Before the site even existed, Bisqwit drew my attention to Morimoto's runs and Famtasia. He actually challenged me to make a faster SMB run with Famtasia than he did (but I never made anything complete). As the community grew from just a couple of people to something like ten or twenty, he started collecting those runs into his own server (under something like http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/ which was the name of the old site for a couple of years).
This forum was added at some point, as the community grew, so I joined pretty much from the beginning.
This. It was the first TAS I ever saw, shown to me by a colleague. By then, it had already been obsoleted twice; he had shown me an encode, and my colleague wasn't aware of TASVideos himself. After I discovered TASVideos, and I found out it was made in frame advance, my thoughts were along the lines of "hey, I can do that too!".
After getting Gens rerecording and half an hour later, I came to the conclusion that no, I could not; at least, not yet. So I decided to start with something easier. The second TAS I saw was this one, and I was already aware of the Tails in Sonic 1 hack; so I decided to try it, as Sonic 1 is a lot simpler, even as Tails, than S3&K. The rest shows up on the forum history.
Edit: Huh; links show up even in spoiler tags. CSS error, maybe?
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1697
Location: RU · ID · AM
Almost the same as for me (“hey, I can do that too!”). I found Qwerty/NaturelLorenzo’s TASes on YouTube first, and at first I did not think of trying it myself yet, but after finding a Crramalama’sTAS finally decided to start learning how to TAS. I tried hard until being able to beat all of his results. That run is also the main reason why Amy is special for me in Sonic games — probably as Tails for marzojr.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
I made a joke TAS of some dumb game called Symphony of the Night to epic troll the TASing community (and especially that nerd arukAdo) but I enjoyed making it so I jumped at my chance for easy internet fame after arukAdo vanished into forever into the night while updating any% and it only took me like 5 tries or something to make a run that isn't garbage. I had become the very monster I had set out to slay on day 1
A lot of things led me here. I remember finding Morimoto's Mario 3 run way back in the day. I must have seen it on eBaum's World. I remember watching it in high school with my friends and being blown away at the tricks he pulled. That got me into the general idea of speedrunning and I must have at some point discovered both Speed Demos Archive and TASVideos. But that's kind of a common story here, so I'll focus on another aspect: what led me to botting.
Back in 2007, Adam Sweeney completed this run of Solstice, a game I had never played or even heard of. Still, something in his commentary stood out to me:
Adam Sweeney wrote:
My previous effort on this game was very popular among the other seventeen people in the world that care about Solstice, and received a mention in a 1up.com article for my "borderline pathological" mastery of the game (which is true; I once had a minimalist speedrun that was faster than the tool-assisted emulator run at the time, meaning that I effectively beat the game faster than a computer [Emphasis mine.]). So, I'm very happy to have trumped the previous run, and to provide a much better-looking one in the process. Have fun.
It touched a nerve. I'd never participated in speedrunning, but I'd watched enough videos and was a big enough fan at that point that I was bothered by what he said. Of course, tool-assisted speedruns aren't completed by computers. What the heck was he talking about? How the heck does this guy think that a computer can be "told", hey, beat this game as fast as possible!
I was right, to some extent. His success over the TAS came in large part due to simple route-planning differences. Still, I wasn't familiar with the tools of tool-assisted speedrunning, so I didn't really know what I was talking about.
When I joined the site, I discovered Lua scripting and wanted to incorporate it into my runs. It started with simple RAM watching scripts and then quickly ballooned into basic look-ahead scripts. For Skitchin', I put together a script that would, among other things, tell me when I could successfully execute a high jump at any given time. I got hooked.
I don't quite understand my own psychology. Back then (and to a certain extent, even today) I thought Adam Sweeney was dead wrong. One can't ignore the human element to TASing. Efforts to make a bot that beats a game aren't unheard of, but are still more dream than reality. And yet, paradoxically, I also want to prove him right. I want people to see that computers are capable of incredible things. I want to push the boundaries of human involvement in TASing.
I realize that doesn't exactly address the topic, but I thought I should share my experience. It's baffling to me that an offhand comment had such a profound effect on my approach to TASing.
Around the time I joined, I had been optimizing my general-purpose emulator gameplay with savestate abuse for a while; the thing that actually got me curious about tool-assisted runs was seeing nitsuja's first Sonic 3 and Knuckles run linked on the GameFAQs private board Life, the Universe, and Everything.
I learned what TASes were and more or less how they were made thanks to 88mph. From there, I really liked watching each episode, learning some basic stuff, and watching good runs at the same time ^^.
But, it took me a while to really ask myself: "hum, why not play with a TASing emulator and try to do something with it?". Then I started with Castlevania; I was in the middle of a test run in the "minimalist, pacifist" category (because that category allowed me to learn how to TAS more easily at first, removing the need to manage items, for example) when I decided to join this site to get some feedback and also bring a small contribution to the game resources page for Castlevania. I then finished that test run and shortly after made the "real" version of that run. It was before the tier system and I wasn't expecting to have my first TAS published so soon. I guess the game + weird category (yo scrimpy ^^) was a lucky combination.
