Chances are if you hop on YouTube and look up your favorite game, you can find someone speedrunning that game. Yes, even those relatively obscure games…like Ratatouille.
Meet Illumina, a Canadian speedrunner who recently shattered the speedrunning world record for the PC version of Ratatouille by eight seconds on November 4th, 2018. Illumina also holds records in Herobrine’s Return, Hypixel BedWars, and ChromaGun.
If you’re like me, you didn’t even know that Ratatouille was made into a video game. Well, it was, and people have not only purchased and played it, but they’ve perfected it, and competed against each other in the speedrunning world to see who is the fastest at completing the 2007 title.
The truth of the matter is, this is fairly common; almost any video game that you can think of has a speedrunning community behind it, whether it be large or little. The members of this community dissect every shape, frame, and input of the game to draw up how the game can be completed as quickly as possible. Speedrunners will then take this information, and practice every single aspect of the game, making sure they can consistently hit frame-perfect inputs throughout the entirety of the run. It’s this level of dedication and obsession that allows for games to be completed in seemingly impossible time.
Don’t believe that people can dissect a game to this level of detail? Last year, Summoning Salt released a 20 minute video picking apart Level 4-2 of the original Super Mario Bros. It’s also worth noting that the 20 minute only covers one half of the level.
If you’re curious just how deep this goes, head over to Speedrun.com and browse around. You’ll discover that almost any game you can think of as history and competition going into it. It will open your eyes to a whole side of the gaming world; one where perfection is the only standard.
