The Art of the Blindfolded Speedrun

It was the Tuesday of Awesome Games Done Quick 2020’s weeklong event, and spectators began filing into the main room. The seats in the convention center’s ballroom quickly filled up, and eventually viewers began lining the walls, not wanting to miss the speedrun that was coming up. The room buzzed with palpable excitement as everyone stared at the two huge projectors near the front of the room, waiting for the runners’ preparations to be completed.

Then, the two runners appeared on the screen. They were both blindfolded, each with one hand on a single NES controller. Speedrunners Sinister1 and Zallard1 are known for their runs of the Punch-Out!! series, including ones they take it one step further and complete the game while unable to see the screen. But on this Tuesday, they were doing something unprecedented: speedrunning the original Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! together, with one controller, while blindfolded.

As the two progressed through the game and made it to Mike Tyson himself, the room fell into complete silence. Sinister1 and Zallard1 never expected to complete the run; in spite of their experience in playing the title blindfolded, they simply hadn’t been able to finish the game in early attempts. But as they landed the TKO on Tyson, completing the game in 23 minutes and 39 seconds, Sinister1 and Zallard1 were met with a roaring crowd and a standing ovation when they took off their noise-canceling headsets.

Speedrunning is the act of beating a video game as fast as possible. Generally, this includes the use of finicky glitches, bugs, and strategies and play as efficiently as possible. This is all already difficult in its own right, requiring intense knowledge of the game, lightning-fast reflexes, and the ability to perform under pressure. Putting on a blindfold takes it a step further, forcing the runner to rely on only sound cues to complete the game, which is incredibly difficult in a visual medium.

Intense speedruns have been a staple for much of Games Done Quick’s existence. During the first Classic Games Done Quick, Andrew G. did a joke speedrun of Super Mario Bros., and while he did not get far, it inspired Sinister1 to try the same with Punch-Out!!, according to The History of Blindfolded Punch-Out.

Blindfolded Punch-Out!! runs have been featured at practically every Awesome Games Done Quick event since 2012, and they always attract a lot of attention both at the event and on Twitch. However, the blindfolded speedrunning community extends beyond a few showstopping annual runs. 

Within the recesses of Discord is the Blindfolded Brotherhood, a group of speedrunners that specializes in blindfolded speedrunning. Their list of runs includes games new and old, across all sorts of genres.

“My first fully completed blindfolded run was [a Donkey Kong Country 2] 102 percent run which I completed in late October 2016 in about 16 hours without breaks. It was the most exhausting thing I’d ever done,” says Katun24, one of the moderators of the Blindfolded Brotherhood. He speedruns a variety of different games, some with a blindfold, others without, but enjoys the unique challenge of getting through a game without the ability to see.

“Stratting a blindfolded run is, in a way, like playing a timed puzzle game,” Katun24 tells EGM. “Every game has its own unique rules and movement possibilities, and it can be so much fun to try to figure out how these can be best used to your advantage.”

This mentality plays into Katun24’s method of strategizing and practicing these runs, which often includes him creating extensive guides and relying more on audio and music cues than muscle memory. “A short, optimized run like Super Mario World (11 exit) relies 99 percent on music rhythm timing for me; muscle memory alone would lead to vast timing inconsistencies.”

Another active member of the Blindfolded Brotherhood, Philip “Bubzia” Garus, approaches blindfolded speedruns a bit differently. “I basically do most of it visually with help of speedrunning techniques and then create and run [my] own blindfolded version of the run,” Bubzia explains. Instead of relying totally on sound cues and rhythm, Bubzia studies visual speedruns and builds blindfolded strategies around what he sees, and even practices runs visually most of the time. 

But regardless of training method and genre, there are some games that just can’t be speedrun with a blindfold, unless the runner wants to go to extremes. Both Bubzia and Katun24 bring up the issue of games not relying on a concept called “normalized movement.” 

“Normalized movement is a means of moving in a completely predictable way,” Katun24 said.“For example, in many 2D platformers you can hold down on the D-pad to duck, then jump while holding down-right or down-left to automatically duck again upon landing. This can result in a fixed-distance jump.” Without normalized movement, speedruns while blindfolded become a lot more difficult. It’s the difference between, say, having to crouch-jump three times to reach a platform and needing to hold right on the D-pad for exactly 1,200 milliseconds to get to the same position.

On top of that, some games lack the sort of sound effects that can provide additional position information. “Deltarune, for example, has very [few] audio cues—you do not hear when you hit a wall, you do not hear text boxes, you do not hear movement,” Bubzia says. “You are basically left alone with the background music and have to count all the way throughout the game to not get lost.”

While blindfolded speedrunning might seem accessible to those who are visually impaired, these limitations can make playing these games nearly impossible to play without a visual idea of how the game is playing. Memorization is a big part of most blindfolded speedrunners’ training, and without understanding how the game work intimately in terms of its movement and mechanics, players will have an extremely difficult time completing the game. Of course, that means there’s an inherent privilege when it comes to blindfolded speedrunning, even more so that a typical speedrun–not everyone can do it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is a game like Punch-Out!!, which has ample audio cues and generously predictable movement. The NES title is still notoriously difficult, but when you know what to listen for and the fighters’ attack patterns, you’re able to get far fairly quickly—even to the point of two runners sharing one controller and still completing the run.

Blindfolded speedrunning is a niche of an already niche community, so it leaves one wondering: Why do it in the first place? For Andrew G at Classic Games Done Quick, it was more of a joke than anything else, but it ended up spawning this community of players that are serious about running through video games quickly—and blind.

For Katun24 and Bubzia, it’s more about the challenge of creating strategies and building their own runs practically from scratch. Both mention that for some games, visual speedruns are already optimized, so it doesn’t leave as much room for actual strategizing. Blindfolded speedruns are more difficult and less popular, so not only do the runners need to route the game themselves, they need to also think up tricks that will be exclusive to blindfolded speedrunning.

Bubzia also finds the entire idea of blindfolded speedrunning intriguing. “It also always fascinates me what is actually possible without looking. I have completed many runs already that I previously thought of as ‘impossible.’ Blindfolded speedrunning is extremely rewarding in that aspect.”

Even if blindfolded speedrunning isn’t well-known outside of Sinister1’s and Zallard1’s Punch-Out runs at Games Done Quick, the Blindfolded Brotherhood will keep on trucking, doing what seems impossible–finding ways to beat games without seeing them. And doing it quickly, to boot.