Competitive games like League of Legends often get most of the acclaim on the Twitch community. But one rising audience is centered around a practice called “speed-running.”
Twitch
Into the wee hours of a morning in July, Cosmo Wright — who broadcasts videos of himself playing video games for a living — had completed what he likely considered to be a masterpiece.
Wright had completed what likely millions of others had done millions of times: beaten The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But unlike everyone else who had played the game, Wright had beaten it very, very quickly. Through some impressive gameplay and manipulation of glitches, he had actually beaten the game in 18 minutes and 10 seconds, earning him the world record for beating the game in the shortest-possible time.
Wright is known as a "speed-runner," one of a community of players who go through older (and sometimes newer) games as fast as they possibly can through mastery of the game and manipulation of various glitches. And thanks to the advent of platforms like Twitch, a website and application that lets professional gamers earn a living through partnerships with the company, it's turned into a full-blown profession in the gaming world. Many popular speed-runners make a show out of playing the game, interacting with their audience and giving step-by-step commentary as they play.
"Part of what appeals to people is it's a lot different from most stuff you see on Twitch," Twitch's head of speed-running partnerships Andrew Schroeder, who runs an annual charity event called Awesome Games Done Quick, told BuzzFeed. "Most of that is eSports and fighting games. You don't really get to see that often, an old game being played you remember from your childhood that's being played in a completely different way — that's what makes people stick with it."
Awesome Games Done Quick
Thanks to Twitch's partner program, which enrolls some of the top and most interesting players in the world, people like Wright are able to make a living through playing video games. Twitch currently has 6,500 players in its partner program who stream games like League of Legends, Minecraft, and older games in the speed-running community like Super Mario 64. These players attract donations, subscriptions for premium channel experiences, and also receive a revenue share for some of the ads shown on their channel. The job is a full-time profession, requiring months or years of practice in order to get the perfect run, like Wright's world record for Ocarina of Time.
Prior to Twitch, speed-running had a bit of a cult following through a site called Speed Demos Archive. Players would manually record their runs and mail them to the people behind SDA, as it is colloquially called in the community, which would then encode it and upload it to the site. SDA still exists today and hosts videos of more than 1,000 games, loaded with commentary about the specifics behind the runs and how they came to exist. The games played in the speed-running community run the complete gamut of iconic classics like Super Mario to obscure titles and new ones like Dark Souls.
Despite being one of Twitch's smaller communities, the company is still quite sensitive to its desires. Earlier this month, Twitch instituted a new tool that would mute unlicensed music in older videos stored on the site. This had the unfortunate side effect of muting archived speed-running videos based on the actual video game music, enraging many in the speed-running community — including Wright. Shear said it was a mistake that would quickly be rectified, and wrote on Reddit to address concerns about the new tools and underscoring much of what made Twitch popular among gamers: focusing on what the community wanted.
The company's focus on its community and broadcasters, coupled with its technical expertise in building a live-streaming service, is part of the reason Twitch has rocketed to being one of the most valuable video properties in the world. Twitch says it has 55 million unique viewers each month, each of whom watch an average of 106 minutes of video a day. The company is also reportedly being eyed by Google for an acquisition that would value the company at around $1 billion.
