Click here for your mood music for this review.
This is a recommendation for some low-stress, feel-good, nostalgic history to play in the background of your next weekend(s) chores or driving. Consider it your invitation to live vicariously through the heights of excellence that can only be achieved in children’s video games.
TL;DR: If you like your video game nostalgia and have time during a drive or when doing chores, play Summoning Salt videos like you would have a sports channel playing in the background. Mostly to listen to, sometimes to pay attention to for hype moments, and mostly pleasant ambience.
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Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This post is unapologetic nerd-out culture of video game speed runs.
I doubt anyone here is unfamiliar with video games. They may not be your thing, but you know of them, in the same way that someone who is not a sports fan can know something about football. You may even have seen or passed by a tournament playing out, where players face off in competitive games in a typical elimination format. You may even know a bit of e-sports, the professionalized gaming leagues typically done for team-vs-team shooters or real time strategy games.
Video game speed running is to e-sports what time trial sprints are to team sports. It is a fundamentally individual endeavor, with no outside interference. It is something one can solely do on their own. However, it is also extremely competitive. You may not be fighting with or interfered by a rival, but you are both in direct competition with not only others, but yourself, for beating the best record.
On an individual level, speed runs can loosely broken into four general phases. You select the game you intend to race. You select the rules you run within- rules such as allowing various types of glitches, or requiring only core story or 100% completion, and so on. You run the game, aiming to be as quick as you can. And then you track and record the effort, creating the timing and the proof which can be compared with others.
But collectively, speed running communities band together to do a lot more than that. What starts to make the community a community rather than a bunch of individuals is the degrees of collaboration and feedback that goes into planning a run. Fans will strategize and theory craft the best way to approach a run, such as identifying the critical requirements and in order to not waste time in unnecessary distractions. Forums of players will share the results of mechanics sleuthing, trying to figure out why an interaction in a game works some way and to see if a nuance can be turned into a few seconds advantage. And finally, of course, is the community tracking and cheering, trying to identify who is the best and getting the internet accolades when you do well.
Video game speed runs are old enough as a format to have started going through the orders of media coverage. Media coverage in this context isn’t in the sense of ‘mainstream media,’ but rather the degrees of separation from the act and how it is discussed.
A first-order speed run media is a recording of the speed run. It is not the act, but the presentation of the act without further discussion.
For example, Super Mario 64, a game that some readers may have spent dozens of hours on as a kid, can be beaten in about 6 minutes. This speedrun video is first-order speed run media.
A second-order media is media that discusses the recording. Given the nature of the medium, and how modern monetization model typically work in the Twitch.tv format where people can watch the runners make their attempts live, sometimes speed runners comment on efforts during the run itself. However, since speed runs often entail heavy focus, second-order media is often commenting on a recording.
For example, the Zelda game speed runner bewildebeest has videos where he inserts commentary over the video itself, sometimes elaborating and sometimes joking. This sort of media can provide insights in the difference between, say, a Majora’s Mask 1 hour speed run, and the considerable differences for a 6-hour 100% speedrun of the same game. The difference between these two speed runs is the rule set implications between ‘just get to the ending credits’ and ‘get to the ending credits getting all the unlockables,’ which creates 5 hours worth of playtime- and commentary- difference. It is the commentary that is second-order media.
A third-order media is media that discusses the discussion of the record. In other words, meta-discussion. This can be done seriously, such as critiquing someone’s critique of a speed.
(Well, maybe not so seriously. That specific clip is part of the memorable ‘Alpharad vs. Pchal Saga’, in which a youtube internet funny man went as far as an entire pokemon nuzlockee villain arc after one too many reaction videos by another youtuber, PokemonChallenges, a dedicated nuzluck reaction channel. Unironically good comedy if you’ve got time.)
But back to orders of speed run media, third-order media really does lean towards parody. Parodies don’t have to literally discuss other people’s commentary, but parody is, by its nature, a commentary on the coverage.
For example, the sub-culture of Nintendo speed runners was influenced in 2009 by youtuber ScottFalco’s animated parody, A TOTALLY LEGIT Wind Waker Speedrun Cartoon (WORLD RECORD). It is a silly cartoon parody of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a game notable for its cell-shaded art style that allowed (and was used for) cartoonish comedic effect. The TOTALLY LEGIT speedrun cartoon is filled with the sort of animated absurdities and pop-culture references that passes for your totally not my humor. Even the name itself is poking fun at the then (and still) common speedrun trope of people posting speed runs with titles in ALL CAPS and insisting on legitimacy because, well, take your guess.
