The Kids Who Beat in Minutes What Took Me Weeks

Two weeks. That was all I had with my classmate’s older brother’s Super Nintendo—borrowed, not gifted—and I treated that deadline like a military campaign. The objective was Super Mario World. Failure wasn’t an option. When I finally rescued Princess Peach on the second-to-last day and those end credits rolled with that perfect music underneath, I was so proud I nearly burst. I was ten years old and I had conquered something real.

The same feeling followed me through Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Yoshi’s Island. Mammoth projects that swallowed weeks, sometimes months of my childhood. Sacred, expensive time. The idea that someone could demolish any of those games in under five minutes—blindfolded, using only their feet—would have sent me into a corner to weep quietly at that age. Some information you’re better off not having.

That’s the world Speedrundale lives in. Gregor Kartsios, Simon Krätschmer, and Siamak Ashouri from Rocket Beans TV built a format that celebrates these people—the obsessives who’ve mapped every glitch and geometry skip in a game’s architecture until they can move through it like water through a crack. No hesitation. No wonder. Pure optimized carnage, delivered without blinking.

In their world, my two-week run doesn’t register as an achievement. It barely registers as something worth remembering. I’m a Sunday driver who died on the side of a road nobody uses anymore. And yet watching them do it—the calm, the precision, the total annihilation of everything I once thought was hard—is still kind of incredible.