>>72770007>Speedrunning has been generally an intrinsic part of video games since early games, similar to the chasing of high scores. However, broad interest in speedrunning came about with the wider availability of the Internet around 1993 that gave the means for players to be able to share their speedruns with online communities. Sites dedicated to speedrunning, including game-specific sites, began to appear at the same time and helped to create the subculture around speedrunning. These sites were not only used for sharing runs but also to collaborate and share tips to improve times, leading to collaborative efforts to continuously improve speedrunning records on certain games.[1]Doom and Quake demos, early Internet communities
Although speedruns were being done before the 1990s, the development of a speedrunning community is considered to have originated with the 1993 computer game Doom.[2][3][4] The game included a feature that allowed players to record and play back gameplay using files called demos (also known as game replays). Demos were lightweight files that could be shared more easily than video files on Internet bulletin board systems at the time.[5] In January 1994, University of Waterloo student Christina Norman created a File Transfer Protocol server dedicated to compiling demos, named the LMP Hall of Fame (after the .lmp file extension used by Doom demos). The LMP Hall of Fame inspired the creation of the Doom Honorific Titles by Frank Stajano, a catalogue of titles that a player could obtain by beating certain challenges in the game.[5][3] The Doom speedrunning community emerged in November 1994, when Simon Widlake created COMPET-N, a website hosting leaderboards dedicated to ranking completion times of Doom's single-player levels.[5][6]