ScottFalco’s parody is just a silly little cartoon, until you realize that the parody actually does allude to real mechanics that look just as absurd when side by side. If you’ve ever wondered why someone would want to motorboat Link, and you’re not a degenerate, third-order media can explain why. Scott isn’t the only speedrunner animated parody either. Around the same time, youtuber TerminalMontage released the animated Something About Super Mario 64 ANIMATED SPEEDRUN. It is only 2 minutes, but when you compare it to the 6-minute real speedrun from earlier… well, it rings true.
(Disclaimer: TerminalMontage was my gateway to speedrunning communities during the COVID lockdowns. He has a host of animated speedrun parodies, to the degree that Speedrunner Mario and Speedrunner Link are reoccurring characters with their own mythos. If you need a way to waste some time, or amuse small children…)
Enter Fourth Order Media
Back (again) to orders of media, and the nominal subject of this post.
Summoning Salt is a fourth-order speedrun media creator. He creates media that discusses the media that discusses the media of the record. Or, discusses the discussion of the meta.
Or- to put it in yet other words- he’s a historian of sorts. He organizes, by topic and chronology, the history of speed runs. He makes his living not by doing the act of speed running (1st order), or commenting on speed runs (2nd order), or making silly parodies (3rd order). Hiss full-time job now entails researching, organizing, and presenting records of the records of video gaming.
Summoning Salt is not the first fourth-order video game commentator. One of the earlier examples was Andrew Growen, who wrote the Empires of Eve by Andrew Growen history series of the EVE Online MMO.
Which, tangent, is really interesting in its own right. For a MMO set around anarcho-capitalism IN SPACE, there is drama, intrigue, and interstellar wars for market share. There are international alliances between gooners and Russians against an authoritarian hyper-centralized centrally-planned economy ran by an American militarist as all compete for control over the keys to power. Which honestly sounds way more interesting than what I’m talking about here. If you want the short version, here’s the 50 minute public talk at EVE Fanfest 2016.
Which I realize may seem more exciting than something about speedruns. But I promised you some nostalgic feel-goodisms, and Summoning Salt provides.
But who is the youtuber who I’ve spent a 1000-word essay and a half not describing yet?
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Part 2: Summoning Salt History
Summoning Salt himself is a nobody to somebody YouTube success story.
Summoning Salt’s start on YouTube in 2016 was as a speed runner for the old Mike Tyson Punch-Out game. This was an incredibly niche and minor channel, with only a couple hundred subscribers. He wasn’t bad at the game by any means, but there’s only so much audience for a game older than the N64, which was the formative gaming experience for the first main YouTube generation. Given how the YouTube economics work, he was making nothing, and it was a strictly hobby experience.
Now, however, Summoning Salt is a 2-million subscriber youtuber whose videos reliably draw in millions of views within a year. This sort of scale is nothing compared to the titans of the platform, but it’s also enough for it to be his full-time job… which it is.
Summoning Salt’s breakout started with his first speed run history video, in January 2017. World Record Progression: Mike Tyson was the transition point where his videos went dozens or hundreds of views to thousands. At this time of writing, nearly a decade later, it marks a transition point between older videos that now have the fame-boosted level of sub-30k views, and the video game histories that routinely break 1 million views, now often getting a million within a year.
Summoning Salt has talked about his channel growth since, notably in his 1 Million Subscriber video back in 2021. He is open that he was inspired by another Mike Tyson speedrunner, Sinister1 (who had 4k subscribers to Salt’s 1 Million at the time), discussing the evolution for a specific character strategy during a stream. Sinister1’s video was just a face cam recording of a two hour stream, verbally relaying the history of records since the 80s. However, it lacked the video editing Summoning would use to condense two hours to twenty minutes.
Summoning Salt received internet kudos on forums and social media, which convinced him to keep trying. From 2017 on, the channel focused on what was initially called the World Record Progression series, focusing on classic games like Super Metroid, Mario Kart 64, and other games. This teething stage was undoubtably a bit of algorithm chasing, going for speed of more and shorter uploads, often with less quality and polish than more recent efforts.
In 2018, ‘modern’ Summoning Salt started. This was when Summoning started using the song ‘Home – We’re Finally Landing’, the song recommended at the start of this post, as his distinctive leitmotif. The opening chords, which are retro and thus appeal to those earliest days of video games, are sometimes called the speedrunner’ s anthem due to its association with him.
