When did you start Speedrunning?

[Unreal]

It doesn't have to be zelda... I wanna know how you were introduced and when you started to speedrun.

Early 2007 I found Kazooie's "Shadow Temple Early" video and was like... wtf <_< I then would find many other videos from Fluffy, Acryte, petrie, Yauty, AKA, and many others. Eventually I found SDA and speedrunning became an instant hobby of mine. I first tried to speedrun Mario Sunshine in the summer of 07 but quit... I would then attempt to speedrun many other games from SM64 to Banjo Kazooie and many others. Just about Febuary of this year I returned to the zelda community and competivley started to speedrun oot and mm....

[AniMeowzerz]

Well it was near the beginning of last year, I had already seen numerous glitching/trick videos on youtube but I had come across a SM64 speedrun (16 star i believe). I was amazed for lack of a better word at the moment. Wasn't a couple days later I stumbled upon SDA and became a member, I decided I decided to do Wind Waker, beings that it was one of my favourite games. I decided to play through again on my own and due to frustration I ended up dropping it. I was off and on for a few months until just recently (3-4 weeks ago) that I played through Mystical Ninja for the N64 in about 6 hours. I decided since I have very good knowledge of the game, I'd speedrun that, which I have about 12 times within the same week.

Now I'm here coming back to Wind Waker, Highly interested in getting into the oot/mm game as well. Speedrunning's fun

[icebreaker007]

i was always interested in watching speedruns and TASes but didnt think i didnt know the game enough to attempt any speedruns. so i spent last summer learning and doing all the tricks on the site. Once the ILs came around i figured i'd go ahead and try a run and it actually turned out pretty good.
im hoping i have enough time on thursday to see if i can do a deku 100% run

[Lexkeeta]

The day I got MK64, my first (owned) vg. I pkayed time trials all the time.

But it wasn't until recently that I started speed running something other than mario kart and break the targets, even though I've secretly followed the community for a long time. It was unreal's  "pro" challenge that started me. I was just going to show myself doing the bk skip, but then I was like "No, that won't do, a million people probably already did that." So I decided to do a speed run using that skip. And then I got better and did another. And another. Then I started the IL thread and here I am

[Tompa]

I've always had fun trying to be quick at Donkey Kong Country, at around 1997-8 or so. But I didn't really speedrun or so, as I didn't even know what that was. But I believe that's the first "speedrun-kind-memory" I have.

Link's Awakening has always been one of my alltime favorite game and is also one of the first games I finished. I've played through it countless of times and I decided to see how fast I managed to beat it, somewhere during the first half of 2004. So I sat down and played it, most of it was played while taking a dump . Using my own route and tricks, died around five times or so. I got a time of 1 hour and 52 minutes, thought that it seemed kinda good.
Around 6 months later, I looked around the internet to see if there were other similar things there and found out that the current LA record was 2:07:39 at Twin Galaxies. Shortly after that I found SDA and blah blah blah.

[Runnerguy2489]

I saw a video of SMB3 being beaten quickly, forget where at. It was the one TAS where in 8-1 he jumps on all the cannon's to get 1-ups. I didn't know it was a TAS (or even what a TAS was) so I showed it to a friend online saying this guy had a ton of skill. He told me that it wasn't skill, and linked me to SDA where people playing on a console submitted their runs.

I was fascinated by SDA. I've always been a big video game player, and in real life I am a runner so it was very appealing. I immediately took the largest interest in the N64 games, as those were the games I "grew up" playing. I thought the Super Mario 64 run was pretty cool, but after trying a SS of mine own just for fun realized I was over 2 or 3 hours behind the record.  I then turned to Ocarina of Time, and saw TSA's sub-5 run, and that he was planning on doing a segmented run. I lurked for a while until I saw fluffy kitten's segmented run. This was the run I looked at and thought, "Ok, I can do that". I didn't want to look like a nub so I would dig through pages and pages of OoT posts trying to find where the tricks and glitches were described in detail, because it appeared all the regulars already knew how to do them. From here I did 2 unrecorded runs of the same kind as fluffy kitten, one in 2:39 and one in 2:34 (his time was a 2:33 I think). I got my laptop in August '07 and learned to record video with it, so I was planning on doing a 3rd run that would beat his time. Around this time, Manocheese's run came out and so I set my goal to beat that as well. That's when I really first started with speedrunning.

tl;dr - A friend showed me SDA, I lurked for a while, got a laptop, started running.

