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BisqBot, a robot designed to aid the creation of tool-assisted speedruns, finds the shortest path towards a desired powerup in Mega Man

A tool-assisted speedrun (commonly abbreviated TAS) is a speedrun movie or performances themselves produced with the use of tools such as slow motion and re-recording. The basic premise of these runs is that a "tool" (such as an emulator that provides the author with features that are unavailable in regular playing) is used in order to overcome human limitations such as skill and reflex.^[1] Tool-assisted speedruns have been made for some notable ROM hacks as well as for published games.^[2]

The term was originally coined during the early days of Doom speedrunning, during which the first of these runs were made (although they were sometimes also referred to as "built demos"). When Andy "Aurican" Kempling released a modified version of the Doom source code that made it possible to record demos in slow motion and in several sessions, it was possible for the first players to start recording tool-assisted demos. A couple of months afterwards, in June 1999, Esko Koskimaa, Peo Sjoblom and Yonatan Donner opened the first site to share these demos, which they aptly called "Tools-Assisted Speedruns".^[3]

Like many other tool-assisted speedrun communities, the maintainers of the site stressed the fact that their demos were for entertainment purposes rather than skill competitions, although the attempt to attain the fastest time possible with tools itself became a competition as well.^[4] The site became a success, updating usually several times a week with demos recorded by its maintainers and submitted by its readers. After a short while, when version 2.03 of Lee Killough's Marine's Best Friend Doom source port was released (based on the Boom source port), it became even easier for people to record these demos, adding the functionality of re-recording without having to replay the demo until it reached the point where you wanted to continue.

The site was active until August 10, 2001, at which point Yonathan Donner posted a news message stating that their site would be an archive from now on, and pointing towards The Doomed Speed Demos Archive, a site mainly for non-assisted speedruns, of which the author agreed to take over the posting of tool-assisted speedruns. Although popularity had dwindled since then, built demos have still been submitted until as late as November 2005, and are currently usually being made with PrBoom.^[5]

In 2003, a video of a Japanese player called Morimoto beating the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 in 11 minutes and performing some other incredible stunts as well started floating around the internet. It was a very controversial video because not many people knew about tool-assisted speedruns back then, especially for the NES. Many people felt like they had been cheated when they found out it was done using an emulator. That video, however, gave the inspiration to Joel "Bisqwit" Yliluoma to start a website called NESvideos, which was dedicated to tool-assisted speedruns for the NES. At first it hosted videos only for the NES, but as the community grew, members of the community managed to add the features required for tool-assisted speedrunning into other emulators for other systems. Later the name of the site was changed to TASvideos [2]. As of 2006, TASVideos is the largest English-language webcommunity which produces and hosts tool-assisted speedruns.

A route planning sheet of Joel Yliluoma's Mega Man speedrun. Redundant routes have been scrapped and the most feasible one has been noted down in detail.

Creating a tool-assisted speed run is the process of finding the ideal set of inputs to complete a given criterion - usually completing a game as fast as possible. No limits are imposed on the tools used for this search, but the result has to be a set of timed key-presses that, when played back on the actual console, achieves the target criterion. Traditionally, the only available tool for this was an emulator with re-recording - the ability to use savestate while recording key-presses. However, due to advances in the field, it is now often expected that frame-advance, stepping through emulation one frame at a time, is used. A tool-assisted speed run done without this technique may be criticised as "sloppy play". Before frame-advance became common, playing in slow motion was a common technique, but frame-advance is displacing this.

Frame-advance also facilitates another common technique, luck manipulation, which is the practice of exploiting the game's use of player input in its pseudo-random number generation to make favorable outfalls happen. Using a savestate from before some event, it is possible to experiment with small input variations until the event has the desired outcome. Depending on the game and event, this can be a very time consuming process, at times requiring much backtracking, and can as such take up a large portion of the total time spent making a tool-assisted speed run. Making the ideal piece drop next in Tetris, or getting a rare drop the first time one kills an enemy, are examples of luck-manipulation.

A rarely used tool is brute-force searching for ideal inputs by making a computer play the game, trying all possible inputs. In theory, this process could find the ideal set of inputs for any game, but since the space of all possible inputs grows exponentially with the length of the sequence, this is only viable for optimizing very small portions of the speed run.

Another rarely used technique is to disassemble the game executable. By exposing the game logic, this can make it possible to manipulate luck without trial and error, or reveal bugs in the game engine. A more common, related technique, is to monitor the memory addresses responsible for certain effects to learn why and when they change.