It wasn’t just the music that evolved. The naming scheme of videos gradually shifted from ‘World Record Progression’ to variants of ‘The History of [Subject] Records.’ Videos gradually became consistently longer, going from less than 30 minutes to over, reflecting more research. Editing likewise improved, even as the pace of updates slowed.
By this point, however, Summoning Salt had built momentum in the YouTube economy and in gamer pop culture, consistently growing. He hit 1 million subscribers around 2021, is in the 2 million tier in 2025.
At this time, Summoning Salt has published over 50 video-documentaries. While older ones are in the 20-minute range, more recent ones are easily in the 1-2 hour range. This makes Summoning Salt Videos very much something to listen to in the background, more as a podcast with visuals for when you want to see clips he’s discussing. Or as a sports channel you have on the TV.
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Part 3: What Helps Summoning Salt Succeed?
Rather than go in depth into any one video, I want to highlight five elements that might make Summoning Salt videos more interesting to the Motte Audience. These are more meta-context and mechanics of approach, if you like that sort of thing.
Element One: Combining History and Technical Sophistication
On a purely mechanical level, Summoning Salt does an impressive job in filtering large amounts of repetitive data into an enjoyable format.
On the history side, this is a necessity. You have to in order to distil decades of material into tens of minutes, but it is still commendable. As a communicator you have to draw the line between relevant and irrelevant history, and as a story teller you have to choose the entertaining stuff that is still accurate enough to give context. This also means knowing when to share information now, and when to withhold it for later.
What makes Summoning Salt more impressive than a mere historian is that he also has to convey a large amount of technical information as well. High level video game speed runs often entail identifying and applying incredibly niche game mechanical interactions for marginal advantages. We’re talking things like exploiting the angle of plane and movement interactions to shave fractions of a second on a run, or leveraging how a game internally tracks race progression in order to exploit reset conditions. A significant part of the world record progressions come from speed runners figuring out how to overcome some technical obstacle, or finally achieving a theorized mechanical opportunity before anyone else.
Summoning Salt successfully balances the needs of historical context and technical depth, and uses them to power the narrative for a constant sense of progression. While his videos are long, they are exceptionally well paced due to how he packages and presents the information for you.
Element Two: Research and History
Summoning Salt is making history in a most literal sense, in that he is making a historical record of things that would otherwise be lost to time.
Since his transition to video game historian, Summoning Salts has consistently improved in his thoroughness when conducting research in topics. This is partly prompted by his earlier algorithm-chasing history videos, where he made some embarrassing mistakes / misinformation in games he personally had no experience in. As his channel matured, he has spent more time looking for recording, conducting interviews with speed runners and building archives of screen shots, video clips, and graphics that he uses in his videos.
This is, unironically, Research in the sense of academic research, using the sort of techniques that graduate students might in a thesis or paper. It doesn’t have the style of ivory tower academia, and it isn’t bound to the same rigor per see, but this is absolutely a deliberate, purposeful, and structured pursuit of knowledge.
It is also a real contribution to the historical record. An irrelevant history, perhaps, but preserving irreplaceable things before they are lost. Many of the games that Summoning Salt publishes on are games where the oldest parts of the speed running community have been lost to time. Old players moved on, old internet archives degraded, videos lost for whatever reason. When these things are lost, they are lost for good.
This means that Summoning Salt’s videos may be the most enduring history of these speed running shenanigans when the primary sources fade with time. His videos, and the fact they are so popular relative to others (and sparked a similar genre), may be the primary (secondary) sources used in the future for anyone interested in this topic. Summoning Salt isn’t just writing about history, but preserving things- irrelevant as they may be- for the future.
Element Three: Music and Editing, and We’re Finally Landing
Summoning Salt found and popularized the perfect song for nostalgic video gamers.
As a video essay maker, Summoning Salt has gotten consistently better over time. In the history section, he referenced that his first history video was inspired by a streamer who gave in depth history during a live stream. That streamer never used any real editing techniques. Summoning does, and over time has gotten better.
Editing isn’t just about smoothing the delivery, but it can also be a part of a story telling medium. Summoning ‘gets this’ in a way many people don’t, for the same reason he’s able to parse overwhelming data on history and technical specifics to deliver a narrative. When you listen to a history of video as a pod cast, this means using the right kind of music for the right time of tone, managing the word tempo for cadence, and transitioning between graphics. But it can also mean making your editing go for the narrative pitch at a visual level, such as selective zoom-ins, strategic blur-outs to maintain a mystery from being revealed too early, and so on.
