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Speedruns are a fascinating part of the gaming community. They show off just how far dedicated players will go in mastering a game. Speedrunners routinely finish games that take dozens of hours in sometimes minutes by optimizing progression paths, minimizing grinding, and searching the game’s code for any esoteric exploits or glitches to help them. However, some games are not easily reduced and have record speedruns that still take dozens of hours to wrap up. So, here are the longest speedrun records that are so long it surprises anyone even attempted them.
Long Speedrun Overview
The reason that speedruns take so long vary wildly between the game in question. Many of the most extended games ever released have exploits and glitches that drastically trim the playtime required to beat them, but others don’t have such exploits for runners to take advantage of. Some games have a lot of content that must be unlocked, require a lot of grinding, or require an extreme amount of unavoidable real-world time for certain mechanics.
Regardless, all of the below speedruns have been confirmed either by official documentation submitted to Speedrun.com or, in the case of one, by a member of the game’s development team themselves. So, as incredible as the below records may seem, they have been dutifully verified by the vigilant speedrunning community that prides itself on making sure that its records and statistics are as accurate as possible.
Breath of the Wild
Speedrun Category:Â 100%
Time:Â 16:36:45
Speedrunner:Â Coensi
Speedruns that require players to achieve 100% completion in a game force them to complete every quest, collectible, or find unique items throughout the entire experience. It is no surprise then that the world record for doing so Breath of the Wild is a whopping 16 hours long. Breath of the Wild is a massive game filled with mysteries that acts as a mechanic sandbox for players to experiment and discover. This makes it a great game to speedrun, as mastering the game’s different mechanics can allow players to do incredible tricks without any exploits or glitches, such as soaring across the map on a speeding airborne boulder.
However, the game’s open nature can also make speedruns more complicated. Not only is the size of the game just inherently tricky, but there are many ways for random occurrences or changes to get in the player’s way and ruin or hinder a run. Even with how long this world record is, it is still very impressive, with many of the closest runner-ups taking up to 50 hours to achieve the same thing that Coensi did in less than half that time.
Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition
Speedrun Category:Â New Game – Segmented 100%
Time:Â 288:28:17
Speedrunner:Â Evanmrob
The second appearance on this list for a Legend of Zelda title, this category only has two speedrunners that have ever attempted it. The world record is currently held by Evanmrob, who managed to unlock everything in the game across multiple play sessions in just over 288 hours, or around 12 days. This particular run takes so long because Hyrule Warriors is far from a typical Legend of Zelda title.
Hyrule Warriors is developed by a team at Koei Tecmo, which made its name with its popular Dynasty Warriors series and unique genre known as a Mousou game. The studio combined their trademark style of game with the Legend of Zelda universe to make both Hyrule Warriors games. Hence, players have to go through action battles with hundreds of enemies rather than complete an RPG with dungeons and puzzles like most Zelda titles. To make this record take even longer, it is on the Definitive Edition of the game that was released when it was ported from the Wii U to the Nintendo Switch, meaning that it has additional previously released and new DLC content that adds even content to unlock, modes to complete, and characters to play as.
The multiple modes make the run take so long, as the Definitive Edition of Hyrule Warriors has different story campaigns with unique gameplay styles and challenges that have to each be completed multiple times to achieve 100% completion. To complete this run, Evanmrob also had to play with each of the dozens of characters in the game across multiple missions to unlock their available weapons and level them up while also finding the collectibles that spawn in each level when certain requirements have been met. It is a lot to juggle all in one playthrough, and their 12-day completion time is awe-inspiring, especially when compared to the 564-hour completion time that is the second-place run.
Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean
Speedrun Category:Â 100%
Time: 338:43:26
Speedrunner:Â Baffan
The time required for this speedrun of an old GameCube game instantly raises one’s eyebrows. This speedrun results from a six-year journey from the runner Baffan that dedicated an incredible amount of time and love to playing through Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean countless times to craft the most optimal path through the game. However, the longest completion time is the game’s sheer size and the need to evolve in-game items.
The catch is that in-game items only evolve after enough real-world time has passed, and that time cannot be spent in menus. One item, in particular, the Shampoo, will only evolve after 300 hours have passed. This is made worse when considering that time spent on menus does not count toward that evolution counter. Since Baiten Kaitos is a card game, players must spend an extensive amount of time in the menus to rearrange their deck, look at cards that they unlocked, or even purchase and sell items in the shops. Over a single run, menus can add hours to the clock.
