Time i quit sonic speedrunning

So after a decade of “speedrunning” Sonic games, I realized that 1. I am not good at speedrunning Sonic games, and that 2. I don’t like speedrunning Sonic games. Sonic games require a lot of know-how and knowledge of speedrun glitches. Not to say that other games are any easier. They are not; in some cases, they are harder, but something about them draws me to them.

And in the Sonic speedrun community, I still hold a bit of bias towards that community, and granted that this sour feeling is towards the old members only and not the new members, I don’t have anything against them. But this bias does add a little on top of why I don’t care to continue to speedrun Sonic. But I am getting ahead of myself, and I should stop doing that.

I started speedrunning Sonic games since it was the majority of a game series I played, and I guess it made sense for a Sonic fan to be a Sonic speedrunner because isn’t that the case for most people? Not everyone, but a good number of people who play Sonic might speedrun Sonic.

And I started off speedrunning Sonic rom hacks, and then later on I began to speedrun Sonic games. While speedrunning Sonic was fun at first, I feel like this community is too crowded for me, and I am “adding” to this.

I have noticed that the Sonic community is growing, and with so many runners in this community, it makes me wonder, “What do I add to the table being here?” There are so many runners who have found or broken Sonic games open that the games have been optimized to and back that it seems like an uphill fight.

And for most runners, they love the idea as it gives them the drive to get better. Then you have to wonder: How much is too much? At what point, when breaking a game down to its core, knowing what makes it tick is fun? It seems that when you hit that point, it no longer becomes fun. It becomes such a weird investment that if you want to get in the top 10, more so the top 3, and trying to get first would feel like a job. Investing time and effort.

“What does this all have to do with me stopping speedrunning Sonic?” You might ask, well, a lot. I came to the conclusion that Sonic speedrunning is not for me anymore. At the rate that Sonic speedrunners find new skips, tricks, and ways to cut down time, I’m wasting my time in that community that’s too far ahead, and it is not for me, and that is fine.

It just took me a while to ask this: “Am I happy running Sonic games or SRB2?” ”Am I wasting my time in a community that I am not really a part of in the first place?” “And should I leave Sonic speedrunning with the nonexistent impact I left on the community?”

The answers are as follows: no, yes, yes. Sonic Speedrunning, it has put into perspective that I’m not skilled at Sonic speedrunning, but I guess this could be a byproduct of a bygone era where Speedrunning was not as technical as it is right now.

Speedrunning was finding out if your route was better or worse, and sure, there were glitches, skips, and tricks, but once you had those down, it was a somewhat even playing field, and that was fun. It didn’t feel like some weird job where you needed to invest a good amount of time, effort, and skill to output a decent amount of work. That’s how it feels to me, and it’s good that I came to terms with this, although it was far too late. Better late than never.

I should clarify that I will still speedrun Sonic games, but those will be few and far now, or I might cut out Sonic speedrunning, and that’s okay. I could speedrun Sonic rom hacks, but no one cares for rom hacks unless they are popular or hit the same level of popularity as SRB2, but that won’t happen.

Even the Sonic ROM hack pages of games I used to run seem dead. One mod who was online four years ago and a moderator who was on two days ago. Ugh. That’s all. I will leave the Sonic speedrunning to the pros. lol