Top 10 Hardest Video Games to Speedrun

Welcome to WatchMojo and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 10 hardest games to speedrun.

For this list, we’re looking at games that are the most challenging to speedrun; the games don’t always have to be hard by themselves but running them is for a variety of reasons.

Let us know in the comments which one you think you could compete in.

There’s only one way to get a world record speedrun in “GoldenEye 007”: you need to look at the floor. This technique, called “lookdown” works because when the game has less rendering to do, you can move marginally faster. To have any chance at competing in the game you’ll need to memorize the levels and enemy placements, so that you know exactly when to look up, where to shoot, and where to go, without wasting precious time aiming or navigating around walls. It might seem silly if you’re not a runner, but those precious seconds could make all the difference.

Beloved by kids and adults the world over, it doesn’t take much skill to simply complete a “Pokémon” game. But the difficulty lies in when you set yourself additional goals, not only beating the game as fast as possible, but beating it as fast as possible and catching every single “Pokémon”. The games have hundreds of Pokémon which will spawn in different places under different conditions, and you need to know how to manipulate this so that you can develop the most optimal method to get them all. Catching them all in “Pokémon Red” and “Blue” will still take you upwards of ninety minutes to be in world record territory – and that’s with glitches.

As soon as this notoriously difficult run-and-gunner came out, people were already trying to devise the best way to get through it quickly. “Cuphead” is a game that necessitates incredibly skillful play at higher levels, and you’ll need to master the techniques of every single boss and exploit them – not to mention the platforming mechanics if you’re going for a 100% run. If you don’t want to do 100%, or even all bosses, you can just try to get to King Dice as quickly as possible. Times across all the categories range from around twenty to forty minutes. The difficulty of speedrunning “Cuphead” is simply because the game is challenging; runs haven’t yet been perfected.

It can already be a pretty difficult game, and in a lot of ways is a speedrunner’s worst nightmare thanks to its procedural generation. This means there are no level layouts to memorize, no enemy placements to exploit, and you have no way to know what items will drop or where. Getting a record speedrun relies largely on luck, making it extremely difficult; you have to dedicate hours and hours of time and even then you’re not guaranteed to get what you need. By 2015, blisteringly fast world records sitting at under two minutes were the norm.

One of the earliest games from which a running community emerged, people have been speeding through “Doom” since the 90s. It’s the game’s age that makes it so difficult to speedrun today, however. While it’s exciting to watch runs develop when a new game releases, since 1993, runs through “Doom” have been iterated on and perfected. Today, top-level runs of “Doom” sit comfortably at around twenty minutes for all four episodes, and individual episode runs ranging from 3 to 5 minutes. “Doom” isn’t that hard of a game, but when you’re competing with people who have been playing it for thirty years, it’s a whole different story.

This game was made for speedrunners. With its focus on finesse, speed, flowing platforming, and immense skill, “Mirror’s Edge” has built a huge running community since its 2008 release. And in 2017 all its best runners came together to collaborate on making the ultimate run, handing off the controls to each other to take on different levels. Though this isn’t a “true” run since it’s the fastest times from every level stitched together, it shows the game’s true potential for speed – especially because, despite this technically being achievable, it hasn’t been done in real-time in one run yet. It took nine years for the pros to develop this unbeatable standard.

Fresh, record-breaking runs are still being produced every few months for “Super Mario 64”, even in the fastest, 0 Star category. But while beating the game in six-and-a-half minutes is impressive, the dedication to getting all the stars might drive you insane. Many new, top 10 records have been made in the 2020s, all sitting at around 1 hour and 38 minutes with only seconds between the leaders. It’s pure torture to dedicate years of your life the collecting all 120 stars in “Mario 64”, only to get a time that’s only three or four seconds faster than the last one – meaning that inevitably, you’re going to be beaten and forced to do it all again.

Everybody’s played “Tetris” at one point or another, but it takes someone truly dedicated – or insane – to play this game on the hardest difficulty settings. Because you’re relying so heavily on which shapes the game throws at you you’ve got to think on the fly, and you have to be inhumanly fast. In “The Grand Master 3 – Terror Instinct, not only do you have to play “Tetris” at the speed of light, but when the credits roll there’s an additional stage where the blocks turn invisible after they lock into place. This means you’ve got to remember where you put them all to score points.

Our list wouldn’t be complete without a “Soulsborne” on it somewhere, and “Bloodborne” has long been a wildly popular game for runners. Unlike “Dark Souls,” “Bloodborne” encourages fast, dangerous play consistently. With the rallying system, you’re rewarded for not backing away from enemies after they damage you, and the better at the game you get, the faster you’ll be able to play. Since its release, many runs have been developed, some utilizing bugs that have been patched out and others aiming to kill every single boss. Because it’s already such a hard game to begin with, speedrunning it is a true nightmare even the Moon Presence would be scared of.

Just like “Doom”, “Ocarina of Time” is difficult to speedrun because it’s been optimized to death. To get a world record, nothing less than complete perfection will do, but the ceiling for what “perfection” in this game is, is still changing. In fact, every month or two, the world record will somehow be beaten, leaving all the other runners desperate to find yet more shortcuts, more exploits, and more methods to get to the credits as fast as humanly possible. As of 2021, the best any percent times are all a little over seven minutes, with milliseconds being measured so that we know exactly who the record holder is.