Speedrunner Summoning Salt goes old-school with a VHS collection of his top YouTube videos

Speedrunners come in all sorts, focused on all genres of gaming. But there’s a sizable contingent of them who focus on older Nintendo games and other vintage titles you might’ve seen in the oft-opened cabinet of an entertainment system during the 80s and 90s, stored alongside VHS players and stacks of tapes.

That’s the vibe speedrunner/speedrunning historian Summoning Salt is going for with his new project: A series of VHS tapes containing some of his top YouTube videos.

Perhaps best known as a top speedrunning recordholder for the 1987 Nintendo game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, Summoning Salt is also a consistent uploader of documentary-style videos that chronicle the history of speedrunning in certain games, as well as fellow speedrunners’ rises to success. He’s been making said documentaries since 2017, and now has over 2 million subscribers on YouTube.

He announced the VHS project in a June 19 video that also featured him revealing his face for the first time in his eight-year YouTube career. (He usually appears via voiceover.) He says that’s not going to be a regular thing; him appearing on camera was just to promote the inaugural installment of the VHS series.

The first VHS is a remaster of his 2023 YouTube video The History of Halo 2 World Records, edited to 4:3 so it’s playable on an old-school TV. It comes packaged just like the VHS tapes of yesteryear: custom glossy box art on a cardboard sleeve with a fully usable teal-colored tape inside.

The runtime? 59 minutes, thanks to a little extra content that “[shows] off what’s happened to the world record since the original release,” Summoning Salt said. “The only place to watch that is on this tape.”

Why do VHS, nearly 20 years after it went out of popular use? Summoning Salt has a simple explanation: “I love physical media, and I love the nostalgia of VHS. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

“I want to a whole bunch of these going forward, with all my classic videos getting a release,” he added.

But that’ll only happen if this initial VHS is a success. Summoning Salt is selling them for $34.99 each (the equivalent of about twenty bucks when Halo 2 came out in 2004, and about $13.50 in 1990, when VHSes were really popping). That pre-production sale period only lasts two weeks, until July 3, and then viewers will have to wait between two and three months while the tapes are made and shipped to them. If that sounds like a long time, remember if you saw Jurassic Park in theaters in 1993, back when theater-exclusive windows were still a thing, you’d have to wait six months or more for it to come to home video.

You can check out Summoning Salt’s project on his website. We here at Tubefilter always have an eye out for interesting creator endeavors, and this one is a unique way to celebrate the simmering nostalgia that’s baked into speedrunning’s bones. We dig it.