RISE OF THE ROBOT

Speedrunning is a very human hobby. The community around it is filled with people who are driven to complete videogames at blisteringly fast speeds with a blend of well-practised manual skill and bombastic game exploits, who share their discoveries with one another to progress even further. Regularly, they assemble for events such as Games Done Quick, during which they showcase their skills and inspire thousands to donate to charitable causes. It all exists because these people are irresistibly drawn to a challenge, and delight in taking apart the games they love in order to figure out how they do – and don’t – work. Speedrunning is an exercise in pushing limits both in and outside the digital world, in risking it all and seeing what breaks first: you, or the game.

Imagine you’re a speedrunner in pursuit of that elusive world-record run. Now imagine a robot rolls up on the scene, one that’s capable of the kind of hyper-precise inputs human runners could only dream of, of running so quickly and so perfectly that the game barely knows how to react.

The TAS – tool-assisted speedrun – has been around since 2003, and has enjoyed a gently scandalous reputation ever since. It’s not hard to understand why: so much of the appeal of speedrunning comes from the human element. Where’s the fun in a pre-programmed script performing a series of optimal inputs on a controller? And, more pertinently, what is even the point?

But behind every robot is its maker. These days, TASBot – a strangely charming fusion of a NES/SNES replay device, a Raspberry Pi and Nintendo’s R.O.B. robot toy – is the star of the Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon streams, breaking games in outlandish ways and raising hundreds of thousands of donated dollars in record time during the schedule’s dedicated TAS Blocks. TASBot has become the friendly face of TAS. But just behind the robot, watching carefully, is another: creator and programmer Allan Cecil.

Cecil’s own story is the key to unlocking the humanity at the heart of the tool-assisted speedrunning scene. Having dedicated a large portion of his life to programming Linux-powered speedruns, Cecil has both an up-close view of TAS, but also a view on how the technology behind it could impact the wider world. This niche hobby, he tells us, could be the catalyst that, in the near future, completely changes how we interact with videogames. It has much to contribute as far as evolving the way videogames raise money for charity. And, like any good speedrun, all this has a good chance of becoming a complete mess, too. But that, perhaps, is how we know it’s really human.

Cecil’s love for tool-assisted speedrunning as a concept can be found in his childhood. He grew up on a farm in rural northeastern Colorado: family tensions made life difficult, money was scarce and he saw no escape from his situation. But they. “It had millions of people with red caps, all chanting ‘Mario’. And as the camera pans out, you see it’s an entire continent of people with red hats forming the face of Mario. It was a bit of a kitschy ad, but as a kid it caught my imagination of, ‘There’s a world I can escape to’.”