Beat Your Own High Score: A Laid-Back Gamer's Starter Guide to Speedrunning

If you've ever watched a speedrunner demolish a classic game in forty-seven minutes and thought "that looks incredible but also completely unhinged and definitely not for me" — first of all, same. But also, you might be leaving one of gaming's most genuinely rewarding experiences on the table.

Here's what the highlight reels don't show you: speedrunning isn't just for the obsessives who map out every pixel of a Super Mario 64 level before breakfast. At its core, speedrunning is simply about playing a game you love with a little more intention — and seeing how fast you can get from point A to point B. That's it. No world record required. No Twitch stream necessary. Just you, a timer, and the quietly addictive question: can I do that faster?

The answer, with a little patience and zero pressure, is almost always yes. And the feeling when you beat your own time? Genuinely electric.

Let's Kill the Intimidation Factor First

The speedrunning community has an image problem, and it's not entirely fair. Yes, there are runners out there who have logged thousands of hours optimizing a single game down to individual frames. Yes, the world record holders for popular titles are operating on a level that feels closer to wizardry than gaming. That stuff is real, it's impressive, and it is absolutely not what this guide is about.

Casual speedrunning — sometimes called "personal best chasing" or just "running for fun" — is a completely different experience. You're not competing with the internet. You're competing with yourself from last Tuesday. That's a race you can actually win, and winning it feels great.

Think of it like running a 5K. Sure, some people are out there training for sub-20-minute finishes. But plenty of folks just want to beat their own time from last month, and that goal is equally valid and equally satisfying.

Picking the Right Game: Start Where You're Comfortable

The best game for your first speedrun is almost always a game you've already beaten. Familiarity is your biggest asset here. You don't need to learn the game's mechanics from scratch — you need to learn how to move through a game you already know faster.

A few genuinely beginner-friendly options worth considering:

Celeste is a masterclass in accessibility for new runners. The game is already built around fast movement and tight controls, has a built-in timer for individual chapters, and the community is famously welcoming to newcomers. You can start timing individual levels before you ever think about a full-game run.

Portal and Portal 2 are beloved in the casual running community for their relatively short completion times and the deeply satisfying puzzle of finding faster routes through each chamber. Plus, GlaDOS is going to mock you regardless of your finishing time, so you might as well be quick about it.

Sonic the Hedgehog games (the classic Sega Genesis titles in particular) are practically designed for speedrunning — the entire point is going fast. If you grew up playing these, your muscle memory is already halfway there.

A Short Hike is a charming indie game with a completion time that fits comfortably in an afternoon. No stress, no complex routing, just a lovely game that rewards you for paying attention to where you're going.

The key is picking something with a manageable length. A 40-hour RPG is a commitment even as a casual run. A 2-hour platformer you already know? That's a weekend project.

The Only Tool You Actually Need

Before you do anything else, grab a free program called LiveSplit. It's the standard timer used by basically everyone in the speedrunning community, and it's genuinely simple to set up. You can create custom splits — checkpoints in your run where the timer records your time — for any game you want.

Don't overthink the splits when you're starting out. Pick three to five major milestones in your game (end of world one, first boss, halfway point, final area, credits) and mark those. You don't need fifty splits tracking every individual room. Keep it manageable.

Your first run isn't about setting a good time. It's about establishing a baseline. That's your enemy now. Everything after run one is about beating that number.

Techniques That Are Actually Beginner-Friendly

Here's where casual runners often get scared off: the terminology. Glitches. Out-of-bounds exploits. Wrong warps. Arbitrary code execution. These are all real things in competitive speedrunning, and they're also completely optional.

For a beginner, the most impactful improvements come from the basics:

Cut the cutscenes. Most modern games let you skip story sequences with a button press. In a casual playthrough you might watch them. In a run, you skip every single one, every time. This alone can shave minutes off your time.

Optimize your movement. Are you stopping when you don't need to? Taking the long way around an area out of habit? Just moving more deliberately and directly — without glitches, without tricks — makes a measurable difference.

Learn one or two small tricks. Almost every game has a handful of well-known, easy-to-execute shortcuts that even casual runners use. Check the game's page on Speedrun.com (a fantastic free resource with guides for thousands of games) and look for beginner-friendly route notes. You don't need to learn everything. Learn three things and practice them until they're automatic.

Play the same section repeatedly. This is where the real improvement happens, and it's also where speedrunning becomes meditative rather than stressful. Pick a part of the game where you keep losing time and run just that section. Again and again. You'll be surprised how quickly your hands figure out what your brain is still trying to process.

Managing the Mental Game

Here's the honest truth about speedrunning that nobody puts in the tutorial: you will have bad runs. You'll have runs where everything goes wrong, you miss an easy trick, and your final time is worse than your baseline. This is normal. This happens to everyone, from first-timers to world record holders.

The key is keeping your expectations calibrated to your actual goals. You're not trying to be the fastest person alive. You're trying to beat your time. Some days you will. Some days you won't. Both kinds of days are part of the experience.

When a run goes sideways, the best move is almost always to reset and start fresh rather than grinding through a compromised attempt. Finishing a bad run teaches you less than resetting and running a clean one. Give yourself permission to reset without guilt — it's not quitting, it's strategy.

The Payoff Is Real

There's a specific feeling that happens when you nail a clean run — when everything clicks, your movement is tight, you hit your tricks, and the final timer stops at a number lower than you've ever seen. It's a genuine, full-body rush. The kind of satisfaction that's hard to get from passive entertainment because you earned it. Your hands did that. Your preparation did that.

And the beautiful thing about chasing personal bests is that the ceiling is always moving. There's always another second to find, another transition to tighten up, another small improvement waiting to be discovered.

You don't need to be a Twitch pro to feel that. You just need a game you love, a timer, and the willingness to ask: what if I tried that a little faster?

Go find out.