Gamers Count Down to Aussie Speedrun Marathon

SOME of Australia’s top gamers are in Adelaide this week for the nation’s first 24-hour speedrun marathon

The country’s lone major videogame walkthrough event has brought together top gamers in the South Australian capital Adelaide in a bid to improve on last year’s inaugural event.

The 2016 Australian Speedrunning Marathon will feature a host of gamers attempting to complete iconic videogames in the shortest possible time.

Event co-ordinator, who goes by the gaming name Frank Black, said speedrunning was an increasingly popular sport that had added an additional element to gaming.

“Speedrunning is highly competitive across the globe. It’s sort of like an additional challenge that gamers would place on themselves,” he said.

“This year’s event is going to consist of about 35 continuous hours of games like Pokémon, the Legend of Zelda, Kingdom Hearts and a couple of the Metroid games. We’re going to have games as recent as 2010 back to the 1980s over a variety of different consoles.

“It has grown from something relatively small to something relatively big, partly thanks to the Games Done Quick events in America which raised about USD $1.3m for charity over seven days.”

Speedrunning is split into two different categories – 100% and any per cent.

100% speedruns refer to the time taken to complete a game while overcoming all challenges and gathering all collectibles.

Any per cent speedruns refer to the completion of a game from start to finish with no restrictions.

Gamers competing in both categories are allowed to use shortcuts or glitches in the games to help them achieve faster times.

The 2016 Marathon will feature well-known runners such as Werster, who has multiple Pokémon world records, and Kingdom Hearts expert Liquidwifi.

Werster has also participated in Games Done Quick events in the United States, which take place twice a year in January and July, and will be aiming to break his own Pokémon Goldrecord of 3:20hr in Adelaide.

The speedrunning marathon will also be the first event of its kind in Australia to be run in support of a charity.

“Our goal is to raise $1500 over the 5 days and we are hoping to really meet that,” Black said.

“We are supporting beyondblue, a fantastic organisation working to raise awareness of and reduce the stigma surrounding depression and anxiety, as well as much more.”

The continuous speedrun marathon will be held at the University of South Australia’sMagill Campus between July 13 at 10.30am and July 14 at 9.30pm.

Interested viewers can watch the event live at the university campus or connect with its livestream at twitch.tv/ausspeedrunmarathon.

The marathon will also extend into Adelaide’s Anime and Video Game Festival AvCon at the Adelaide Convention Centre on July 16 – 17 and will be livestreamed on a second account twitch.tv/ausspeedrunmarathon2.

Donations for the speedrunning fundraiser can be made via this link.

South Australia’s capital Adelaide has three long-standing public universities, Flinders University, University of South Australia, and the University of Adelaide, each of which are consistently rated highly in the international higher education rankings.

Nathan Stevens

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I have always enjoyed playing video games and am a programming team lead for a video game company. I co-founded Gaming Cypher because I enjoy the gaming community and would like to provide the best news service around. Feel free to ask me any questions and I will make sure to get back to you quickly.