All these techniques involve direct interaction with the game state in ways not possible without emulation, but the final result, the set of inputs that makes up the speed run, does not depend on such manipulation of the state of the emulated machine. The tool use in tool-assisted speed running is therefore different from the sort of state manipulation tools like Gameshark provide, since such manipulation would not be expressible as a sequence of timed inputs.

Emulators that currently feature the tools necessary to create these tool-assisted speedruns include the Nintendo emulators Famtasia, FCE Ultra [3], Nintendulator and VirtuaNES, the Super Nintendo emulators Snes9x [4] and ZSNES [5], the Genesis emulator Gens [6], the Game Boy Advance emulator Visual Boy Advance [7], and the Nintendo 64 emulator Mupen64 [8].

Tool-assisted speedruns are created for many reasons, the major ones being noted below:

• To find a game's theoretical limit — runners are interested to find out what the fastest possible completion time for a game is under "perfect play," and tool-assisted speedruns allow for that.
• To provide entertainment — tool-assisted speedruns (and speedruns in general) are fun to watch for many casual gamers because speedruns allow them to learn tricks they never knew before from playing the game "normally."
• To provide a standard for comparison with unassisted runs; but only in special cases: both runs must be following the same or very similar routes, and using a similar set of tricks and/or glitches. Unassisted runners often use the TAS as a reference point to gauge their own performance.

Tool-assisted speedruns are timed in a distinct category from unassisted runs, for reasons of fairness. In unassisted runs, a difficult path is often avoided in favour of an easier, but slower one, in order to avoid the risk of dying and having to start over. Depending on the game, the time differences between possible routes, along with other advantages from frame-by-frame precision, tool-assisted speedruns surpass their unassisted counterparts by a few seconds to entire hours. For example, the fastest Super Mario Bros. TAS currently stands at 04:58.53 (4'57" using Speed Demos Archive Timing), while the fastest unassisted run stands at 5'00". A trick in A Link to the Past allowing for walking through walls has allowed for an extremely short 3'45" TAS, but because the trick is impossible to reproduce in real time using a standard controller, the fastest unassisted run is over an hour long. Because unassisted speedruns can be made in much less time than tool-assisted speedruns, discovery of a time-saving trick may mean the fastest unassisted speedrun is faster than the fastest tool-assisted run. From August 13 to 21, 2007, the fastest unassisted speedrun of Pokémon Blue was 4 minutes faster than the best TAS, due to a new trick that allowed walking through walls. On August 21st, however, a TAS was submitted that was 20 minutes faster than the unassisted run.

Tool-assisted runs are timed by input, i.e. from game power-on to the last input necessary such that the ending scene and/or game credits can not be prevented. Any introductory cutscenes, game-loading screens, and trailing dialogues after the last boss battle (if input is necessary to scroll through the text) are included in the final times. The times are exact (to the nearest frame), a level of precision that is not possible with unassisted runs because it cannot be determined from a recording when exactly the input ended. Speed Demos Archive and Twin Galaxies measure only the length of the gameplay proper, and begin timing when the player gains control of the character and ends timing when the player loses it. These differences in timing conventions can result in seemingly discrepant times between unassisted and tool-assisted runs. For example, the most recent Super Mario Bros. speedrun by Andrew G., an even five minutes by SDA timing, seems to be only 0.4 seconds slower than the current tool-assisted world record of 4 minutes and 59.6 seconds, but his run actually contains 5 minutes and 3 seconds of input.

One of the most important differences between a tool-assisted and unassisted run, is the use of glitches in the game. Though glitch use is not uncommon in unassisted runs, many are negative towards them, some considering glitch use cheating. In tool-assisted speedrunning, glitches are held in much higher regard, to the degree that the term "glitch abuse" has positive connotations, and tool-assisted speedruns often make heavy use of them. This may in part be because the majority of glitches are very difficult to exploit without frame-precision and re-recording.

These differences also lead to different expectations from tool-assisted and unassisted speedruns. Taking damage when doing so does not save time and/or is not required may look sloppy in a tool-assisted run, while being hit by the occasional hard-to-avoid enemy in a relatively long unassisted speedrun would not prevent the runner from holding his world record title. After the advent of frame-advance, frame-precise movement has also come to be expected, the lack of which may be characterized as "sloppy play". Another difference is in the standards of use of waiting time in the speedrun: in situations where it is not possible to make the game move faster, and the player has to wait, such as in autoscrolling or any other areas of a game in which the runner does not have control over the speed, the runner is advised in TASvideos guidelines to do something entertaining for the viewers. An example of this is the gathering of 99 extra lives in the autoscrolling sections of the famous Super Mario Bros. 3 speedrun. In unassisted runs, however, players usually would not risk dying and having to start over to entertain the viewer.

