons in a fight.

Some speedrunning communities go one step further, and actually tamper with the controls in order to pick up speed, a practice that’s considered perfectly legitimate within the group.

Lafungo is a Super Mario Kart speedrunner, who estimates that he has spent as many as 7,000 hours playing the