When did you start Speedrunning?

[ING-X]

I started speedrunning back in 2006 when I saw one of Saturn's WIPs for his Super Metroid Reverse Boss Order run on Youtube. I didn't know it was a TAS or even what TAS was so I decided to try out a speedrun of the game myself. After I realized I sucked at the game I moved to high scoring Star Fox 64 for about 2 years until I discovered Super Metroid again and started working on getting better at it. Around that time I found out about DK64 breaks and was fascinated by them so I started running that until I found Manocheese's OoT uber challenge on GFAQs and played through that. I then found ZSR and tried speedrunning OoT for about 9 months (I was going to do MST on PAL like Kazooie did lol) until I discovered MM and worked on the any%. This was the first speed run I ever finished with a time of 1:49. And the rest is history

[Enterim]

Never. I don't speedrun.

[aleckermit]

The first real recorded speedrun I worked on was for Dead Space 1 in 08'.

[Matt23488]

Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission. I had never heard of speedrunning before, but I found that I was able to play those games very quickly after I had played through them a few times. I would always try to beat my time while trying to get as many items as possible. Finally, I decided to search YouTube to see if anyone had posted videos of their runs through the game. I eventually found a few, and I think one of them had a link to SDA, which I found astonishing. I watched the Portal PC version run and was amazed.

That's how I got in to speedruns, here's how I got into Zelda.

Sometime before that, I had played OoT for the first time. I was about 16 at the time (I'm 22 now). I hadn't played it when I was younger because I never had an N64. My friend had showed me a bunch of glitches for both Halo 1 and 2, and at that point I was obsessed with glitching in games. So of course I was in love with OoT at this point, so I looked up glitches for it and found Golden Scale early, ground jump to skip part of DC, and other various tricks like Ice Arrows as child. I learned to pull these tricks off and showed them to my friend who was a long time OoT fan and he was amazed. Eventually, I found ZSR and joined the IRC chat, and realized that a person I knew in real life was part of this community (maxx). I was also glad to see that a lot of the people who's videos and speedruns I'd seen were part of this community, like Jiano, Kazooie, Swordless, Paraxade, etc.

I don't speedrun as much myself, I'm more interested in the tricks. But then again, I didn't find this community until I was in college, and once I graduate perhaps I'll have more time to devote to this hobby.