How did you get into speedrunning and was there a person or multiple people that influenced you to start speedrunning?
I started speedrunning pretty recently, but I have thought about speedrunning ever since I watched Summoning Salt's World Record Progression of Pokemon Red/Blue speedruns back in 2018. Another channel that made me want to start speedrunning was Lowest Percent, as they always produced a variety of speedrunning content.
in the sense of actual influence, as in being a popular personality and not so much focused on their speedruns' popularity, then definitely summoning salt helps people get into it that i know of. personally the first runs i ever watched were some old smw runs and like one of kosmics old smb records
i got 2 in mind
Karl Jobst and Kosmic.
Propably dream too but since the cheating scandal I don't know if he is influence that much for speedrun
(This is just my opinion and nothing more i don't want to Criticize or offending anyone so please don't take it too serious)
Me, specifically, I've always been into completing games as quickly as I can - and back then I didn't know of any tools or even communities or "celebrities", so i just had some really poorly-put-together .txt files and I would use my old phone as a timer/stop watch (and in the event they didn't have any, I'd just write down the starting and ending times from my phone's screen, if the games didn't have IGT).
I don't think it's possible to quantify this in any way, due to how each country/continent has different biases towards certain games, systems, etc. Not everyone will have started speedrunning due to a YouTube Speedrunning Historian or due to a massive WR holder that may have been exposed as a cheater nowadays (you know who they are). But in terms of whether anyone influenced me to become an actual speedrunner for "leaderboards" and stuff, nah. Just the fact I found people who also liked the challenge, and then eventually I began looking into speedrunning communities for games I played - pokemon and sonic being the major ones - was probably enough for me to keep it going.
But in a way that's what makes this a great hobby: everyone will have a different story as to how they started or whether they got influenced by someone - especially the older folks who were speedrunning before there were youtube channels dedicated to Speedrun analysis or history tracking :)
Isn't @Pac also influential since he made the site? I think I'm just changing the definition of the word here lmao
Penguinz0, the first time i watched a speedrun was his on outlast. I thought it was just oh play it fast but he made a 4/8 hr game into 6/7 minutes. Now i spend hours trying to speedrun forza💀
A question of the most influential is entirely subjective. In terms of me starting out, I've enjoyed games for a long time. I'm 31 and consider speedrunning a pleasure alone. Love to compete, but wouldn't consider myself special. Its enough for me, a hobby
I started because of a TAS run of New super mario bros, but I signed up because of @JaidenAnimations. I mainly wanted to speedrun mario, but I found some other games that I like.
I'm no speedrunner but I did practice SMW Lunar Dragon for a while and decided it would take ages and I didn't have the skills to pull it off.
SummoningSalt is technically not a speedrunner, no? edit: Oh I guess he is.
If we go outside that I would say the movie King of Kong or some of its collaborators. If you look at the timing the games done quick stuff started in Nov. 2007 and King of Kong came out in Jan. 2007.