Any% and Absolutely Unhinged: How Speedrunners Broke Gaming and Made It Funnier

Imagine spending five years crafting an epic fantasy world. You've written 200 pages of lore, hired a full orchestra, hand-painted every texture, and built a 40-hour journey of self-discovery and dragon slaying. You're proud. You're emotional. You pop the champagne.

Then some guy in a gaming chair at 2 AM beats your masterpiece in eleven minutes and forty-three seconds by jumping into a wall.

Welcome to speedrunning — where games go to get roasted.

The Beautiful Disrespect of Sequence Breaking

At its core, speedrunning is the art of playing a game the way the developers absolutely, positively did not intend. Sequence breaking — skipping the intended order of events through exploits, glitches, or sheer stubborn creativity — is the backbone of the whole operation. Developers build elaborate narrative highways; speedrunners take the median strip directly into the final boss's living room.

The community calls these "skips," which is a profoundly understated word for what is essentially a full-frontal assault on a game's structural dignity. You didn't skip the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. You deleted it from the timeline like it owed you money.

And the thing is? It's hilarious. Watching a speedrunner clip through a locked door that the game spent three dungeons building up to feels less like cheating and more like a prank. A very technical, deeply impressive prank — but a prank nonetheless. King Joker would be proud.

The Funniest Categories in the Speedrunning Multiverse

If regular speedrunning is a comedy special, the alternative categories are the unhinged bonus features you find at 3 AM.

Any% is the pure chaos option. No rules. No restrictions. If it's faster, it's legal. This is where you'll find runners using memory manipulation, arbitrary code execution, and what can only be described as convincing the game to have a small existential crisis in order to warp directly to the credits. Any% runs are less "playing a video game" and more "performing surgery on a video game's brain while it's still awake."

Glitchless runs are the opposite — and somehow still funny, just in a different, more suffering-based way. Runners commit to beating the game without exploits, which means they're basically doing homework while the Any% crowd is setting off fireworks in the parking lot. The comedy here is in the restraint. It's like watching someone refuse to jaywalk while everyone around them is teleporting.

Low% might be the crown jewel of absurdist speedrunning. The goal? Beat the game while collecting as little as possible. As in, runners will actively avoid picking up health, power-ups, and items just to make things harder on themselves. It's the gaming equivalent of refusing to use a shopping cart at Costco. Technically possible. Deeply inadvisable. Wildly entertaining to watch.

And then there's Bingo — where runners race to complete a randomized card of objectives. It's chaotic, unpredictable, and looks roughly like what would happen if you let a golden retriever design a game show.

Developers vs. The Void (The Void Wins)

Here's where the relationship gets genuinely comedic: the ongoing tug of war between developers and speedrunners is basically a workplace sitcom that never gets canceled.

Devs patch a glitch. Runners find a new one. Devs patch that one. Runners discover that the patch itself introduced a better glitch. Repeat until everyone involved has achieved a kind of enlightenment through mutual exhaustion.

Some developers have leaned into it with grace. The Celeste team, for instance, openly celebrates its speedrunning community and has even added in-game features that nod to the runners' creativity. That's the healthy response — acknowledge that your players found something beautiful in the wreckage and hand them a trophy.

Others have been less chill about it. There's a long and storied history of patches that feel less like bug fixes and more like passive-aggressive notes left on the office fridge. "Fixed an issue where players could bypass the entire second half of the game." Translation: We saw what you did and we did not appreciate it.

The runners, naturally, treat these patches like a challenge. A dare. A gauntlet thrown down by people who should have known better.

Games Done Quick: When Chaos Gets a Charity Telethon

If you want proof that speedrunning has transcended niche hobby and entered full-blown cultural phenomenon territory, look no further than Games Done Quick — a biannual charity marathon where runners perform their most deranged achievements live in front of an audience that donates millions of dollars to causes like Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Let that sink in. People are watching someone break Super Mario 64 in real time, and the result is cancer research funding. The joker energy is off the charts.

GDQ events are equal parts technical showcase, comedy performance, and community celebration. Runners narrate their exploits like tour guides through a haunted house they personally built. Couch commentators provide color like it's the most important sporting event of the century. And in a way? It kind of is.

The live donation incentives are a particular highlight — crowds will pool money to influence what happens during a run. "Donate $10,000 and the runner has to name every enemy after a US president." This is democracy working exactly as intended.

Why We Love Watching Games Get Absolutely Owned

There's something deeply satisfying — almost cathartic — about watching a speedrunner dismantle a game. Most of us have experienced the frustration of a cheap death, a confusing puzzle, or a boss fight that felt designed by someone who personally dislikes you. Speedrunners don't get mad. They get creative. And then they get even.

It's the ultimate power fantasy, just executed sideways through a wall texture.

Speedrunning also democratizes mastery in a way that feels uniquely American. You don't need to be the "best" at a game in the traditional sense. You need to be the most curious — the most willing to ask "but what if I just... didn't do it that way?" That's not just a gaming philosophy. That's practically a founding principle.

The speedrunning community has built something genuinely special: a culture that celebrates irreverence, rewards deep knowledge, and turns the act of breaking things into an art form worthy of a standing ovation.

Or at the very least, a very enthusiastic Twitch chat.

The Punchline

Developers build the stage. Speedrunners burn it down in twelve minutes, rebuild it out of glitches and spite, then take a bow while the credits roll.

And honestly? We're all better for it.

The fastest trolls in gaming didn't just find shortcuts — they found a way to make millions of people laugh, donate to charity, and appreciate the beautiful chaos lurking inside every carefully crafted world. That's not breaking games. That's giving them a second life.

A weird, any%-completed, wall-clipping second life. But a life nonetheless.

King Joker salutes you, speedrunners. Now go find another wall to phase through.