10 Video Games Broken Beyond Belief While Speedrunning

The early Sonic games aren't really the most complex beasts around. At the risk of over-simplifying things, all you have to do to finish a stage is sprint from left to right, pulling off a few jumps along the way. It's gaming at its purest.

That being said, it's still ridiculously difficult to pull off a speedrun of the original game like the 9 minute and 53 second one seen below.

Rather than one central exploit being responsible for that incredible time, speedruns of Sonic The Hedgehog are like a puzzle - a mixture of glitches, well-timed jumps, and bouncing on top of enemies to get an extra burst of mid-air speed, all fitted together in a seamless fashion.

Some stages - like Green Hill Zone: Act 1, the very first in the game - are just faultless "normal" runs through the level, while on other occasions, players can glitch through walls to skip entire sections (at the start of Marble Zone: Act 3, for instance, where Sonic can teleport straight to the boss battle).

It's also possible to skip small sections without even glitching. If players get enough speed when bouncing off a spring, they can do a massive jump that sends them soaring over the stage (5:02 in the video below), out of the way of obstacles and enemies.

Sonic games want you to run through each level, but as it turns out, it's a lot quicker to take to the skies.