Sleeping Giants: The Speedrun Records Nobody's Talking About (But Should Be)

Every few months, a speedrun goes viral. Someone beats Elden Ring in under six minutes, or a blindfolded Punch-Out!! run lands on the front page of Reddit. Mainstream gaming media covers it, Twitter loses its mind for 48 hours, and then everyone moves on.

But here's the thing — the speedrunning community is enormous, deep, and weird in the best possible way. For every record that gets its moment in the spotlight, there are dozens more sitting quietly on Speedrun.com, technically brilliant and completely ignored by anyone outside a tiny dedicated community. We spent weeks going through leaderboards, watching VODs, and talking to runners to put together this list. These are the records worth your time in 2024.

Why Obscure Speedruns Are Often the Most Impressive

Before the list, a quick word on why niche runs deserve more credit than they get. Popular speedgames — your Super Mario 64s, your Ocarina of Times — have massive communities, years of accumulated knowledge, and dozens of runners pushing each other to improve. The meta is deep, but it's also well-documented. Someone new can hop in and learn from thousands of hours of existing footage.

Obscure games don't have that luxury. A runner working on a forgotten PlayStation 2 platformer might be the only person on Earth who fully understands the game's memory layout. They're doing original research. They're writing the rulebook from scratch. That's a different kind of impressive, and it deserves recognition.

Animorphs: Shattered Reality (GBA) — Any% in Under 12 Minutes

Yes, there was an Animorphs game on the Game Boy Advance. Yes, it's genuinely terrible. And yes, the current world record sits at just under 12 minutes, achieved through a sequence of movement optimizations and a mid-game memory corruption trick that essentially folds the last third of the game in on itself.

What makes this run worth watching isn't the game — it's the routing. The runner (who goes by the handle MorphClock on Speedrun.com) spent months documenting the game's level transition triggers and found that the game loads the final boss arena's memory address far earlier than intended if you enter a specific room while a cutscene flag is still active. The result is a skip that looks like magic if you don't know what you're looking at.

Where to watch: MorphClock's Twitch VOD archive. Skip to the 11:23 timestamp in their most recent PB run to see the skip in action — the chat reaction alone is worth it.

Myst III: Exile (PC) — All Ages in 38 Minutes

The Myst games aren't traditionally thought of as speedrun territory. They're slow, puzzle-heavy adventure games designed for patient exploration. Which is exactly why watching someone tear through one in under 40 minutes feels genuinely surreal.

The Exile any% and all-ages categories require runners to solve or bypass every major puzzle in the game at near-perfect efficiency. There's almost no RNG involved, which means every second of improvement comes from pure optimization — tighter mouse movement, more efficient dialogue skips, and a deep understanding of the game's puzzle logic that lets runners anticipate transitions before they fully render.

The current record holder, AgeRunner_77, has a run where the margin between their personal best and the theoretical perfect run (based on frame data analysis) is less than 90 seconds across 38 minutes of gameplay. That precision is extraordinary.

Where to watch: Speedrun.com's Myst III leaderboard links directly to a YouTube archive. The 22:47 mark in the run is where the final age transition happens — it's genuinely beautiful to watch happen that fast.

Winback: Covert Operations (N64) — Any% in 18 Minutes

Winback is a late-90s third-person shooter that most people have either never heard of or vaguely remember from a rental store. It was a launch title for the N64 in North America and got buried almost immediately by the console's stronger lineup.

The speedrun community found it anyway, and what they uncovered is a game absolutely riddled with exploitable geometry. The entire middle section of the game — roughly four levels — can be bypassed using a wall-clip sequence that requires frame-perfect positioning on two separate occasions. The catch is that the N64 version has slightly different timing windows than the Japanese release, meaning US runners had to develop their own version of the technique from scratch.

This is a run where understanding the platform matters as much as understanding the game. The N64's memory management quirks are essentially a co-runner.

Where to watch: Search "Winback N64 speedrun" on YouTube. The top result from OperativeSkip has a commentary track that explains every major decision — highly recommended for first-time viewers. Key moment at 9:14.

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon (Wii) — Any% in 1:52

This one hits different. Fragile Dreams is a post-apocalyptic action RPG for the Wii that sold modestly in Japan and almost invisibly in the US. It has a small but devoted fanbase who love it for its atmosphere and melancholy story.

The speedrun community has treated it with surprising respect. The current any% record of 1 hour and 52 minutes requires extensive menu optimization, careful inventory management to avoid backtracking, and precise combat routing to avoid losing time to damage states. There are no major glitches or sequence breaks — this is a pure optimization run, which is a different kind of satisfying.

What makes it special is the community around it. There are fewer than 20 people on the leaderboard, and they all seem to genuinely know each other. The Discord server for Fragile Dreams runs is tiny and incredibly welcoming to newcomers.

Where to watch: Twitch. Search the game directly and sort by recent broadcasts. Most active runners stream their attempts live, and the community regulars show up in chat to offer real-time commentary.

Chulip (PS2) — Any% in 47 Minutes

Look, we couldn't make a list like this without including Chulip. This 2002 Japanese life simulation game — in which you play a boy who must kiss every resident of a small town to restore your health — is one of the strangest games ever made. It's also, apparently, an incredible speedgame.

The any% category involves manipulating NPC schedules, abusing a specific dialogue skip that triggers faster than intended on original hardware, and routing a kissing order that minimizes travel time across the game's map. Yes, this is a real thing people have spent serious time optimizing.

The current record holder runs the game in a way that requires knowing the exact in-game timestamp at which each NPC becomes available. It's almost poetic that a game built around timing and schedules rewards runners who understand time management at a granular level.

Where to watch: The GDQ archives on YouTube include a Chulip run from a past Awesome Games Done Quick marathon. It's one of the funniest and most charming runs in GDQ history. Find it. Watch it.

The Bigger Picture

Speedrunning has always been about finding the edges of systems — the places where a game's rules bend or break under pressure. The mainstream records get the attention because the games are familiar. But the real frontier is out here in the weird stuff, the forgotten stuff, the games that only a handful of people ever loved enough to break completely.

Stream2009 is going to keep tracking these communities. Because the timestamps that matter aren't always the ones on the front page of Twitch.