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As a gamer with disabilities impacting my focus, coordination, and fine motor skills, for many years video game speedrunning was something I enjoyed as a fascinated onlooker, rather than getting personally involved in.
For the uninitiated, video game speedrunning involved completing a video game in as fast a time as possible, often by any means necessary. While some speedruns will have specific rules, such as completing every level or objective, most speedruns are “Any %”, a category about finding whatever methods possible to trim time and get to the end of the game, however the community decides to define that ending. It might mean beating the final boss, but might just as easily mean tricking the game into loading the wrong data and jumping straight to the ending credits cutscene.
As a disabled gamer, I assumed for the longest time that speedrunning wasn’t something I’d be able to get into. I struggle with precise movements, quick repetitive button presses, accurate timings, and doing actions consistently without getting distracted or making a mistake. These barriers made me think that speedrunning just wasn’t going to be something I could get into.
However, over the past few years, I’ve managed to get really into speedrunning in my own way, as a disabled gamer. At the time of writing this script I hold all possible speedrun world records for Cooking Mama: Cookstar, and all but two records on the 2010 Wii game Babysitting Mama, as well as a handful of scattered records across Train Simulator and the childrens PC game Pokérom, a Pokémon game about speed solving basic children’s math problems.
So today, I want to talk a little about how I got into speedrunning, and the tips I learned to make setting world record speedrun times possible, as a disabled gamer.
Choice of Game
Getting into speedrunning as a disabled gamer was initially about finding the right game to try speedrunning. For me, that meant finding a game I would care enough to set a world record on, but that wasn’t so competitive as to be unattainable for my mix of disabilities.
I began by searching Speedrun dot Com, organising their list of games by fewest speedrun attempts, looking for games that either had never been speedrun before, or had been attempted very few times.
If I found a game that nobody had ever speedrun before, that was great, I could set a world record simply by taking the time to record myself playing the game. If I found a community that had a few runners already but not many, there was a good chance that the current speedrun record wasn’t yet so optimised that claiming the record would require perfection.
Babysitting Mama and Cooking Mama: Cookstar are examples of games that, when I started speedrunning them, had never had any attempted speedruns in history. I was able to set a world record simply by playing, sure, but the fun was then in trying to encourage others to help me try to grow a little community around these games. Telling others they only had to beat my first try speedrun times made taking the record from me sound easy, giving them an easy target time to get started speedrunning, and in turn giving me times to start trying to retake. Soon each of these games had 3-5 people trying their hands at submitting runs, and I had to try and overcome times that were better than my first attempt, but not so insurmountable that I couldn’t practice and retake them.
This is where you get to start doing the fun part of growing a speedrun community from the ground up. You don’t necessarily have to get better at playing the game if you can find ways to save time that nobody else has thought of. In Babysitting Mama for example, this might mean discovering which minigames it’s actually quicker to fail at than succeed in. You get to discover the time saving techniques for your community. It’s not yet a solved game, so saving time doesn’t have to be about mechanical accuracy or speedy play.
Maybe a game is faster to play on a different patch number, or with a different region copy of the game. These are all things you get to discover to save time in niche communities, that are not necessarily tied to being the best player technically in the world.
Beyond games with no or few attempted runs, there’s the option of finding a niche or meme category with fewer runs on a more popular game. For me, one of the first ones of these that I found was the Ditch Bill % category in Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, where players race to Bill’s house, then leave without freeing him from the Pokémon costume he’s trapped inside. By virtue of having fewer players taking the category seriously, it was more approachable for me as someone with inconsistent co-ordination to attempt to set a decent time on the leaderboard.
Early on, game choice can make a big difference to speedrun accessibility.
Partial Segment or Individual Level Runs
As someone with ADHD, I know my level of focus and attention varies wildly over time, making focusing on precision in full game speedruns somewhat tricky. If you suffer from similar issues with focus, or perhaps experience chronic pain flare ups that might limit how long you can game for at one time, partial segment or individual level speedruns might be more your speed.
