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This week in speedrunning had a little bit of everything: a moderation controversy that put trust and process under the microscope, a pair of Super Mario 64 records that made “blindfolded” feel like an inadequate adjective, and a 360-degree TAS that turned a familiar trick into a place you can look around inside. The scoreboard was busy, but the bigger story was how many different ways runners found to make old games feel new.
There was also a reassuring amount of speedrunning’s quieter magic. A tournament run broke Super Metroid’s 41-minute barrier under pressure, a question about assistive software opened up a thoughtful conversation about what fair play can mean, and a simple question about short 100% categories sent the community into the weeds where leaderboard definitions get delightfully strange. This was not just a week of fast times; it was a week about who gets to run, how we decide what counts, and why the rabbit hole never closes.
So let’s start with the story that asked the community to slow down and examine the machinery behind the timer.
When a Ban Becomes the Story: Valheim’s Trust Crisis
The week’s most consequential discussion came from a Valheim video about a runner’s long-running ban and harassment by the game’s moderation team. The allegations were serious, but what made the post land so hard was the claim that the evidence behind them had never been made public. In a community built around verification, hidden reasoning is not a minor inconvenience: it is the difference between a judgment people can understand and a verdict they are simply asked to accept.
The Reddit reaction reflected that tension. One of the strongest comments came from Pamelm, who said they had helped start Valheim speedrunning alongside Kuru years ago and had been considering a return around the game’s 1.0 release. Watching the dispute unfold made that return feel conditional on a complete change in the moderation team. That is a sobering measure of damage. A leaderboard can survive a rejected run; it has a much harder time surviving the loss of the people who built its community.
Other commenters pushed back against the temptation to treat a viral analysis as a final answer. Valheim is unusually vulnerable to suspicion because cheating is easy and a fast run can contain so many variables. A convincing-looking case can still be incomplete, and an innocent runner can still produce evidence that looks strange. The community’s most useful instinct here was not to pick a team at maximum volume, but to ask whether there is a transparent, appealable process that can distinguish those possibilities.
That process matters beyond Valheim. Speedrunning moderation is where technical rules meet human judgment, and the best systems make both visible: what was flagged, who reviewed it, what standard was applied, and what an accused runner can do next. The discussion even surfaced stories of rules being changed after submissions without meaningful debate. If speedrunning wants to keep growing, trust cannot be treated as a side effect of fast times. It has to be part of the category.
Mario’s Blindfolded Era Refuses to Blink
On a much more triumphant note, Bubzia posted a new blindfolded 120 Star world record in Super Mario 64, finally bringing the run under ten hours. That sentence is already absurd enough, but the full achievement is even more impressive because it represents years of accumulated route knowledge, audio cues, muscle memory, and the sheer discipline required to keep making decisions when the screen is unavailable. The video may be visually black for long stretches; the performance is anything but empty.
Reddit responded in the only sensible way: with jokes about watching an eight-hour black screen, then with genuine excitement from people who had followed the run live. The “who was the rabbit?” comments captured the strange charm of this category. It is technically astonishing, but it is also entertaining because the runner’s mental map becomes the spectacle. Every sound and hesitation tells you that an invisible world is being navigated in real time.
Then came the companion shock: Nico2718 took the blindfolded 0 Star world record in 14:24, using an “ultimate DDD skip” strategy that is possible without sight. That result ended Bubzia’s sweep of the blindfolded leaderboard, turning the week into a friendly handoff rather than a single-player coronation. The community also noticed the obvious comparison: 14:24 is a very serious time even with eyes open, which makes the blindfolded achievement feel less like a novelty category and more like a distinct technical discipline.
There is a lovely lesson in the two records arriving together. Blindfolded running is not merely ordinary Mario with a handicap added. It has its own strategies, its own information economy, and its own route development. When a new skip works without visual confirmation, it expands the category’s language. Mario is still moving through the same castle, but the runner has changed what “seeing” the route can mean.
Pannenkoek Turns a TAS Into a Room You Can Enter
Super Mario 64 also supplied the week’s most delightful piece of technical theatre: Pannenkoek’s 360-degree version of the 1 Key TAS. Instead of simply presenting the famous sequence from a fixed camera, the video lets viewers look around in every direction from Mario’s perspective. It is the kind of idea that sounds like a gimmick until you try it, at which point the familiar route becomes a small interactive museum exhibit.
The top comments immediately asked the question everyone had: how was this made? That curiosity is part of the appeal of Pannenkoek’s work. The run is not only a demonstration of what the game can do; the presentation makes you think about the machinery required to show it. Camera control, rendering, the player’s point of view, and the choreography of a TAS all become visible because the usual cinematic framing has been removed.
There is also something very speedrunning about the format. A TAS is often described as a finished object, a perfect line through a game. The 360 version reopens that object. You can look away from the intended spectacle and inspect the space around it, like turning a record-setting route over in your hands. Even the odd “s” in the resolution label became part of the comment-section investigation. When a community is this willing to scrutinize the wrapper as well as the run, you know the trick has done its job.
