A new documentary will tell the “peculiar story of the fastest video game players in the world”

The gaming event Awesome Games Done Quick will return for another round of speedruns on January 8, 2023. Two days before the annual gathering convenes, a new documentary about the speedrunning community will hit VOD platforms. Running With Speed will feature appearances from some of the fastest speed demons in gaming and will be narrated by the popular YouTuber Summoning Salt.

Running With Speed, from directors Patrick Lope and Nicholas Mross, is a feature docmentary that will hit Apple TV, Prime Video, Vudu, and Google Play on January 6. A description of the film emailed to Tubefilter explains that Running With Speed will tell “the fascinatingly peculiar story of the fastest video game players in the world,” with a focus on some of the community’s most prominent events and characters.

Summoning Salt told Tubefilter that he met the directors of Running With Speed in 2019 and signed on as the film’s narrator a few months later. Other gamers who appear in the doc include “GrandPooBear, Mitchflowerpower, Sinister1, YellowKillerBee, and Kasumi Yogi.” Salt noted that the presence of the Japanese speedrunner Hotarubi will be a “nice surprise” for diehard members of the community.

Salt, who described himself as a sports fan, said that viewers enjoy watching top performers chase records in any context. “I think that speedrunning is also by far the most popular way to play classic games competitively,” he told Tubefilter. “For modern games, the competitive scene usually involves playing against others directly – for your classic Mario

games, Zelda games, etc, the only major competitive scene is speedrunning.”

Though speedrunning may seem like a niche, the genre is growing fast. The most recent Games Done Quick events have been some of the series’ most-popular renditions, and the organization has raised $40 million for charity. During the week of AGDQ 2023, each sale of Running With Speed will deliver $1 to the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

The expansion of speedrunning has been huge for creators like Salt (and his videos about games like Super Mario Bros have contributed to that growth). As the scene gets bigger, there are questions about whether its sense of community will fade. “Nowadays, the top 10-15 runners of any given game are usually friends and know each other pretty well,” Salt told Tubefilter. “If games have 100 top-level runners instead of ten, it will certainly be more disorganized and will feel less tightly-knit overall.”

Running With Speed will honor the connections that exist within speedrunning circles while also introducing newcomers to the category’s impressive displays of gaming skill. Salt dubbed it “a blend of personal interest stories mixed with gaming specifics that hopefully scratches that nostalgic itch and appeals to many.”

To keep tabs on the documentary, keep an eye on its Twitter page ahead of its release.