I won’t claim the video editing is out of this war, but Summoning Salt’s leitmotif, We’re Finally Landing, might as well be. I’m not a musically inclined person, so the best I can do is say that the use of synthesizer cord, rhythm, and artificial tinniness is what strikes me as ‘retro gaming.’ It’s the sort of thing you might associated with a 80’s era arcade, video gaming before modern 3D gaming kicked off with the N64, and so appeals to a retro-history before the history of many of the games he's talking about. We’re Finally Landing is pure nostalgia bait for people who enjoyed older games, and even for the people who don’t it gives the audio-thematic vibes of video game history that works so well in the story telling format. Its chords match what I’d associate with optimistic, successful, but also a bit tired- whether that’s because of age or of hard-won success.
And it is also distinct enough as a leitmotif that it has come to be associated with Summoning Salt’s speedrunning series. Which is a good parallel with the rest- it’s not that no other video game 4th-order video game writer uses video editing or even music, but few pair them as well.
Element Four: The Unapologetic Sports Narrative
I raised at the start a metaphor linking speed running to sports. This was not an accident, but a key part of why Summoning Salt’s narratives work. He is absolutely cribbing from the well-worn genre of sports documentaries.
Summoning Salts’ history isn’t delivering a mess of facts. It is organized to tell a story, and that story is of people competing to be the best. He uses many- though hardly all- the tropes of genre. He has challenger narratives, underdog stories of protagonists no one thinks has a chance, defending champions trying to hold their titles against the next generation. He shows people responding in real time to winning world records, the excitement and break between pure focus and celebration.
This, in turn, lets him use the rhetorical tricks and techniques to build audience investment. He will not lie, but he’s not beyond obfuscating some facts or framing to imply a level of emotional investment that the protagonist may not have felt, like a loser’s congratulatory message being a show of bitter-sweet good sportsmanship. He’s a particular fan of a sort of progression chart which is used to track speed run progression, and then zooming in make small gains seem huge. The horse racing of who’s ahead at the moment is central to, well, racing, and speed runs are a race of sorts.
One element of sports genre that Summoning Salts does not employ is toxic rivalries. Arguably the least realistic part of the narrative, but there are no villain stock characters in these stories. There are not sabotage campaigns or whisper narratives to disqualify legitimate winners. It’s all in good fun, the flame wars are glossed over in favor of compromise, and the speed running community is presented as a wholesome community, not a toxic one.
Is it totally unvarnished realism? No. But it’s not trying to be either, any more than it’s trying to deconstruct the characters. The embrace of the sports narrative is what it is trying to be, and that includes the sort of trite cliches and warm-and-fuzzies of inspirational quotes that make it a cheesy feel-good experience.
Which leads to the final merit-
Element Five: Unapologetic Celebration of Excellence
Summoning Salt’s videos are unreservedly positive about the people who contribute to the speed running community, and that above all else is why I think his channel took off. It is optimism in the face of difficulty, and overcoming adversity on one's own merits.
Speed running is obviously a contest of excellence on the part of the player. This is where it is most like the excellence of sports. There is excellence of control on the part of the player, the sort of minute motor control and timing that allow the player to control the avatar into feats of acrobatics or maneuvering. It is the excellence of the player’s ability to strategize, to recognize optimizations. It is also the excellence of managing or leveraging RNG, with world records often hinging on player RNG and the world-record holders maximizing the odds and minimizing risks that could ruin a world-beating run. This requires grit of its own sort, to sit down and keep trying after hundreds or even thousands of failures in order to get that best RNG.
But speed running is also a genre of collaborative excellence, in ways where it is a multidisciplinary activity in ways most sports aren’t. A football player doesn’t need to understand the theory of physics to learn to handle the ball, but world-winning speed runs often have to engage in exceptional code sleuthing to understand why mechanics work the way they do and how to leverage it. The player at the controls and the players theory-building, code-diving, and developing proof of concepts often aren’t the same people. In fact, sometimes the brute force approach of many people playing the same game uncovers things that the ‘elite athlete’ speed runners don’t know, but then adopt wholesale.
To get what I mean, there is a memorable sequence in the opening of ‘The Quest to Beat abnew317’, a Mario Kart 64 speed runner, in which a top tier speed runner is dominating the leader board. This is two decades after the game’s release, and so the speed run optimization is pretty much a solved problem that can only be marginal improved through player performance and RNG. Then, one day, a random no-name nobody had heard of sends a message claiming to have a new shortcut and asking how to send proof.
