The exploits and tricks that define competitive speedrunning — documented and explained
A speed-building glitch in which repeated backwards long jumps — typically on stairs — let Mario's backwards speed grow without limit, carrying him through star doors and other barriers.
A setup in Gohma's boss room, using a bottle and precise timing, that confuses the game's location loading so the blue warp out of the Deku Tree sends child Link to the end of the game at Ganon's Castle.
Mockball lets Samus carry her full running speed into Morph Ball form by morphing in mid-air just before landing. Combined with wall-jumping, it allows sequence breaks that skip large parts of the intended item order.
Hidden warp zones in Worlds 1-2, 4-2, and 4-2 allow Mario to skip to Worlds 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 8, with the 4-2 World 8 warp being the centrepiece of modern Any% routing.
Using Fly or Teleport the moment a Trainer initiates a battle corrupts the encounter pointer, causing the next wild encounter to load any Pokémon — including the otherwise uncatchable Mew.
Exploiting Quake's Newtonian movement physics to maintain and accumulate horizontal speed through repeated jumps, combined with rocket-jump propulsion, enabling movement speeds and trajectories the game's level design never anticipated.
Moving diagonally by combining forward and strafe inputs simultaneously to achieve approximately 141% of the base forward movement speed, using a specific strafe-run key combination documented by the community as SR50.
Exploiting the GoldSrc engine's air acceleration model to maintain and accumulate speed through continuous jumping, allowing the player to move at several times normal walking speed throughout the entire game.
By accelerating Mario to speeds so extreme that his position value overflows, players can reach "parallel universes" — copies of the level existing outside the map — in order to complete a star using only half of an A-press.
By getting Samus stuck inside a wall and repeatedly toggling the X-Ray Scope, runners force the game to shunt her upward five pixels at a time — climbing out of bounds and skipping vast swathes of the game.
Placing a bottle on the B button causes Ocarina of Time to write item values outside the space reserved for the inventory — letting runners conjure almost any item in the game, and eventually warp straight to the end credits.
By arranging Koopa shells at pixel-perfect positions, runners write machine code into the SNES's sprite table and make Super Mario World execute it, jumping straight to the credits from the first level.
id Software assumed nobody would fire a rocket at their own feet because the damage would be suicidal. The damage turned out not to scale the way they expected, and a programmer discovered by accident that it launches you across the map.
NES Tetris was thought to end at level 29, where pieces fall faster than the game's input delay allows you to move them. Two techniques — vibrating your arm, then drumming the back of the controller — proved otherwise.