Tool-assisted speedruns usually extensively abuse glitches, such as this zipping trick which makes travelling through walls possible

In the context of tool-assisted speedrunning, many common terms, usually neologisms, have been created. These terms are necessary to understand most general discussions about the phenomenon. This list covers the most ubiquitous terminology. Note that some words may have a different typical meaning outside of the lexicon of tool-assisted speedrunning; for example, frame applies to movies as well as to video games, but only the latter has relevance in this case.

Emulator

Software which allows console games to run on modern platforms (computer architecture and/or operating system) and provides the runner with the common toolset, such as save states. Emulators that currently feature the tools necessary to create these tool-assisted speedruns include the Nintendo emulators Famtasia, FCE Ultra [9], Nintendulator and VirtuaNES, the Super Nintendo emulators Snes9x [10] and ZSNES [11], the Genesis emulator Gens [12], the Game Boy Advance emulator Visual Boy Advance [13], and the Nintendo 64 emulator Mupen64 [14].

Input

The play data that is inserted into the game in the form of button presses, either by the actions of a player (both during normal play and during speedrunning) or by an input file.

Input file

A computer file that, among various other data, contains the boolean states of all buttons during every frame of a tool-assisted speedrun movie. This data is needed to reconstruct actions in a game, using an emulator. Unless the movie starts from the console power-on or from reset (as is the case with most movies on the TASVideos website), it might also contain a save state that is loaded at the beginning of the game.

Frame

One of the still images composing the animation of a video game. Most gaming systems (and thus, emulators) update the screen 50 (PAL) or 60 (NTSC) times per second (although sometimes only every second or third frame is rendered on some systems, notwithstanding lag). Every one of such updates is called a frame. Almost all console systems check the input (which buttons are pressed on the controller) once per frame, which is therefore the highest possible resolution of input in tool-assisted speedrunning.

Frame advance

An emulation feature which allows for the manual progression of frames, such as by pressing a button. It is similar to slow motion, the only difference being that the game is effectively paused until the player decides to resume the emulation for one frame. This is used in order to create input at exactly a specific time, seen as how one can find that particular moment simply by checking every frame at one's leisure.

Glitch

An unintentional feature in a game ― usually considered an error. Many games contain glitches, some very small and hardly notable, but others very significant. Glitches are usually result of accidental or intentional sloppy programming. Because many console games are ran on rather slow CPU power, perfect programming (such as pixel-perfect collision checks) would often be too slow. As a result, programming “shortcuts” have to be taken. See Speedrun#Glitches for further information.

Hex editing, Binary editing

The act of editing the raw data that composes a binary file (usually done with a tool that displays the file data in hexadecimal numbers). This is usually done in order to modify input files, such as to change small errors or to copy and paste parts of a movie. Due to its difficulty, it is fairly scarcely done.

Lag

The effect experienced when the game runs slower than normal due to there being too many instructions for the CPU to calculate in the time of one frame. Thus, the CPU will spread the calculations over multiple frames. Because it cannot show the results of the calculations when expected, there will be identically rendered frames while it is working. Often, during lag, the game will ignore the player's input until the calculations are performed. There might also appear graphical anomalies, such as Head-Up Displays appearing in the wrong place. Note that lag often refers to delays experienced in computing communications, such as during online gaming.

Luck manipulation

The act of recording a beneficial pseudo-randomly generated result. Console gaming systems are actually computers; computers are actually calculators; calculators perform calculations; calculations are always predictable and repeatable with identical results. When a player “manipulates” his luck, he abuses the fact that with save states, he can try different methods of input to see how a game will react. Pseudo-randomly generated results in the context of video games (such as some instances of artificial intelligence or the obtaining of random power ups) may be examined and retried until the most opportune one is found.

Re-record, Re-recording

An instance of the usage of a savestate while recording a tool-assisted speedrun or the act of doing so. This is an absolutely essential and very typical part of tool-assisted speedrunning. See Re-recording (video gaming) for further information.

ROM

The read-only memory of a game cartridge dumped as a binary file on a separate file storage medium. It contains all data of a game cartridge, such as the programming as well as the graphics and music. Loading a ROM image of a game in an emulator is the usual method to play such games.

Savestate

A snapshot of the emulated system's state at that current moment. Restoring a saved savestate will revert the game to that exact state, including future outcomes of pseudo-random generators. This is known as a re-record when performed during the recording of a movie (input file).