This is probably futile, the sort of claim made countless times and variously false or outdated and wouldn’t help… except this one is true. The provider is a tool-assisted-speedrun expert (someone who programs a computer to play the game with a precision humans can’t) wanting to share their find. The documentary shows the twitch stream of the speed runner’s expression change from skepticism, to confusion, to realization as a technique for a new world record pace is realized.
And then it happens again, the very next day, because someone watching the stream had discovered the same general technique twenty years prior when playing with their friends. They’d just never brought it up because they thought the speed running community knew about it already but had reasons not to do it. In a competitive context where world records can change hands by margins of a third of a second, a random casual contributed a shortcut worth 30 seconds.
Summoning Salts delights in searching for and sharing these sorts of contributions, commending all involved. Part of this is the sports narrative framing, part of this is his own past as a speed run passion player, but there’s a clear sense of joy that’s rare in [current year].
Summoning Salt videos are unapologetically happy about video games, and the people who play them, and the people who engage with people who play them. There are no snide jobs fat gamers, people without real jobs, or the childishness of playing or watching others play games from one’s children. There are no efforts to deconstruct the premise, to vilify or tear down people on a personal level, or engage Serious Issues.
There is, in other words, no culture war.
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Part Four: The Influence of Summoning Salts on the Genre
It turns out, a moderately successful niche youtuber and inspire emulators and copy cats. Who’d have thought?
Once you go down the speed running rabbit hole, you start to look at games differently. And once you start looking into fourth-degree media influencers, you start to see how they influence the community and shape the environment around them. As people become aware of media like Summoning Salts’ documentaries, it changes how they behave in the sort of things that might be in a speed run documentary.
In the speed running community itself, it’s hard to quantify the impact Summoning Salt has had. There are no good metrics I’ve seen to suggest he has had an industry-level shift in viewer engagements or what have you. There are anecdotal examples of people who claim to have entered speed running after seeing his videos, including allegedly at least one record holder, but there’s no real data and unlikely ever to be such. At best, Summoning Salts has raised exposure of the community more broadly, raising it from incredibly niche to merely still very niche.
What is more visible is the niche of video game World Record Documentary genre. In the last either years since Summoning Salt started taking off, but especially in the last four when he was already past the 1 Million metric, a host of other, smaller youtubers have tried to follow suit with similarly structured video essays. There is a World Record Progression playlist of such YouTube videos, and of various quality.
There have also been branching media from speed runs to less speedy challenge runs, where instead of racing for time, there are special conditions. Perhaps the most infamous is the five and a half hour documentary on the Mario 64 ‘A Button Challenge’, i.e. how little jumping it takes to beat Super Mario 64, a platformer game designed around jumping a lot. This is the challenge which has made memes of speedrunner Mario entering parallel universes, cloning, and possibly cosmic rays a part of the subculture lexicon. There has quite possibly been more graduate-level research and analysis put into how to pick apart this one challenge than went into creating the first 3D platformer of the N64.
Most broadly, Summoning Salt has helped normalize a sort of video game nostalgia / retrospective genre that certainly pre-dated him, but certainly has adopted elements of his exhaustive analysis since him. Whether it’s the 2CPhoenix Kingdom Hearts Breakdown that reviews levels in exhaustive detail at up to an hour a stage, retrospectives on The HALO Trilogy that include not just the game but corporate contexts behind games, there is a clear market- niche but there- for people interested in long-form essays on the sort of childhood games they no longer play, to a level of detail that goes beyond lore videos or so on.
But most recently, there’s been this endorsement to you.
If you’re still reading this… congratulations! You may be the sort of stickler for nerdiness and overly exhaustive detail that could enjoy a history of video game challenges. You might not even have known that about yourself, if you only started reading because of where this was posted or who pointed you to it.
If so, consider this your endorsement to start with Summoning Salt.
It’s free, there’s no cost besides opportunity costs of not watching something else, and let’s be honest- you weren’t going to be setting any world records on your games anyway. But that’s no reason you can’t enjoy other people’s triumphs from a good story teller, and this would make fine background audio on your drives or during your chores.
It’s not like you should be working right now anyway… right?
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Notes -
I found speedrunning entertaining initially, and still do to some extent, but in recent years my interest has shifted to a related but different category: challenge runs.
Challenge runs are fundamentally different than speed runs in that there is a bar to be cleared, and once the bar is cleared, that's it, the challenge is complete, and you can do something else. This stands in explicit contrast to speedrunning, where you can invest indefinite amounts of resources chasing the metric harder in ways that are often not compelling: e.g., repeated attempts to farm the best RNG.
