I had no idea people actually compete in these things! I have to wonder, are these things sanctioned? Are they playing on an actual N64 or is it a simulator? It's not the whole game, but I wonder is it due to glitch exploitation or was this built into the game? Here's the video

http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/2/7481395 … edrun-ever

edit: Apparently glitch exploitation

http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/1/ … eed-runner

I have no idea how people figure these things out?

http://speeddemosarchive.com/

There's entire communities dedicated to certain games and finding glitches to exploit in them.

Polygon is just posting those ahead of the Awesome Games Done Quick rush. They did crazy numbers last year, both AGDQ and SGDQ. It will be even huger this year.

This is really cool

Here it is on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_vBNnc9X8A

The link I posted in the first message includes the video as well as the in-game commentary. If interested, I would recommend you watch that instead of just the youtube video

I was going to repost the original video... derp

It's often amusing to see the way people act when they hear about these things, considering I'm big into the speedrunning 'scene' (not that I run much myself, but still) and to me it's like "Oh, someone beat Cosmo, huh".
Glitch exploitation is HUGE in speedrunning in general, pretty much all of the most popular games (even Super Mario Bros. 1) use them, though some games people will run 'glitchless' on top of other ways of making the runs longer and/or more interesting (for instance in OOT one common one is 'MST' or medallions, stones and trials)

Yeah, there's a lot of flexibility. I tend to prefer 100% runs or glitchless ones for the most part, but some games I just don't have patience for. Last year at SGDQ they did a near 6 hour run of of Skyward Sword in primetime and it DRAGGED! Someone came up and ran the game with glitches in like 10 minutes after that.

They were running some 3D games the other day (Tomb Raider Ann., Infamous and Uncharted 1). Had a lot of out of bounds glitches. Those are fun because they look like the whole game is going to crash.