ANY%: A History of Speedrunning – new book explores gaming's craziest counterculture

It started around 1992 with id Software's legendary first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D. The game's principal designer, John Romero, provided his record times for each level in a tips book on how to complete the game. The challenge was set, and for subsequent games across all genres, players of a certain mindset raced against one another to finish levels and entire games as quickly as possible.

Speedrunning, as it's known, is covered in depth in ANY%: A History of Speedrunning, the latest title from UK Read-Only Memory, an indie publisher dedicated to gaming culture. Written by Kat Brewster and designed by Atelier Müesli, the book is being crowdfunded on Vol.co and will be especially interesting to creatives who like to take things apart and put them together again.

Why? Because that's essentially what speedrunners do – they work out how a game is put together, locate the glitches and gaps, and then burst through them wherever possible to set record times.

"When you really get down to brass tacks, videogames are just shapes stitched together to look like a cohesive environment. Sometimes that's 2D, sometimes 3D," says Kat Brewster. "Players are responsible for guiding a camera through those shapes and can manipulate objects within that space to progress. Game developers are usually pretty slick and can stitch shapes and objects together, so you can't get places you aren't supposed to go. Speedrunners work really hard to try and find small bugs and glitches so that they can. You can think of it like a marathon where someone cuts across a park to get to the finish line."

The challenge has evolved a great deal since the early 1990s and has become highly collaborative – something that ANY% explores in great detail. At one time, it was a case of playing Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog as fast as possible, relying on tips by word of mouth or computer game magazines. With the rise of the internet, speedrunning has become an online community of gamers who take down huge, complex titles like Elden Ring. Some players share information about where bugs can be found and exploited, while others do the actual gameplay against the clock.

"Sure, someone has a world record for going fast, but the runners themselves aren't always the people who come up with the routes or strategies that runners then implement. They don't learn their skills in isolation – it's more like a group project, where, at the end of the day, there's (usually!) only one person with their hand on the controller. But it takes a lot of people to get them there," says Brewster.

It sounds a little bit like working on a complex design brief with plenty of creatives involved, then hitting the launch button with the client.

Developed by Atelier Müesli, the design evokes the pixellated vibe of 8-bit gaming alongside wireframe representations of early gaming worlds. Some of the inspiration was drawn from the streetwear collective Boot Boyz Biz, of which Kat Brewster is a big fan. The book will be available in a Special Edition of 250 signed copies, each in a die-cut slipcase, with a cover that makes an interesting play on the RGB gamut intrinsic to computer gaming.

Pledging is underway at Vol.co and ends on 29 October 2024. Also, see our article about the Read-Only book WipEout: Futurism.