Slow motion

The slowing down of an emulated system to make it easier to create input (thus increasing the potential precision). The usage of slow motion is crucial to tool-assisted speedrunning, as many of the esoteric techniques are impossible to perform without it due to said human limitations. Frame advance is the most accurate kind of slow motion.

TAS

Common abbreviation of tool-assisted speedrun. The word TAS is used in the tool-assisted speedrun community exactly like the word “run” is used in the unassisted speedrun community. (See Speedrun, § Glossary.)

Tier

A particular intention or set of rules with which to record a speedrun, such as playing with different characters or taking a certain route. For example, if a route is found that allows extremely fast completion of a game via a glitch, it will often be considered a separate "tier" in order to preserve the old route's movies and records, as people may find the old way of doing it to be more enjoyable or otherwise interesting.

Timeattack

Tool-assisted speedruns are sometimes called "timeattack". This most likely stems from the Japanese term “タイムアタック” (“taimuatakku”). In the English community, this term has mostly fallen out of favor.

• Speedrun — play-through of a computer or video game, in which the whole game or a select part of it, such as a single level, is played with the intent of completing it as quickly as possible, optionally with certain prerequisites
• Re-recording — the act of using a save state while recording a tool-assisted speedrun
• Time attack — a mode which allows the player to finish a game (or a part of it) as fast as possible, saving record times
• Score attack — the attempt to reach a record logged point value in a game
• Game demo — a freely distributed demonstration or preview of an upcoming or recently released computer or video game
• Electronic sports — a general term used to describe computer and video games which are played as competitive sports

The Wiktionary definition of tool-assisted speedrun.

In the writing and research of this article, a variety of sources have been used.

Due to the nature of the subject matter, usage of what would otherwise be considered inaccurate sources is inevitable. It is common for many online communities to use collaborative content management systems and discussion boards to convey their news and information; such sources have been used mainly in order to refer to recordkeeping databases and treatises that directly concern the sites in question. It is rebuttably presumed that in such cases, accuracy is proven by the certainty that people who have been cited in such instances are who they claim to be. In addition, references have been given a usage rationale.

The external links generally lead to sites that specialize in speedrunning, and are often hosted by knowledgeable and well-respected speedrunners. They are therefore very reliable and good locations for further research on the subject. Among the listed sites are also communities that have been created so that players of video games may compete against each other for fast times and high scores. For reasons of practicality, sites which only give a brief description or passing remark about speedruns, of which there are many, are not included.

• Turner, B. (2005). Smashing the Clock. 1UP.com. Retrieved on August 13, 2005.

Very extensive article about speedrunning, both tool-assisted and unassisted, in general.

• Totilo, S. (2006). Gamers Divided Over Freakish Feats Achieved With Tool-Assisted Speed Runs. MTV News. Retrieved on April 29, 2006.

Very well-informed article on the differences between unassisted and tool-assisted speedrunners and the reason why this causes controversy between the two camps.

• Slashdot contributors (2004). 'Perfect' Zelda NES Speed Record Beaten. Slashdot. Retrieved on May 25, 2006.

Posting of a tool-assisted speedrun on Slashdot, a news website and Internet forum.

• Grohé, M., Coté, P. (2005). Interview of Phil for September 2005 issue of GEE. NESVideos. Retrieved on May 25, 2006.

Interview of a tool-assisted speedrunner about speedrunning in general.

• Grohé, M., Yliluoma, J. (2005). Interview of Bisqwit for September 2005 issue of GEE. NESVideos. Retrieved on May 25, 2006.

Interview of Joel Yliluoma, webmaster of TASVideos, currently the largest tool-assisted speedrunning website.

• Orland K., Yliluoma, J. (2005). Interview of Bisqwit for GameCritics. NESVideos. Retrieved on May 25, 2006.

Another interview of Joel Yliluoma, conducted in 2005, about speedrunning in general.

• NESVideos contributors (2006). Common Tricks. NESVideos. Retrieved on October 16, 2005.

Documentation on commonly used tricks in tool-assisted speedruns.

• TASVideos contributors (2006). Glossary. TASVideos. Retrieved on July 2, 2006.

An extensive glossary documenting all of the common terminology in the context of tool-assisted speedrunning.

• Tool-assisted console game movies - Speedruns through various classic console games, made with emulators and utilizing slow-motion and savestates.
• Common tricks page on Bisqwit's TASVideos site, actively documenting techniques that may be used in tool-assisted speedruns.
• GamesTech - Finalfighter's Rockman series tool-assisted speedrun planning site