This also means that most of the game’s speedrun is spent not playing the game. In the run’s FAQs, Baffan explains that around 85% of the speedrun is letting the game sit open without even playing it, as the content outside of evolving the Shampoo only takes around 50 hours to complete. This means that over the dozen days it takes for the Shampoo to evolve, he only plays the game for a few hours each day to make more progress before letting it idle to evolve the Shampoo and other items. The run isn’t even over after the Shampoo is evolved, as the player then has to defeat a handful of endgame bosses before they can call their run completed.
Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon
Speedrun Category:Â 100% No Time Manipulation
Time:Â 528:09:47
Speedrunner:Â Snowfats
Speedruns for this PSP title are incredibly interesting because they heavily rely on the real-world moon cycle, weather, and time of day. Each segment of Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon has certain conditions to be accessible, such as rain during the day or it being a clear night with a new moon as the player is playing the game. The game even takes note of the system’s entered location to base its in-game conditions on where the player physically is in the real world.
This means that the absurd run time for the world record is inflated, similar to the Baten Kaitos speedrun with time where the runner isn’t even playing. The world record holder, and only registered runner for this category on Speedrun.com, even says that they had to prepare for the run by planning to start it at the right time of the year so that it would line up properly with the lunar cycle as well as having the highest chance of them getting lucky with the weather during that season.
The real-world implications on the speedrun are not for everyone, evidenced by the fact that only Snowfats has a submitted time for it, but it is a unique achievement in speedrunning. It has been three years since Snowfats’ run through Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon, and it seems likely that it will be a very long time before they have to relinquish their world record.
Gran Turismo 4
Speedrun Category:Â 100% No B-Spec
Time:Â 230:35:51
Speedrunners:Â thebook92, SheenieTheGee, another_car_guy, feathers51564
Getting 100% in this classic racing title for the PlayStation 2 took a team of four drivers that swapped out to complete all of the races and collect the massive sprawl of cars. This speedrun is impressive because all 230 hours of its time is active gameplay. This means that the time the speedrunners had on the game was all actively spent racing, modifying cars, and fighting against the AI drivers for the ultimate victory.
The run is filled with intense moments and great comebacks spread across the 230 hours of playtime. The speedrun time is made so long because of how many races the speedrunners have to complete, along with how long many of them take. The time commitment is also increased because players have to tweak their cars to get peak performance out of them. Without doing so, finishing in first place in the most challenging races is a distant dream, but doing so takes hours of modifying the nuanced parts of their racing machines. The fact that the game is known to crash PlayStation 2’s and lose progress occasionally is also a bane of this game’s speed runs.
Old School Runescape
Speedrun Categories:Â Normal, Ironman, Ultimate Ironman, Hardcore Ironman 2277 total level
Times: 2156 hours, 3522 hours, 4954 hours, 2863 hours
Old School Runescape is one of the classic MMORPGs and still has a dedicated community. The game has numerous skills for players to raise and make money with, from cooking and baking to slaying dragons. There are multiple categories of speed runs for the game, but the most demanding is getting every in-game skill to max level, known as reaching a total of 2277. Dedicated Runescape players have raced to get the best times for doing so, but it takes an incredible amount of time.
The high time requirement comes from how Runescape‘s skill leveling works. The experience required for each level continually increases, making the experience required for each level rise exponentially. This makes the highest level of skills take hours and hours to raise. Another reason the times to do so take so long is that the most efficient ways of leveling up the skills often cost a lot to do, so leveling them up frequently requires grinding for money or items before even working on the particular skill.
The above run categories also add to the time because the ironman mode stops players from interacting with other players at all. This means that they cannot trade for supplies or work together for quests. The Hardcore category also requires that players never die during their playthrough, otherwise their character is deleted and they have to start all over again at the beginning, which is a dangerous threat when grinding combat skills.
Conclusion
Speedruns are a fascinating part of the gaming industry. Whether you want to watch your favorite game get dismantled with exploits and glitches, want to watch incredible feats of dexterity and skill, or just enjoy the community, speedrunning has something for you. The runs on this list are a great part of the history of speedrunning because of their unusual length, but even shorter runs are very interesting to read and learn all about. There are also speedrunning communities for almost every game out there, no matter how big or small, so whatever title you’re passionate about there are likely like-minded people out there that would welcome you with open arms.
FAQs
Question: What are Fun Games to Speedrun?
Answer: Speedrunning a game will be a lot more fun if the game is one that you already really enjoy since you’ll have to play it so much. However, some popular ones are Pokemon games, Minecraft, and Skyrim.
Question: How do Speedrunners Make a Living?
Answer: Most speedrunners that do it full-time make a living from followers that either support them on Patreon, watch them on YouTube, or subscribe monthly to them on Twitch.
Question: What is the Most Popular Game to Speedrun?
Answer: Probably the most popular speedrun game is actually Mario 64 because of its fun exploits, tight platforming controls, and large community.
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