How Failing a Speedrun World Record Taught Me To Enjoy Gaming

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #178. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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I’ve been into videogames for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are sitting down in the family car and playing on an old PSP, barely having a clue how to even use it. I got entranced for hours, forgetting about the bustling city around me.

I’m neurodivergent, and so with that I tend to latch onto interests with a much greater intensity than the average Joe. Videogames are one of the earliest examples that – I was intensely hyper fixated on them. It didn’t matter the type of game; I was mesmerized by every single genre. I learned all the different types of games, learned all the obscure facts and tried to collect as many games as I possibly could.

As I grew older, I began to meet friends who had a similar strong interest in gaming. We shared facts, played fighting games together and talked about what we were going to buy next. I began to go on gaming forums. When YouTubers and social media communities started becoming more of a thing I engaged with them, too.

As I started connecting to a broader community, there began to be an established set of games that I recognized as the must plays. Everyone recommended them, they were on every top 100 list and they had a huge historical impact. These games, and the community around them, began to represent the videogame canon.

This concept loomed over me for a few years. On its own, it’s a pretty decent idea and can do wonders for unifying the community as well as establishing a shared history for people to talk about. Celeste in particular represents the kind of game that is featured prominently among the must plays. The game has tight controls, charming visuals and story, addicting gameplay, and constant homages to other games in the genre. As Celeste developer Maddy Thorson said to me in an email exchange:

“It seems like a fine concept, as long as we remember that this kind of thing is incredibly subjective. There does seem to be a certain critical mass that some games reach, where they come to represent the history and community around them more than the game itself.”

This is something I agree with. Without the concept of a gaming canon, we wouldn’t really have much common ground to talk about games easily. Discussions would move away from games that people have a shared familiarity with, and there wouldn’t be much understanding of the historical impact.

But it’s also possible to take it too far.

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I’m a big fan of Celeste. I started playing it in 2022 to completion, but only began to seriously get into it late last year when I started vying for 100% completion and pushing past into the world of mods. This interest of mine developed into a completionist view of the game to where I achieved the extremely difficult goal of getting all the Steam achievements. (Only got two golden berries so far though!)

Eventually, I even started to get into playing mods for the game to see what the world of user created levels could show me. As this extended, my interest in speedrunning the game also began to grow and develop.

And then the sixth anniversary of Celeste hit, and with that came the surprise release of Celeste 64, a free-to-play 3D sequel to the original game. It gave a lot of updates to the overall story and provided fun new challenges for the players.

“We truly just wanted to work in the Celeste universe again, to give fans a small update on what these characters have been up to since the events of the game. And we’ve always wanted to make a 3D platformer,” said Thorson.

For me, Celeste 64 also was the perfect entry point into speedrunning. It was familiar enough to me that I knew what I was getting into while still being a completely fresh experience. I was seeing it integrate into the community before my eyes.

I was getting into it during some of its first few hours and, after I achieved 100% completion, I thought, hey, I don’t see any speedruns yet. Let me try and see if I can get the first speedrun out there – the first world record.

I started practicing my route, charting out what I believed to be the quickest way to get to the end goal of the level. I practiced a few sections of the route individually until I got them down perfectly – of course, only after many deaths. And so, I tried out a couple runs – the first was a dud, I died right away and had to restart. But the second? It was done below one minute, after I had barely needed to put in any effort for it! I got a run I was satisfied with and posted it on YouTube. I even thought I discovered a speed trick when playing through this – I was extremely proud!

And then I discovered that not only had someone else beat me to first, but multiple people easily trumped my record shortly after. It wasn’t even close – the first established world record was something below 30 seconds – over twice as quick as my time – and many more kept clocking in even lower times using methods I couldn’t wrap my head around.

This was my first time diving into the broader Celeste community. Beforehand, most of what I was doing was either on my own or with a handful of friends. I hadn’t really engaged with folk who regularly play Celeste up until this point, but when I did, I was amazed. I posted my run and, even though I wasn’t the quickest or the best, I got tons of support from the community as people cheered me on for a quick time. This includes people who had bested me in the total runtime! These folk were playing an entirely different game from the first Celeste, and yet were still conquering it entirely within just a few hours.

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Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist who specializes in covering LGBTQ+ issues, politics, and science. She occasionally likes to write about video games. Follow her on Twitter and Bluesky.