Watching and/or doing!
I was linked Siglemics and Cosmos streams by friends and had watched some TAS runs before and after. But it wasn't until after AGDQ 2014 and the goldeneye run there that I started trying it myself.
:D
Watching and/or doing!
A buddy show me speedrunning for the first time at the end of year 2012 , AGDQ 2013 was my first marathon, i loved too see Runnerguy Cosmo Siglemic. But soon i searched my own fav. games like SSB and MK64 i tried to run this but i had no n64 and wii so emu times doesnt count. i got no viewers so i though "F' of" i didnt stream anymore... I saw Joshimuz and the other GTA runner. i was always a big GTA Fan. I saw the leaderboards and that a lot of games and categorys be left. I start GTA Chinatown Wars and GTA TLAD, but anyway... i got viewers so, the best motivation to begin too stream again was Pac_ and Lanayru_
I'm now a GTA Runner since 2013/2014 :)
I was on some games reviews site. There was some kind of estimation for each games' completion time (casually). One of the estimates was titled "speedrun". I kinda figured out what it was on my own (completing the game as fast as possible), but other than that I had no idea what it was about, so I decided to look it up. That was when I found SRL. The first thing I noticed, right at the top of the page was Josh's GTA SA run. Since I was a big GTA fan, I decided to take a look at the run. At first I didn't understand 90% of what went on (same for runs of Portal and HL2 which I found a bit later), but slowly I got into that, and eventually decided to try it on my own. Hopefully I'll be able to actually run stuff later on this year.
I think the first speedrunning-related I ever saw was Morimoto's SMB3 TAS somewhere between 2003 and 2005, it wasn't labeled as a TAS back then (TAS haven't been invented yet Kappa), that run was awesome ! But I didn't care much about it, what's the point of playing on the same game for 15 years when you can play new games like GTA3/VC/SA, MGS2/3, FFX, TimeSplitters 2, Dark Cloud, Kingdom Hearts. (PS2 so good Kreygasm )
Later (2005 or early 2006) I discovered SDA, I remember downloading a run (1GB was a lot back then), it was a segmented run of MGS3, but it wasn't fun, the guy skipped all cutscenes and codec calls, and was rushing through levels with running or rolling everywhere. I was expecting superplay, but the intended way all stealthy and shit
Then, years later in May 2012, I accidentally ended up watching SGDQ2012 with french commentary (it wasn't a restream at the time, just audio commentary), it was awesome, the skills, the skips, the glitches Kreygasm. in November 2012, I watched NumberSMW marathon on twitch, it was the day I discovered people were speedrunning games EVERY FUCKING DAYS !!! on twitch, so I started watching it more and more.
Personally I don't really speedrun any games (I'm not a very skilled nor patient gamer) but I like to learn route/tricks/glitches, I'm trying to understand why runners do thing the way they do, etc...
While looking at the games library in Twitch in about March 2013, I saw GTA: San Andreas, and I saw that josh was streaming. If I remember correctly he was at The Da Nang Thang. Then later I found out about Adam_AK etc.
For me it was a month or so after sonic generations was released, so late 2011. I loved the game and just kept playing it, trying to get higher and higher on the leaderboards, before eventually getting number 1, atter that I was pretty hooked, and I eventually discovered the sonic Center and continued speedrunning from there.
Kept bumping into speedrunning for a couple of years, as in see one, then spend the rest of the day on SDA watching more. Then GameGrumps linked Wymorn's skyrim run, and that was the time I decided to get off my butt and learn games. I was also getting into twitch at the same time, so that helped motivate me as well.
I've known about speedrunning for ages, I don't know exactly when, watched a few runs on youtube/sda. I remember being amazed by the 1:15 GTA III run at one point in the past.
My stream viewing experience started with The Speed Gamers in 2008, which are a gaming charity marathon who were the forerunners to AGDQ (and every other gaming charity marathon for that matter). In 2012 I was looking at SDA and noticed the w00ty page, I started watching Zelda runners (RG2489, Cosmo) on a regular basis. I found Adam/Oasiz around this time too, was surprised at the lack of GTA streams back then because I thought it was a natural speedgame choice. (This all changed at the start of 2013).
I started timed let's plays of Vice City last year, and had to take a long break due to life.
I'd been playing some casual SA for a couple of weeks and kept misquoting the game. My friend had corrected me and told me of a guy who can complete the game in six hours. I said "impossible" and went to do some research and turned out he was talking about Josh.
Knew about the Doom speedrunning scene, but very vaguely.
When I started checking out Twitch one day I noticed that GTA III was near the top most viewed games. The rest is history.
I think it was this video:
And then from it I've found runs of Half-Life, Oblivion, Morrowind... finally led me to finding SDA. From that I did some experimentation, some individual level runs etc. And about a year ago, I got myself interested in Twitch, slowly getting more and more in single segment runs.... and this is pretty much where I am now.
I had/still have been part of the competitive Mario Kart community (MKWii while that still had a lot of players) since late 2011. I had been watching many YouTubers on there since 2011 as well. I somehow found my way on to Twitch in 2012 and started watching streams of a couple of those YouTubers. They were streaming MKW a lot (Obviously OneHand). Eventually, they started streaming Crash 2 100% runs on there a lot. After watching it for a while and enjoying it I decided to buy Crash 2 and run it. The rest is history OneHand
Kreedz Climbing. It is a mod for Half-Life 2 that is about climbing maps. Speedrunning those was what got me into it, that was about 2005 or so... I've loved it ever since.
I was always planing to try and speedrun something. I really liked Kirby 64 since I was a kid but what really got me into it was when I saw 0xwas and his 100% run, I really liked how intricate and detailed the 100% is, so I practiced and figured out I was actually pretty good at that game aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand the rest is history =D
Part of it is the way in which I play games naturally. As a kid growing up, I'd often find myself resetting the game a couple hours just so I could play through the beginning up until the point I had gotten to in a more efficient manner. This was more noticeable when it came to RPGs.
I don't mind playing through the same game multiple times and speedrunning just adds to the fun of it with the constant improvement and learning a game inside and out. There's also racing others for when I'm in a competitive mood.
I didn't start watching others run games until maybe spring of this year and didn't consider doing them until I watched SGDQ. That's probably what sealed the deal for me.