On
December 6th, 2003 (possibly a few days earlier), NESVideos, the site that eventually would become TASVideos, was officially launched by
Bisqwit.
At the time, Bisqwit had just a few weeks before discovered a video of
Morimoto's famous 11-minute time attack of Super Mario Bros. 3, and became interested in the nature of these "time attack" videos. On the Japanese websites that were linked, Bisqwit discovered that Morimoto had made more of these time attacks (of games like Rockman, Rockman 2, and Gradius), and that the files for those could be played back in the emulator
Famtasia.
Figuring that these discoveries would be interesting for western audiences, and that the .WMV of Super Mario Bros. 3 was encoded in poor quality and could be done much better, Bisqwit developed tools to record AVI files from a NES emulator and publish them. He then created the website NESVideos (originally hosted on his personal website at
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/nesvideos.html - today this simply redirects to TASVideos) - and the process of taking in tool-assisted speedrun movie files and publishing them with supplementary information and AVI files (then distributed by torrent) was born. Besides Morimoto's works, Bisqwit also started creating his own "time attack"s, and invited users to mail in their own works as well. The first user-submitted submission was
Ghosts 'n Goblins by Arc, submitted and published on January 15th, 2004. Many more would follow.
As the number of submissions expanded, so did the site. Bisqwit started running an
IRC channel alongside the site. On March 8th, 2004, Bisqwit integrated a phpBB2-based forum onto the website (the phpBB2 forum base, heavily modified over the years, survived all the way until January 2022). On June 25th, 2004, the site was rewritten with a wiki engine (which also lasted until January 2022, when it was replaced with a new backwards-compatible wiki engine as part of a brand new site codebase). Sometime in the first months, the site-based submission system also was developed, and Bisqwit started taking on additional staff members to help with judging and publishing movies, setting up the core operational framework of the site that still persists to this day.
With the number of tool-assisted speedrun movies continually expanding, and emulators getting developed with TAS tools for more systems including SNES, Genesis, GB/C and GBA, NESVideos was renamed to TASVideos on November 26th, 2006, almost three years after its founding, and its domain was moved to
https://tasvideos.org, where it still resides today.
In the 20 years since its founding, many things have happened to TASVideos.
- TASVideos has experienced multiple changes in administration leadership - with Bisqwit relinquishing control and adelikat and Nach taking charge in 2009, and then Memory and feos taking the lead in 2022, with Samsara joining the administration in 2023.
- Dozens of staff members and contributors have come and gone.
- The site TAS rules have been rewritten, expanded and updated more times than I can count.
- Some statistics: more than 8000 TASes have been submitted, by more than 1000 TAS authors, and over 5000 have been published (even this year we're still breaking year-long record numbers), going from just NES videos twenty years ago to more than 50 platforms today.
- We've had TASBot and dwangoAC et al. representing TASes and TASVideos at dozens of speedrunning and charity events, including Games Done Quick, European Speedrunner Assembly and RPG Limit Break.
- And we've gone from a few dozen people hanging out in an IRC channel, to over 2500 members in our Discord server, and over 10000 members registered on the site in total.
Looking back at this little history lesson and these numbers, the site certainly has come a long way. I'm very curious to see what the future has to offer for the site.
But for now, let's celebrate a happy 20th birthday to TASVideos!