These typically involve playing a smaller segment of a full game such as a single level or chapter, and have a shorter runtime than full game runs.
By virtue of taking less time to attempt these can sometimes end up being the more competitive categories for a game, as players can attempt them more times in a given session, but they’re less of an overall time commitment, and can be more manageable to commit to attempting if you know that session length is going to be a barrier to your performance.
Speedruns Without Frame Perfect Tricks
While some speedruns of more popular games today involve frame perfect tricks, where you have to hit a button on the correct 1/60th of a second time window, many games are simply not built to be played so precisely.
Babysitting Mama is a game I gravitated towards because often, so long as you do a required motion within a several second window of time, you don’t gain or lose any time on your speedrun. A rocking motion of the baby at the start of the input window vs on the final frame of the input window won’t save or lose you any time, as a specific animation needs to finish playing regardless, and you can’t rush Mama from acting out her motion. Games like this allow a degree of inaccuracy to go undetected, and a wider range of timings to not result in an overall time loss in the speedrun.
These kinds of games are a much better fit for me as someone whose sense of rhythm and fine motor control are inconsistent. I don’t have to be perfect, I just have to be within a window of acceptable ranges, which suits my disability types much better.
Speedruns with Less Focus on Fast, Repetitive Inputs
Similarly, it’s possible to find games to speedrun that avoid things like fast repetitive inputs. One of my favourite games to speedrun is Train Simulator, a game where the primary speedrun category involves getting your train moving off the starting station and getting it to full speed as quickly as possible, then for most of the run simply slowing down on specific corners to avoid derailing, and micromanaging the driver alertness system so the train doesn’t force itself to a complete stop, assuming the driver is incapacitated. Then it’s just a matter of applying the brakes in a way that doesn’t overshoot the final destination.
Most of the run there’s very few inputs needed, just operation of a few levers at the start, and some trial and error in discovering when to start the braking procedure for the final destination.
This is one example, but there’s other games out there that similarly avoid reliance on fast, repetitive inputs that may be an issue for disabled gamers.
Speedruns That Avoid Visually Inaccessible Speedrun Tricks
Some games are simply not going to ever be accessible to speedrun in their main categories, and that’s important to research up front.
A key example of this is modern Wind Waker speedruns, which employ a trick where they essentially force the game to rapidly perform 180 degree turns in order to quickly move across the ocean at ridiculous speeds. This trick creates a rapid full screen flashing effect that isn’t going to be accessible for many people with photosensitive conditions.
I would love for speedrun communities to be upfront about these kinds of techniques to their communities, but they are barriers that will inevitably exist in some games. In cases like this, see whether other categories exist for that game that might ban inacessible tricks, or try asking moderators to create a category that doesn’t allow the inacessible trick so that you can compete safely in a category that might be appealing to others too.
Speedruns That Work Within a Player’s Physical Needs
When selecting a game to speedrun as a disabled gamer, knowing your own physical needs and challenges is key to finding a game that’s the right fit for you.
For me, that meant speedrunning Train Simulator, because it didn’t require constant accuracy over time during runs, with the start and end of runs the key places for time saves and time losses. It meant speedrunning Babysitting Mama, a game more about accuracy with arcing motions than precise analogue stick control. It meant picking games like Cooking Mama: Cookstar, where many minigames allow you to save time by deliberately failing them, making chaotic erratic inputs beneficial.
This is a trial and error experience, but finding games where the inputs required are ones you’re confident repeating over and over can make lengthier sessions of speedrun attempts more accessible over the long run.
Speedrun Communities Can Actively State That Accessibility Controllers are Welcome
This is going to be something that differs from game to game and community to community, but I would love to see more speedrun moderators actively take the initiative to state that accessibility controllers are allowed to be used when submitting speedruns for their games.
