#Speedrunners game list software

Twice a year at the charity event Games Done Quick (helpfully preceded by ‘Awesome’ in winter and ‘Summer’ in summer to mark the seasons), hundreds of thousands of people now gather around computer screens and in conference halls to watch speedrunners blitz through beloved games under an hour, half an hour, twenty minutes.

#Speedrunners game list software

My recollections of these iD Software titles – lacking in plot, but rich in colour – seem to hold up fine against the test of time. I’d stare at the box art for the game, as punchy and pulpy as any Johanna Lindsey novel on my mother’s bookshelf. Wolfenstein 3D was a collection of inputs and responses: collecting turkey dinners and gliding through cyan doors. It wasn’t a game to win in the traditional sense of the word. I remember shooting Nazis in the face, I remember William Joseph ‘B.J.’ Blazkowicz’s eyes and jaw moving back and forth in the HUD, and the way his face got bloodied as his health trickled down to zero. I’m not going to pretend I remember the specs of her computer, or even exactly what year it was. My memories of gaming in my early childhood are always accompanied by the sound of a whirring fan. The fan would turn its head disapprovingly back and forth as I logged on to play videogames during summer break. More importantly, her office housed a modem, and the small mechanical fan next to her desk was always on to keep her computer setup cool in those damp, muggy, Virginia summers. There was Minesweeper of course, which I never got the hang of, and Solitaire, which I managed to beat once or twice before the age of 10. There was also Billy the Kid up there, and Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter.

It was an otherwise cramped room: stacked with papers and behavioural therapy workbooks from her private practice, all nestled next to romance novels and the DSM-IV. My mother’s big beige block PC in her upstairs office had it installed. Of all the iD Software games from the early ’90s, I only hazily remember Wolfenstein 3D at best.