[Lexkeeta]

It'd be awesome if runnerguy was actually the 2489th track runner that became a speedrunner

[Jer]

Tompa, that's a long dump dude

Anyways, i've been "Speedrunning" for a while, maybe 2-3 years, but i've never really recorded anything. I mostly did Break the Targets in SSBM where i had sub 3 or something like that, which i thought was amazing Then i got into DKC2, which i played hours on hours for a whole summer, speedrunning IL's, Each area, and the whole game. I never finished the run but yeah.

Zelda speedruns have ALWAYS been interesting to me, i used to lurk SDA forever watching the Zelda runs, because they're my fav games.

Now that ZSR is out, i've finally man'd up and starting trying Oot Tricks, but i might play around with some MM.

[Lexkeeta]

shut the fuck up jer, nobody has sub 3 btt in melee lmfao

[GlitchesAndStuff]

I started speed running last week when I felt like doing a snowhead 100% IL....

yeah, that's it...

[Chimpas]

the truth, Unreal is who first introduced me to speedrunning, I was glitching OOT and TWW but I had no idea of the things I coul get done, I uploaded one of my videos to youtube and saw Kazooie's channel as a related, went to his account and saw the SDA page. I wanted to sign in but I found with the questio 'The year SDA born' I asked to Kazooie but had no aswer, then Ureal answered and we were good friends, he told me about the TWW topic and about the speedruns, I knew about beating it fast and since there were no much glitches then it was easy to beat.

If unreal doesn't introduce me, then I may still without know about this great sites

[SD2]

I think Manocheese's OoT run got me thinking about speed running in general.  I took a gander at the TP thread and the time for the Wii version, and I knew that it would be beatable...

Tat was probably a couple of years ago, and to this day I have never completed a speed run of that game.  Oh well, tears killed that game.

[RingRush]

I too started speedrunning with melee BtT, only got to like 4:30 though. Though I did get a 7.xx Young Link when I had 6 minutes total time, which beat everyone in beginner and intermediate. Yay for creating my own route.

Almost three years ago I saw a video of a sonic speedrun on google, and I ended up joining The Sonic Center. I TAed a bit of Sonic Adventure 2 (which I was borrowing from my friend; I didn't get my first sonic game till late february 2007), and then started ring attacking. I did ring/score attacking for the next year, with time attacking on the side. My first successful time attacking only came in mid 2008, when I started running Sonic and the Secret Rings. Slowly I creeped up the charts until now, when I have 105/110 records for time attacks.

In March I started time attacking Baten Kaitos Origins for SDA and am still doing that now. As for time attacking Zelda...well I've never done that. But I like making routes >_>

[MarcusSDA]

I started speed running in October 2007. My first speed run was Twilight Princess Any% and I got 6:12. After that I did a speed run of Wind Waker and got 7:02, some people said it was better than 6:42 because of wrong timing. After that I did a new run of WW and got 6:10 WR and at the same time I worked on a new TP speed run which I quitted and then my time was 1:23. After that I did speed runs of some parts of the dungeons in WW and did boss speed runs. In July 2008 I quitted and started again in June or July 2009. Then I did many speed runs of some N64 games. Now I'm doing a new WW run and I'm only playing the 4 3D Zelda games because they are the best.

[Venick409]

I Always loved to, "Speedrun." even when I was like 5, but back then it wasn't really speed running more just trying to play the game fast.

Somewhere Around 2005 - 2006 I found SDA.  I never really did any speedruns / tried to.
Until I found ZSR and Finally got recording equipment.