OR: Do these pre-race runs really help all that much when you’re trying to speedrun the game on stream?
H: Oh yeah. Absolutely!
K: Definitely.
H: Like- it’s such a big difference to take something, let’s say Hollow Knight for example. A game that Keiz did way better at remembering stuff than I did. But Hollow Knight is a game where if you’re playing it for the first time casually, it can take you anywhere between fifteen and thirty hours to finish. It’s a pretty large game for how small it seems on the outset initially. When you have actually played it once and you have an idea of where you’re going, you can beat that game in four or five hours. Even without knowing any speedrun stuff, that’s [by] just knowing where to go. You can do it even faster than that if you take notes, which was something we were very bad at doing.
That first ‘primer run’- maybe Keiz can add more to this- but for me, learning to move your character is about ninety-five percent of that whole first run. That entire time, you’re just getting better and better [with] moving your character. Then, the entire time in the back of my head I’m thinking, ‘How am I going to try to do this faster next time? Which of these pieces are actually progressing the game versus giving me optional stuff?’. And so routing comes into play. Isn’t that right Keiz?
K: Absolutely. I think another good game, a good example of a game, is Super Metroid. Just to show how powerful that first run is- we didn’t finish both the race and our casual runs, but in what took us about eight or nine hours [in our casual run], on race day, we got to in two-and-a-half hours. So it turned from a ‘semi-blind’ race to a ‘blind’ race because we had no idea what the heck we were doing.
I remember my first playthrough of the game. I think about a good thirty-forty minutes in was when I realized that you could wall jump, and so I practiced wall jumping. So just to go back to Hobz’ point of movement, there’s a lot of practice involved, just to try to get used to the movement, and even that- I didn’t know half of what was going on, and Hobz had taught me something the day of the race.
That initial run definitely ‘wets the beak’ a little bit. You get to take ‘baby’s first steps’. Hey, there’s the plug, “The First Step”. *laughs*
H: You also get an idea of whether or not you need to take specific notes, or get a feel for how the game’s going to go. For a game, like say, Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, which was one that we did recently, that’s a game that you really don’t need to take notes on. You just go from stage to stage to stage and when you start getting good at the game you might start taking notes on some of the treasure hunting roles.
But for us, at the beginning of that game, you say ‘Okay, cool, it’s the linear path through the levels. I really don’t need to taking notes or worry much about routing. The game is going to figure that out for me. I just need to figure out how to move through each level as fast as I can.’
With a game like Hollow Knight or even Mega Man X2, when we did that one, those games are note-heavy when you’re just getting started. In the case of Hollow Knight, that’s because it is all about where to go. That’s what’s really important. Which items you’re going to pick up and where you’re going to find them. Mega Man X2 is all about which boss order you need to do in order to be able to have an easier time with the bosses that are coming up. This is because that game is like rock-paper-scissors with the weapon weaknesses.
There’s a lot that goes into the first playthrough. At the same time, all the while we’re also just trying to enjoy the game as a casual experience.
K: [Mega Man] X2 was a surprise to me too because I knew there were different paths that you could take, but [we have] a pretty similar mindset to when we want to do something. You will see a minor change, kind of like when we did Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. For the most part, we came up with the same idea of ‘I want to develop my power-ups this way, and I want to use this as an upgrade for the gun.’
With X2, we were all over the place, which is not something I really expected. That is just a really good example of [how] that first playthrough gives you the idea of how you want to approach the game and route it. In X2’s cawse, II definitely took more notes for that than Hollow Knight.
H: Oh yeah, me too. Which was a mistake. *laughs* I should have taken more for Hollow Knight.
The First Step tackled Hollow Knight in April 2020 and Mega Man X2 in May 2020.
OR: So you can tell so far, but you two play a wide variety of great games like Super Mario World and Biped, and some not-so-amazing games like Mega Man Legends. How do you pick the games that you want to play for each week’s episode, especially if you haven’t played them before to ensure that they are ‘beatable’ by a novice in a timely fashion?
How far in advance are these games decided upon?
K: Before we go into that answer real quick, I just want to say [that] Megan Man Legends– our re-streamer Richard [Ngo], ‘ogNdrahciR’ on Twitch- it is his fault that we played that game. Absolutely, one-hundred percent his fault. I want that added. I want him called out. I was so miserable, it was terrible! We could have done Mega Man Zero, and it was my fault. *laughs*
H: *laughs* Yeah, sometimes the games come from suggestions and in that case it was Richard- who we have been downplaying, but he plays a huge part in this show as well. Richard’s in on pretty much all of our planning conversations and he always thinks of things in a different way. Biped was a game where we didn’t put up our traditional two screens. We really only needed one, and so we found a way to do the webcams and stuff.
K: The replay thing in the top too.
H: Yeah, he wanted to sneak that in. But we generally try to plan out a couple months in advance. Picking games is probably the hardest part of the show. It’s really hard to tell how long a game is going to take on your first playthrough, and in order to help us avoid burnout, we try to limit the average game to eight hours or less and then sometimes we’ll do a shorter one or a longer one.
For example, Biped was a very short game and we had to try to find ways to increase the length of that because, otherwise, it would have been too short of a show. Whereas our next game is Dark Souls III-which is a slog of a game, but we’re going to see if we can make it work.
So to pick the games we will try to go off of games we can think of, and just looking at our personal libraries. I have them up on my bookcase back here, but there’s a bunch of PS2 games back [there].
We’ll look at Speedrun.com for ideas in terms of what’s been popular lately and what has a lot of active players. Then we will even take suggestions from our viewers. We’ll try to take all of these things and look at a website called HowLongToBeat.com, which gives us an idea of ‘Okay, how long is this going to take us to beat if we’re just going through the main story?’
The number is never correct. *laughs* The number is never accurate.
So we just try to use it as a gauge. If something is six hours, it’s probably going to be okay. If it says twelve hours, it might also be okay but I think we tend to go faster than a lot of people in the first playthrough. That’s just because we’re trying to make sure that we get it done.
Then we take all stock of all of that. We look at the world record time for the speedrun a lot of times. We do this to get an idea- ‘Okay, maybe this game only takes seven hours to play, but the world record is a three-and-a-half hour run. We’re not going to beat that game in four hours.’ [That] is our general target for the show’s length, roughly between two to four hours.
It’s all a lot of nebulous figuring out of game titles first and then pumping through them as fast as we can to try to figure out ‘is this something that will actually fit within the time constraints?’ Sometimes we miss the mark and sometimes it’s better if the games run a little too long because then it’s easier to cut them off short. I would rather do that if need be than extend it unnecessarily.
It’s definitely hard, yeah.
[This interview has been updated to reflect that it was Richard [Ngo], ‘ogNdrahciR’, who wanted to include the replay feature in the Biped race and to correct ‘J_Hobz’ to ‘JHobz’.]
Stay tuned for Part Two of our interview with the hosts for The First Step Later this week!
Have you picked up speedrunning because of The First Step? What do you think of the games that they’ve played so far?
Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to click the link here to see Part Two of our interview!
