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I enjoy watching videos about speedruns, but I'm not super knowledgeable on everything so I don't know if this exists or not.

I just wanna know if there are kinds of speedruns where the goal is to perform every single glitch in a game before beating it.

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    Do you have reason to presume there is?
    – Joachim
    Jun 10, 2022 at 6:20
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    Often, distinguishing if two glitches are the same or different can be subjective, so making a shared unchanging list is generally not possible.
    – Mooing Duck
    Jun 10, 2022 at 16:47
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    Not an answer, but you might also consider speedruns that avoid playing the actual game. An example is the 'Credits Warp' for Super Mario World, where the speedrunner abuses memory manipulation and then triggers a glitch that results in rolling the game's credits, all from the first level of the game.
    – agweber
    Jun 10, 2022 at 19:52

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Not exactly.

Although every game can have their own distinct speedrun categories, there is normally no "All glitches" run.

I can think of couple of problems with that category:

  1. You would have to upkeep a list that contains every glitch in the game. Every time a new glitch is found, you would need to add it to the list.
  2. Some glitches may end the game so it wouldn't be possible to perform any glitches after that.

One could always create such a category.

For example Any% is a category where you complete a game any means necessary. This means that players will most likely use any glitches that improve their time to beat the game. The game is completed when the credits roll.

Source: Explanation of speedrunning - Reddit.com

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    3. Glitches can be patched
    – Batophobia
    Jun 10, 2022 at 13:43
  • @Batophobia which is one of the reasons why most of the "glitch abuse speedruns" are for older games
    – Josh Part
    Jun 10, 2022 at 14:33
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    re 1.: In addition to having to update the glitch list, you also need to create a new high score list. Any previous records will be invalidated, as they now do not contain every glitch in the game (in practice, this would probably result in a high number of different high score lists (each with their own list of - at the time - known glitches))
    – tim
    Jun 10, 2022 at 15:13
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    Another reason: even the simple creation of an "all glitches" list is a subjective exercise that a whole game's community probably would not agree on. For example, in Elden Ring, I have seen a graphical glitch with the lighting in the Consecrated Snowfield that creates distorted shadows, often with no apparent source. Should this be one of the glitches that a player would have to demonstrate? Should this be considered the same as any/all other lighting glitches? Communities would have to address questions like that for every software bug in the game to compile an "all glitches" list.
    – murgatroid99
    Jun 10, 2022 at 17:39
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    @tim Not necessarily. The way they do it for low% which has a similar problem, is they rank the scoreboard by low% first, then by time. So a lower % is better even if it takes longer, but the old ones stay up on the leaderboard, but they drop down to the bottom. For "all glitches" it would be ranked first by highest number of glitches, then by time.
    – user253751
    Jun 10, 2022 at 17:39
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In practice, if it exists and is not just Any%, the Low% category often involves a lot of glitch exploitation, and for some games, it is a reasonable approximation of "all glitches" because it will usually contain most or all of the "interesting" glitches.

Here is a specific example of this phenomenon in Super Mario 64:

Seizure warning: Video flashes rapidly from 8:28 to 8:44.

This video is a tool-assisted speedrun of the star "Stomp on the Thwomp" in Tick-Tock Clock, pressing the A button only twice (it is not currently known whether the star can be completed with fewer A presses). By my estimate, it contains at least all of the following glitches, just to get one star:

  • Chuckya (RNG) manipulation
  • Object (Goomba) cloning
  • HOLP manipulation
  • HOLP preservation (pause-buffered hitstun)
  • More cloning (coins etc.)
  • Star dance clip
  • Cog (RNG) manipulation
  • Hyperspeed grinding
  • Pendulum and clock hand (RNG) manipulation
  • Pedro spot
  • Vertical speed conservation

(Read the description on YouTube for a detailed account of exactly what the speedrun is doing, and consult Ukikipedia for more information if desired.)

This isn't all the glitches in Super Mario 64, by any means, but it is a good selection of interesting glitches, and most of the other well-known glitches are used elsewhere in the A-button challenge, with the exception of those that specifically depend on pressing the A button, such as the infamous backwards long-jump. Another example of a Low% run that has lots of interesting glitches is Super Mario Odyssey's minimum captures route.

(The Goomba cloning is not actually optimal, so it could be removed from the run, but other objects are still cloned at various points.)

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  • While it might be obvious to some, perhaps also worth mentioning that some glitches used on TAS cannot be achieved by humans due to real-world limitations.
    – antimo
    Jun 11, 2022 at 7:06

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