This shouldn’t need to be something that’s actively stated, but I know better than to assume that people won’t try and accuse disabled players of cheating for using non-standard controllers to play games, hence wanting to see a culture shift in speedrunning communities toward actively stating support for accessibility controllers as part of category rules and notes.
If you’re a disabled gamer concerned about this, I would suggest messaging the moderators for the game you’re looking to speedrun. Generally, in my experience, speedrun mods are usually excited for more people to join their communities, and open to having discussions about how they can make their communities more approachable.
There’s no reason you shouldn’t be allowed to speedrun using an accessibility controller, but I would encourage moderators to have discussions about making support for accessibility devices clearly supported within their communities.
Speedruns That Explicitly Allow Accessibility Tools Such as Rewind and Save States
As someone with inconsistent coordination issues due to my disability, one of the nicest things I’ve recently seen offered by a speedrun community involved Tomba! Special Edition.
That game features support for a number of tools designed to prevent loss of progress during difficulty platforming challenges, including the ability to rewind gameplay or create and load save states during runs, quickly undoing accidental deaths.
The Tomba! Special Edition speedrun community explicitly states in its rules that these accessibility features are allowed to be used during speedruns. While obviously you will lose a little bit of time by falling down a hole and rewinding rather than jumping over the hole sucessfully the first try, this does mean that a small error can be quickly rectified, and a minor error doesn’t need to snowball into the kind of major time loss that ruins an entire speedrun instantly.
By explicitly allowing these types of features, the game makes small errors during play feel less run ruining, and as such this helps make attempting speedrunning games more approachable for those of us with inconsistent fine motor control issues.
Speedruns Focused on Short Bursts of Interaction and Decent Amounts of Downtime
Previously, I discussed that Train Simulator speedruns involve bursts of interaction at the start and end, with light maintenance in the middle, but a lot of downtime mid speedrun. This is an example of a speedrun with breaks built into it, which can be more approachable for a number of disabled players.
Other examples of this include Cooking Mama: Cookstar, where several steps in a multiple recipe run will be most quickly completed by putting down the controller and just letting the minigame fail all by itself.
These self failing minigames are a great example of something to look out for in speedruns if you’re disabled, points where you can literally just put the controller down and look after your own physical needs for a moment. Maybe that’s stretching, or relaxing your hands, or having something to eat or drink, or taking a moment to not have to be tense and focused. These moments can be small rest stops spread throughout a run, allowing a player to meet their physical needs without losing time on the overall speedrun.
Ask Communities to Create Categories For The Way You Play
As mentioned above, in my experience, speedrun moderators are always looking for ways to get new people into speedrunning their games. Don’t be afraid to ask if they’d be open to creating a new category, if that’s what it would take to get you into competing with others.
You might get lucky and find a game already has a category you’re well suited for, such as a blindfolded category that might be a good fit if you’re a blind player. If not, consider asking if the mods would be willing to create a “One Handed Any %” category if you’ve only got one usable hand, or a “segmented run” category if sitting for the full game in one sitting is a barrier for you to compete.
Talk to the mods about your situation, and see if they’d be open to creating a category you might find approachable, and that others without your disability might find a compelling challenge run to try competing in.
Now, this is far from a complete and comprehensive list, but I hope this goes to show that speedrunning can be an accessible hobby to get into as a disabled gamer, if you approach it the right way.
By finding games that fit your needs, it’s possible to get in on the ground floor of a community, try your hand at speedrunning, and maybe even take part in finding the time saving tricks that will one day come to define your game’s community.
Speedrunning has become, over the years, one of my favourite ways to pass the time. I’ll never be good enough to set a first place record in any of the more competitive games out there, but I found a spot where I could start growing some niche communities. I’ve had fun getting to know these games better than most out there know them, while trying to be the fastest player out of a relatively small number of people interested in the challenge. It has undoubtedly made practicing tasks that my disability makes difficult feel like fun and less like an unwanted chore.
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