Genius Move or Happy Accident? Ranking Video Game Shortcuts From 'Frame-Perfect Mastery' to 'The Dev Left the Door Unlocked'
There is a very specific kind of pride that comes with watching a speedrunner clip through a wall in under three seconds, skip a boss that took you four hours as a kid, and finish the game in eleven minutes flat. Part of you is in awe. Part of you is furious. And a small but honest part of you is wondering whether the developer just... forgot to put a hitbox there.
That question — skill expression versus developer oversight — is the beating heart of speedrunning culture, and we at SW Tier List are here to rank it, debate it, and absolutely refuse to let it go. We're grading video game shortcuts on a spectrum from 'This Is Legitimate Art' all the way down to 'Someone Got Paid to Ship This?'
Buckle up. We're going fast.
S-Tier: Frame-Perfect Wizardry That Took Years to Discover
The Celeste Hyper Dash Chain
If you want a textbook example of a skip that feels earned, look no further than the extended dash tech discovered deep in Celeste's speedrunning community. Chaining hyper dashes across levels using frame-perfect timing wasn't a bug — it was a physics interaction the devs built and the community weaponized. Madeline's movement system was designed with precision, and the runners found the ceiling of what that system could do. This is skill expression at its absolute peak. The developer didn't leave a door unlocked; the runners built a skeleton key out of pure dedication.
Ocarina of Time's Wrong Warp
Yes, it involves manipulating memory addresses. Yes, it looks like the game is having a medical emergency. But the Ocarina of Time any% wrong warp is the kind of discovery that makes you believe in human ingenuity. It took years of community research, tool-assisted runs, and obsessive frame counting to make this work consistently. The fact that it can be done on console, by human hands, elevates it from "glitch" to "dark art." S-Tier. No debate.
A-Tier: Clever Exploits That Respect the Game's Own Rules
Super Mario 64's BLJ (Backwards Long Jump)
The backwards long jump is Mario 64's most famous trick, and it sits comfortably in A-Tier because it's born from the game's own momentum physics. Exploiting velocity buildup by spamming jumps in reverse is weird, yes, but it's a logical consequence of how the engine works. Nintendo didn't intend it, but you can almost see the physics simulation going, "well, technically..." That's the sweet spot. It's not a missing wall. It's math behaving badly in your favor.
Resident Evil Village's Merchant Skip
Some sequence breaks feel clever because they require you to understand the game's systems better than the developers thought players would. Skipping major merchant interactions in RE Village by manipulating inventory states and trigger zones falls into this category. It's not glamorous, but it shows a level of game knowledge that borders on obsessive. We respect it.
B-Tier: Useful, But Definitely Not Intentional
The Skyrim Whirlwind Sprint Out-of-Bounds Clips
Skyrim is a beautiful game with the structural integrity of wet cardboard in certain areas. Using Whirlwind Sprint to phase through geometry isn't really "skill" so much as it is "knowing which corners are made of lies." It's useful for speedrunners, and it takes some knowledge to execute, but let's be real — Todd Howard did not greenlight invisible walls that actually work. B-Tier. Functional. Slightly embarrassing for Bethesda.
Any Invisible Wall Skip in a Mid-2000s Open-World Game
You know the ones. The barrier is there, but it's more of a suggestion. You can wiggle into it at a specific angle and the game just... lets you through. There's minimal skill involved. The real accomplishment here belongs to whoever found it, not whoever repeats it. Still useful in a run. Still kind of a cry for help from the codebase.
C-Tier: The Dev Left the Door Unlocked (And Maybe the Windows Too)
Early Boss Kills via Out-of-Bounds Projectiles
There's a category of skip where you fire a projectile through a wall, it hits a boss in the next room, and the game just... kills the boss. No fanfare. No "this was intended." Just a dead boss and a very confused player. These are firmly in C-Tier. Yes, the runner who found it deserves credit. But the developer who made boss hitboxes extend through solid geometry deserves a talking-to.
The "Walk Into a Corner Until You're Somewhere Else" Clip
Every generation of games produces at least one of these. You walk into a specific corner, wiggle slightly, and suddenly you're on the other side of a locked door. There's no frame timing. There's no physics manipulation. You just... walked funny and the game broke. This is not skill. This is a collision detection error wearing a trench coat and pretending to be a speedrun strat. Respect to the finder. Zero respect to whatever engine let this happen.
D-Tier: This Wasn't Supposed to Ship Like This
Out-of-Bounds Entire Final Boss Arenas
When a speedrunner can skip a game's climactic final encounter entirely because the arena boundary wasn't closed properly, that's not a skip — that's a postmortem. These exist. They've existed in AAA titles. They are a monument to the gap between a game's ambition and its QA budget. D-Tier. Not because the runner is bad, but because this is genuinely sad to look at from a development standpoint.
The Verdict
Here's the thing: both ends of this spectrum have value. Frame-perfect mastery skips are a love letter to a game's systems. They prove that communities can find beauty and complexity in mechanics that even developers didn't fully map out. They are, genuinely, a form of art.
But the "dev left the door unlocked" skips? Those are archaeology. They're the community digging through a game's foundations and finding all the load-bearing assumptions that turned out to be wrong. There's something darkly funny and oddly humanizing about that.
Speedrunning isn't really about whether a skip was intended. It's about how fast you can get from A to B, and the entire community is just extremely committed to finding out if B is actually behind a wall that doesn't have a hitbox.
We're not judging. We're ranking. And honestly? Both are valid.
Drop your hottest take in the comments. Was the BLJ a skill check or a physics accident? Fight it out below.