The 100% Question Has No Small Answer
A discussion asking for the shortest 100% speedrun produced exactly the kind of chaos that makes category theory so fun. The prompt pointed to Turok 1, where 100% takes only about five minutes longer than Any%, and asked whether anything goes shorter. The strongest replies quickly jumped to games such as Refract and Minesweeper, while another commenter pointed out that the answer depends almost entirely on what we mean by “game,” “100%,” and “shortest.”
That definitional problem is not a flaw; it is the entertainment. Include tiny browser games and joke projects, and the answer may be measured in seconds. Restrict the field to officially licensed releases or substantial modern games, and the range shifts dramatically. Even within one game, 100% can mean every item, every objective, every ending, or simply the completion condition a particular community has agreed to recognize.
Speedrunning’s categories are often treated as stable facts, but they are really negotiated stories about what makes a game interesting. “Any%” is a useful baseline because it asks for the ending by any accepted means. “100%” adds a promise of completeness, yet completeness has to be interpreted. The discussion showed the community doing that work in public, with examples and caveats instead of pretending there is one universal answer hiding in a spreadsheet.
Super Metroid Finds Another Gear Under Pressure
In the Super Metroid 2026 Any% tournament, ShinyZeni became the first runner to post a sub-41 race, finishing in 40:xx territory after a year of grinding and a run of setbacks outside the game. The result is especially satisfying because the runner described a more important improvement than raw pace: greater consistency, plus a handful of new strategies worth more than ten seconds over the previous standard.
Tournament runs expose a different kind of speedrun skill. A practice room can be paused, reset, and revisited until a difficult trick feels inevitable. A race asks for that preparation while adding nerves, routing decisions, and the knowledge that the other side of the bracket is moving too. The community’s reaction—surprise that a record had fallen at all, followed by immediate congratulations—captured how rare it is for a mature category to produce a breakthrough in that setting.
Super Metroid remains a perfect example of why old leaderboards never really become finished. A route can look solved until somebody finds a few seconds, then makes those seconds repeatable, then proves they can survive a race. The stopwatch only records the final result. Underneath it is a long process of losing runs, refining movement, and learning to make the ambitious line feel ordinary.
Accessibility Is Part of the Rules Conversation
One of the week’s most thoughtful discussions came from a deaf runner asking whether software that represents the direction and intensity of in-game sounds would be allowed in an official speedrun. The answer from the community was appropriately cautious: there is no universal ruling, because software rules are game-specific. The practical advice was to ask the relevant game community and its moderators before submitting.
But the broader response was encouraging. Several commenters made the case that if this is how a runner needs to experience the game, they should run it, regardless of whether a particular leaderboard has already written the perfect rule. That distinction matters. Official categories need consistent standards, but people should not have to wait for a committee to grant them permission to pursue a challenge for their own enjoyment.
The best moderation answer here is likely to be specific rather than suspicious. What information does the software expose? Does it automate an action, or translate information that the player could otherwise receive through sound? Does the category want to measure an unmodified audiovisual experience, or the player’s execution under an agreed set of tools? Those are questions for each community, but asking them openly is already better than treating accessibility as an edge case to be quietly rejected.
A Wrong Warp, a New Route, and the Joy of “Not Yet”
Palworld supplied a smaller but potentially explosive story: a co-op wrong warp in version 1.0.3 that can send a guest into the World Tree at level 7, before normal progression allows access. The discovery has reportedly been reproduced in three of five test worlds, but the trigger is not isolated and the warp is not yet consistent. That combination—repeatable enough to be real, mysterious enough to be useless on demand—is exactly where a new route begins.
There were no comments on the post, which feels fitting. Glitch discoveries often spend their first life in a quieter phase, with runners testing versions, hosts, guests, and possible conditions before the wider community knows what to make of them. The important word here is potential. A sequence break is not automatically a leaderboard revolution. First it has to be understood, reproduced, and translated into something a runner can actually build a run around.
That patience is one of speedrunning’s underrated virtues. The headline is always the finished route, but the real work happens in posts that end with more questions than answers. Somewhere between the third successful reproduction and the first reliable setup, a strange accident becomes a strategy. For now, Palworld’s World Tree warp is a promising door left open.
And that may be the best summary of the week. A leaderboard community was forced to ask how trust is maintained, two blindfolded Mario records expanded what mastery can look like, and technical experiments kept turning familiar games into unfamiliar spaces. Even the debates about 100%, assistive tools, and new glitches pointed toward the same truth: speedrunning is not one challenge. It is an ongoing conversation about which challenges are worth defining, sharing, and chasing.
The stopwatch remains the cleanest symbol of the hobby, but it is not the whole hobby. Around every time is a route, a ruleset, a community, a player’s circumstances, and a comment section trying to understand what just happened. This week offered records worth celebrating and systems worth questioning. That is a healthy combination for a scene that intends to keep moving.
See you next week.
Source: reddit.com