Why And How

A movie is entertaining when it is:

• Interesting (not slow, boring, or repetitive)
• Surprising (does the unexpected)
• Skillful (handles awkward situations efficiently and creatively)
  Note: This does not refer to playing skill.

We have written some guidelines to aid in achieving these goals.

Although most of our movies intend to play games as fast as possible (tool-assisted speedruns, if you will), with respect to art, our main goal is to create movies that are beautiful to watch.

We are a diverse community, and each of us has different opinions as to what can be considered art, but in general, we value creativity, variability, surprising outcomes, and speed.

Our guidelines are written in order to help you reach these goals.

To reach these goals, we use emulators and other tools. The most commonly used tools are slow motion (frame advance) and save states. These allow us to overcome human limitations of skill and reflex. See the glossary and emulator tool usage pages for more information.

One important thing to remember is that we are not competing in terms of playing skill, nor do we claim to. Indeed, we use tools to eliminate such human limitations.

No. We do have some rules around here. One of the most important is that we are playing real games that are familiar to and popular with our audience, and we explore surprising ways to play them in order to entertain that audience.

Movies on this site are nothing more than a record of which buttons were pressed, and when. We offer AVIs of most movies for people that do not or cannot procure legitimate ROMs to play back the movies themselves, but all the movies on this site can be verified by anyone with just a ROM, an emulator, and the record of button presses. Here is how:

1. Download the ROM of the game from a trusted website.
   • Make sure you are using the correct ROM. Some games have a few different versions due to developer bugfixes and releases in different languages and regions.
   • We do not distribute ROMs. Do not ask us where to get them.
2. Download the emulator needed to play the movie.
   • Be sure to download the right version of the emulator and specify the correct settings. Emulator settings are vital to the game’s timing. If the settings are not right, the movie may desynchronize.
   • The appropriate settings are usually described in the author’s comments in the movie submission. If no settings are specified, more often than not no special changes need to be made.
3. For advanced users: Study the format of the movie file (see Emulator resources/Formats) and analyze it to prove to yourself that it consists of what is claimed.
   • Each movie format consists of a header that describes the game name and movie length, and a sequence of button states for each frame of the movie. Some movie formats also contain extra information in the header such as the ROM’s hash and emulator settings.
4. Launch the emulator, load the ROM, load the movie, and watch it play.

Once upon a time, someone calculated that in an 11-minute movie that has been re-recorded 50000 times, a savestate has apparently been loaded on average 75 times per second. What is wrong with this figure?

Rerecording is not an act applied to an individual frame. It’s an act of rewinding to a specific point in the movie and playing again.
If a 4 second long sequence in a game (like the incredibly hard beginning of world 1-2 in SMB3) takes 2000 retries to succeed, it does not mean that a savestate was loaded 500 times per second.

The idea of rerecording is that when you do make a mistake, you don’t have to start all over again, but you can keep something you’ve already played and continue from a point before you made the mistake.

In some cases even relatively short (e.g. less than 30 minutes) tool-assisted speedruns may take a really long time to make, in some cases even several months. With some games the process of creating a virtually perfect speedrun can be a very slow and laborious process. It's not at all rare for such movies to require tens of thousands of re-records.

Perfection is not easy.

Yes, using the tools makes playing easy ― but we do not just play here.

We attempt to perfect the games to a godly level of precision, which involves handling the game as if it were The Matrix ― observing every slightest detail to gain control over it in ways that the makers never imagined. We search for perfection.
To reach that goal, using the features provided by an emulator is irrelevant, as long as the “world” – the game – is unmodified.

It is a massive undertaking to produce a good tool-assisted movie. Sure, anyone can undo when they make a mistake ― but who can spot the error that causes 0.1 seconds of delay in the movie? Who can spot and abuse bugs in games to do seemingly unearthly maneuvers?

Note: Creating good tool-assisted movies has little to do with playing games well. Only a few players that are skilled in real-time play have the will to create good tool-assisted movies (patience and determination count instead of real-time skills), and only a few players that make good tool-assisted movies are truly skillful in real-time playing (almost always in a different game). Bisqwit, for example, does not do well at Mega Man games, although he is the author of the sensational tool-assisted Mega Man movie.

If a child receives a box containing an expensive toy as a birthday present, it’s possible that he will enjoy the box more than the toy.
This is creativity.
We’re doing the same for these games.
Instead of walking on the paths created for us, we create our own paths, our own legs and so on.
And we’re not listening to people who say “you can’t do that!”.
Just like children.

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