Any% Chaos: Ranking Video Game Franchises by How Completely Speedrunners Have Dismantled Them
Photo: speedrunner gaming setup multiple monitors timer overlay, via media.wired.com
There's something deeply poetic about a speedrunner. A developer spends five years crafting an emotional 40-hour journey, and within six months, some person in a Discord server has reduced it to a 12-minute highlight reel involving a rocket launcher, a poorly-loaded texture, and a move that was never supposed to exist. We love them for it.
At SW Tier List, we have enormous respect for the speedrunning community — and even more respect for the chaos they've unleashed on some of gaming's most iconic franchises. So we built the tier list nobody asked for but everyone needed: ranking game series by how badly they've been absolutely cooked under optimal play conditions.
Buckle up. Some of these franchises didn't survive with their dignity intact.
S-Tier: Already Dead on Arrival (In the Best Way)
Half-Life / Half-Life 2
If there is a patron saint of speedrun destruction, it's the Source engine. Half-Life 2 speedruns look less like someone playing a game and more like someone escaping from a dimension that was never designed to contain human movement. Bunny hopping, object boosting, and the legendary 'save glitch' have turned Gordon Freeman's entire resistance story into a blur of physics-engine nightmares. The world record for Half-Life 2 sits under two hours for a game most players remember as a solid eight-to-ten hour experience. That's not optimization. That's surgery with a crowbar.
Nintendo tried. They really tried. But across decades of Zelda games, speedrunners have found wrong warps, arbitrary code execution exploits, and sequence breaks so severe that entire dungeons simply cease to exist. Ocarina of Time is the crown jewel here — runners have used a glitch to write arbitrary code directly into the game's memory using in-game inventory manipulation. They are, essentially, reprogramming the game while playing it. Link never asked for this. Neither did Ganon, who sometimes gets skipped entirely.
A-Tier: Thoroughly Cooked, Impressively So
Dark Souls / FromSoulfware series
Here's the twist: these games were designed to be punishing, slow, and methodical. Speedrunners looked at that design philosophy and said 'no thanks.' Dark Souls runs now involve clipping through fog gates, zip glitches that send players flying across entire maps, and skips that delete boss encounters the developers clearly wanted you to suffer through. The fact that Elden Ring — a game the size of a small continent — has been completed in under seven minutes is one of the funniest things the gaming world has ever produced.
Super Mario series
Mario games are like speedrun starter packs. The franchise has been picked apart so thoroughly that Nintendo's internal QA team probably watches GDQ to find their own bugs. Super Mario 64 is practically a religion at this point — the parallel universes explanation alone has more lore than most actual games. Mario Odyssey, Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World — all of them reduced to skeletal ghost runs that skip 90% of the intended experience. Wholesome content. Absolutely broken franchise.
B-Tier: Noticeably Damaged, Still Recognizable
Resident Evil series
RE speedruns are fascinating because the games are almost built for it — tight layouts, resource management, and a structure that rewards memorization. Runners have optimized item routing to a science, and movement tech like the infamous 'rocket skip' in RE4 has become iconic. But here's the thing: Resident Evil speedruns still feel like Resident Evil. You're still shooting things, still panicking in corridors. The soul of the game survives, just... faster. B-Tier. Damaged but not destroyed.
Halo series
Bungie accidentally gave speedrunners grenade jumps, and the community has never let them live it down. Halo CE especially gets run in ways that would make Master Chief's AI companions short-circuit — skipping entire mission segments using geometry clips and grenade-boosted launches. Still, Halo's linear campaign structure provides a natural ceiling on how broken things can get. Respectable chaos. Not apocalyptic.
C-Tier: Attempted Murder, Survived
The Witcher series
CD Projekt Red built something almost too narrative-dense to fully dismantle. Speedrunners have found exploits — dialogue skips, mounted movement optimization, some genuinely weird physics moments — but Witcher 3 still runs in the two-to-three hour range even under world record conditions. For a 100+ hour RPG, that's actually not that embarrassing. The sheer volume of cutscenes and scripted sequences acts like a natural firewall against total annihilation. Geralt survives. Barely.
Minecraft
You'd think a procedurally generated sandbox would be impossible to speedrun consistently. And yet. Minecraft's Any% category has evolved into a highly technical discipline involving specific seed manipulation, blind travel routing, and a very particular relationship with Nether portals. The game bends, but it doesn't break — mostly because it rebuilds itself every run. Respect to the runners. The game gets a pass.
D-Tier: Speedrunners Tried, the Game Won
Final Fantasy XIV
MMORPGs are essentially immune to traditional speedrunning because the game's structure — server-side validation, mandatory cutscene locks, instanced content gating — acts as a bureaucratic wall of invincibility. FFXIV runners exist, and they're impressive, but the game fundamentally resists being broken at a systemic level. You cannot arbitrary-code-execute your way past a server tick. The game wins. The game always wins.
The Bottom Line
What speedrunning really tells us is which developers accidentally built a house of cards and which ones poured the foundation in concrete. Half-Life 2's Source engine is a physics sandbox with a story bolted on — of course it collapsed. Dark Souls was built on the premise that you'd struggle, so watching runners skip the struggle is cosmically funny. And Final Fantasy XIV? That game has a legal team's worth of server-side protection.
The real S-Tier achievement here belongs to the speedrunning community itself — a group that looks at finished, polished games and asks 'but what if we did it wrong on purpose?' Every world record is a love letter written in exploit code. And honestly? We're here for every frame of it.
Drop your franchise hot takes in the comments. We know you have opinions about the Zelda wrong warp discourse.
