Treasure chests in the medieval setting of Hyrule were capable of yielding missiles or futuristic blaster upgrades, while weapon caches in the depths of Planet Zebes could house a magic wand or sword. Key items from both Super Metroid and Zelda had been randomly scattered across both games’ environments-their exact locations unknown to the speedrunners. In addition to requiring the players to travel between the games’ worlds by way of designated passageways, the hack provided an additional twist. 1 During a session titled “Link to the Past + Super Metroid Combo Randomizer,” the pair raced to complete a video game hack that merged the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) titles The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) and Super Metroid (1994) into a single game (see fig.
#SUPER METROID RANDOMIZER ANDROID FULL#
On June 29, 2019, in front of an auditorium packed full of Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) attendees, speedrunners Andy and Ivan squared off in a competition that may have seemed unusual even to veterans of the annual fundraising event. I contend that VARIA is a crystallization of video game hacker and speedrunner activities, both enabling new practices through its affordances and codifying the expertise of its community members through its interface.
I then perform a more deliberate analysis of VARIA using the walkthrough method, scrutinizing the application’s environment of expected use (that is, how users are encouraged to interact with it) and providing a technical walkthrough of its features (that is, a step-by-step account of its functionality). This is followed by a summary of how randomizers function and a chronicling of VARIA’s development, in which I draw comparisons to a number of commercially released game technologies. I begin my analysis with an overview of Super Metroid’s underlying game structures while elaborating upon its connections to broader speedrunning histories. In this paper, I investigate the histories, affordances, and legalities of the browser-based applications that lie at the heart of this practice-video game randomizers-using the Very Adaptive Randomizer of Items and Areas (VARIA) for Super Metroid (1994) as a primary case study. In order to play games in new ways and facilitate competitive races on Twitch, speedrunners and hackers have cultivated a new genre of speedrunning based on remixing classic video games.
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