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Speed Demos Archive provides the speedrun community with a non-commercial
platform, solely dedicated to hosting high-quality (WR and non-WR) speedrun videos. Each hosted
speedrun on the site has gone through a peer-review verification process to
ensure that the published runs meet the site's requirements in terms of gameplay
and A/V quality. SDA also maintains a forum, where speedrun-related news and
topics can be shared and discussed, as well as the Knowledge Base wiki with a wide range of information on speedrunning/recording in general as well as a place for Strategy Guides for individual games and game series.
The main man behind SDA is Nolan 'Radix' Pflug. He founded SDA in April 1998
with the merger of two Quake sites, then expanded it with his Metroid Prime 100%
1:37 run in November of 2003, and opened it to all games in March 2004.
Nathan Jahnke joined in Summer 2004 with his valuable capturing services.
With the site's popularity increasing and the existing staff's free time
decreasing towards late 2006, Mike Uyama was drafted in to take over the contact
and verification process. During the supervision of Mike, the site started to
become more selective in what speedruns to publish and the focus shifted towards
higher standards of gameplay. In May 2011, Mike Uyama decided to spread out his
duties and concentrate on the 'GDQ' franchise marathons.
SDA of today is a continuation of the foundation laid in the early days and
with the core values remaining intact. The focus is still on providing a place
on the internet for speedrunners and speedrun friends to watch and share
speedrun highlights.
Just doing runs is one option, but you can also volunteer to help verify a run.
A topic on
the forum keeps track of the list of runs needing verification.
The run of game X is great! May I
link to it?
Feel free to link to the individual game pages, the news, threads on the forum,
etc. However, please do not link directly to the download pages or the movie
files themselves. This way, visitors can read the runner's comments and explore
other areas of the site.
Could you host videos that show
all the cutscenes, plot, tricks, glitches, or sidequests?
Sorry, but exhibition videos are not SDA's focus. The objective measure of a
speedrun is time and that is the first and foremost priority for SDA. If a game
allows cutscenes to be skipped, then we require runners to skip them, and they
are probably not interested in watching them for the hundredth time either.
Depending on the game, you may catch some of these aspects in a run if you're
lucky.
Could you please do a run of game X?
SDA is not a 'team' of speedrunners that do speedruns on request. We're a
community of people who share the same passion. Most runners speedrun for
personal reasons and not because someone else wants them to do a run.
What types of games do you accept runs
on?
The Rules go through which
games are not suitable for SDA. In short, basically any speedrunnable (i.e. not
on a fixed timer or similar) computer or video game that was ever distributed by
a third-party retailer (i.e. not homebrew, shareware, pre-release copies, etc.)
is acceptable.
What's your stance on games
released on different platforms?
SDA's philosophy is to be a place of 'fair competition'. A speedrun that is
faster only because of language, version or platform differences will not
obsolete or be given priority over another run. However, if it's possible to
make a fair comparison (such as a fixed time difference because of the amount of
text), runs on different platforms/versions will be compared with each other. If
it's not possible to make a simple comparison between two runs of the same game,
they will be considered as belonging to different categories based on platform
or version.
Why do you allow glitches but
disallow cheat codes and tricks like crooked cartridge?
Using glitches is simply trying to use whatever is within the rules of the game
to your advantage. When you use a cheat device or outside alteration, then
you're breaking the game's internal rules. As for cheat codes and debug codes, they
differ from glitches in being intentionally programmed, so for the
purpose of SDA, they're considered being outside the rules of the game.
To put it as succinctly as possible, SDA usually times speedruns from the moment you
gain control of your character until the moment you lose it at the end of the
game. A bit more detail is found in the Rules. When SDA was founded,
this method was chosen as the preferred one among a number of other
possibilities. Later on, as the speedrun community grew, other ways of timing
speedruns started to appear. In this plethora of ways to time speedruns that we
have in our days, the term 'SDA-timing' has stuck for the timing method that is
still the most commonly used here and that is based on character control.
For PC games, you'll need software that captures your playing. Commonly used
software for newer games include OBS, Fraps, Camtasia, and CamStudio. For console
games, the method we recommend is to connect your console's output to a DVD
recorder and record it, but capture cards are also very common and can achieve
great results.
Runs with no sound, horribly loud or overpeaked sound, or mixed-in music are
unacceptable. The video needs to contain the game footage and nothing else, although some games like Oblivion require an extra FPS meter to be showing for legitimacy. If
you're interested in exactly how mean we are, here is a laundry list of Ways to get your run rejected for video quality.
More detailed information about recording methods can be found in the Knowledge Base.
Why don't you accept videos
hosted on YouTube or Twitch (or other video stream hosting sites)?
In order to save bandwidth, these sites generaly modify videos for the worse in
terms of framerate, resolution and image quality. In the best cases, these
effects are negligble and the videos are then acceptable for SDA. If you're
interested in submitting a run to SDA, you should however be prepared to set up
local recording. This is something that is highly
recommended anyways as the commercial platforms can change policies on a whim to cater
to their financial interests (or just randomly delete videos for other reasons),
which means that speedruns are regularly forever lost for the community.
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