My favorite challenge run category is hardcore, in the sense of permadeath. The first time I encountered it was in Diablo, but Diablo was specifically designed with "recovery" mechanics in mind that make it actually not that hardcore in practice (specifically, levels are quite easy to gain relative to quality loot, and the latter is not lost on death if you have it in your bank, so you can "bounce back" after a death very quickly). Hardcore is actually a lot more fun in games that weren't specifically designed for it, the most popular being Classic WoW. But the neat thing about the challenge is it's applicable to almost any game, because in nearly every game ever made, simply beating the game is, in some sense, a string of segments which together constitute a no-death run, so hardcore is just "can you just do it right the first time?"
The reason I find hardcore so much more interesting than speed runs or even other challenge run categories is that it emphasizes a completely different skill set: most challenges incentivize a high-risk high-reward just-try-again-if-you-got-it-wrong playstyle, and hardcore is the exact opposite. In many games, it's almost a test of character more than a test of skill. For example, in Classic WoW, you can basically beat the challenge with minimal effort by just making a rule that you'll only kill single mobs a couple levels lower than you. Yet despite this very simple path to victory, I think only around 1/1000 players actually complete the challenge. It's extremely difficult to exercise the level of self-control required. One quick anecdote: a player was talking in zone chat about being super tempted to do some high-risk quest for this juicy 14-slot bag or something, and I was like "But you realize you're not actually getting 14 loot slots, right? You presumably already have what, a 10 or 12 slot bag in your worst bag slot? So you're taking this risk for 2 slots. The question isn't whether the risk is worth 14 slots; it's whether it's worth 2 slots." And he replied something to the effect of "wow, when you put it that way, this is not at all worth it, thx". It's very easy to trick yourself into thinking you're taking worthwhile risk when you are not!
Anyway, enough of hardcore. Challenge runs generalize well beyond this. Other popular challenge restrictions that apply to most games include things like "no items." But they can be anything. For example, one run I did last year that I found quite fun was doing Final Fantasy XII with gambits-only (defined as starting once you get past the tutorial and gain access to gambits, obviously), i.e., once you're in battle, just put the controller down and watch. It actually wasn't as hard as I expected, but it was quite enjoyable and felt totally different than playing the game normally. And it doesn't feel like watching a movie at all. More like watching a children's play when you're the director, and you sit there helplessly hoping they won't mess it up and make a fool of themselves and you.
For Elden Ring or other Souls games, popular challenges are beating the game at level 1 and doing bosses without getting hit. For Pokemon, Nuzlocke is by far the most popular challenge category. For popular RTS games like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, you can beat the campaigns without losing a single unit on the highest difficulty (GiantGrantGames has some popular videos showcasing this), which I suppose is kind of like hardcore but feels a bit different.
In conclusion, I find challenge runs much more entertaining than speed runs. They rarely entail abusing glitches in the game engine, they aren't usually plagued by uninteresting incentives like RNG farming or decaying into some flavor of "who can play DDR the most precisely"? They have a wide range of difficulties to choose from, some being very easy, e.g., no items in Pokemon or Persona, up to nigh-impossible, e.g., beating Hades on 64 heat. And most importantly: there is a point at which you can say you are done.
As a rule, I agree! Challenge runs, and things you can 'complete' and put down and move on, are a bit more low-key than the never-enough speed run absolutism.
Then again, I'm not really much of a sports person in general, so the competition over whose best is less interesting to me than how they did it.
I do enjoy attempting challenges myself, as well as watching them.
One other thing I like about challenge runs is that they often have some sort of amusing meaning internal to the game's universe. For example, when you beat Starcraft 2, in the final cinematic there's a line to the effect of "Just think on all the men we've lost", which, when you beat it without losing a unit, has the hilarious implied answer of "Actually, sir, it seems we didn't lose anybody." Similarly, Persona solo hero runs are basically beating a game about the power of friendship without the power of friendship -- great man theory confirmed. Challenge runs are often designed around some deference to the game's aesthetic, and even when they're not, e.g., hardcore, the difficulty at least lends more weight to the dialog. When the characters talk about how difficult getting to this point was, it actually feels true, rather than the "ya I barely paid attention to the mechanics and I just waltzed through" you get with a normal playthrough.
In contrast, speed runs often break the aesthetic of the game, rather than complement it. What does it mean in Elden Ring when you run off the edge of a cliff, heal yourself, and final boss whom you've never even seen just dies? That's just lame.
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