A new fake blindfolded speedrun just became popular recently, so I thought I’d take a moment to talk about how real blindfolded speedruns are done. Hopefully you’ll learn something, and if you weren’t already familiar with the practice, maybe you’ll have some newfound respect for the sheer dedication required to pull this off.
Why do people even speedrun blindfolded?
Guess this is the first question, eh? Well, it’s actually quite simple: the challenge. Speedrunners in general are constantly thirsty for challenges to overcome, and what’s more challenging than not being able to see the game when the primary way the player gets information from the game is by sight?
But of course, there’s also another side to it. Some people speedrun “blindfolded” for the simple reason that’s the only way they can play the game. Some speedrunners are quite simply blind and have no other way to enjoy the game but without sight, and so they decided to take the lemons life gave them and throw them right back at life by speedrunning the game to spite their disability. Quite bad ass if you ask me.
So how does it work?
In short: extremely long strings of perfect inputs done quite literally without knowledge of whether you got them right or wrong until you either hear the death sound or a sound that says you’ve done it. Of course, it gets a bit more complicated than that.
Years worth of research and strats
While there are many techniques involved, it all starts with strategies. Speedrunners end up studying games for years, learning every little quirk of the game. But putting that information to use is a bit more work. Some routes and techniques are faster, but are riskier due to RNG or extremely complex movement which would be hard to do even sighted, let alone blindfolded. Other routes are safer, but significantly slower. The key is to find the routes which balance risk and speed the best… at least at the beginning. As the World Record is pushed lower and lower, strategies also get riskier and riskier, but usually no one goes for the crazy strategies until they’ve ran out of everything else.
Normalisation
Playing an entire game in a single string of perfect inputs is, quite simply, impossible. No human is capable of doing that, not when pressing a button just 1 frame too late or too early, or moving the analogue stick just the tiniest bit in the wrong direction, can end up setting you completely off course.
Speedruns already have a lot of planning behind them, but when you can’t see the game, you can’t see the mistakes you make to course correct. As such, blindfolded speedruns often times employ normalisation techniques which are sequences meant to help them get in a known position. For example, maybe you can’t know exactly where in the room you are, but you can do a sequence of movements guaranteed to get you to a specific corner of the room, always facing a certain direction. This allows speedrunners to break the aforementioned long strings of inputs into segments which can then be optimised, practiced, and memorised independently of each other. Of course, each time you normalise, you lose some time, so they still have to be used only when there’s no alternative, but even normalising a single time can make the difference between the speedrun being possible or not.
Sound Cues
This point is fairly misunderstood by many, and this misunderstanding is often times used by people faking blindfolded speedruns to act like they can tell where everything is by sound alone like they’re Marvel’s Daredevil.
The reality is quite different.
Humans can infact roughly tell where something is based on how the sound reaches each ear. If a sound is louder in your right ear, the sound is probably to the right of you. If the sound is just as loud in both ears, it’s probably directly ahead of behind you. However, these deductions aren’t very precise, even less so with video games. So how do speedrunners actually use sound as a guide?
Well, you’ve read the subtitle: Sound Cues. They can’t tell where a sound comes from, but if they know a specific sound should play as a result of a specific action, at a specific time, or in a specific place, then they can use it to time their actions or judge their general location. One famous example of this is the Bowser throws in Super Mario 64: The swoosh sound you hear as Mario spins Bowser is tied to Mario’s rotation. This means that based on the sound, speedrunners can immediately tell which direction Bowser would be thrown if they let go.
But why fake them?
Clout, mostly. Blindfolded speedrunning has a certain level of prestige in speedrunning communities due to it being even harder than regular speedrunning, which is already absolutely insanely hard and complicated for some games. Then of course, who doesn’t find it impressive when someone can play a game so well they don’t even need to see it to be good at it? Even tho blindfolded speedrunning is its own beast that only loosely correlates with skill playing the game sighted, most people aren’t familiar with the techniques I outlined above. Hell, I’ve been following speedrunning of all kinds for years now, learning about the techniques employed, and I still probably misunderstood some of those techniques used by both blindfolded and sighted speedrunners.