Challenge runs and speedruns turned finished single-player RPGs into endlessly replayable competitions and communities, and FromSoftware's Souls games made that culture central to how modern action RPGs are designed, streamed and discussed.
What happened
Role-playing games were designed to be beaten by patience. Grind enough Experience points, and any boss would fall. Almost as soon as players realized this, the most devoted of them started refusing the easy road. On the computer side, the Roguelikes had already built unforgiving Permadeath into the rules, and NetHack went further, tracking voluntary "conducts" such as pacifism or vegetarianism so that players could prove they had won the hard way. Console players invented their own restrictions for Final Fantasy and its successors: finishing at the lowest possible level, or with a deliberately handicapped party. These challenge runs circulated as FAQs and forum posts, a folk tradition passed between fans.
Speedrunning grew in parallel from the first-person shooter. Doom (1993) could record tiny "demo" files of play that were easily shared, and in November 1994 Simon Widlake launched COMPET-N to rank completion times. In June 1997 Nolan "Radix" Pflug released Quake Done Quick, a full-game run that dazzled players with its movement tricks. The Speed Demos Archive, founded in 1998, opened to all games in 2004, just as YouTube (2005) and then Twitch (2011) made watching other people play a mass pastime. Speedrun.com, founded in 2014, centralized leaderboards for more than 20,000 games by 2021. Runners compete in categories such as any%, 100%, low%, and glitchless, while tool-assisted speedruns chase theoretical perfection with emulators and frame-by-frame input.
Two collective phenomena brought this culture to a wider public. Games Done Quick began in January 2010 as Classic Games Done Quick, a charity marathon that the Speed Demos Archive community planned for the MAGFest convention and ended up broadcasting from an organizer's mother's house after hotel internet failed. Its twice-yearly marathons have since raised more than $59.8 million, as of January 2026. And in 2010 Nick Franco, a University of California, Santa Cruz student procrastinating with Pokémon Ruby, drew a webcomic about playing under two strict rules: catch only the first creature met in each area, and treat any that faint as dead. A recurring Nuzleaf drawn to resemble John Locke from Lost gave the "Nuzlocke" challenge its name, and it became a widely played rule set across the Pokémon series, especially among content creators. In 2014, Twitch Plays Pokémon let a crowd of more than 1.16 million people control a single game of Pokémon Red through chat commands; they finished it on March 1 after more than sixteen days.
Why it mattered
FromSoftware's Demon's Souls (2009) and Dark Souls (2011), directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, seemed built for this culture. Their difficulty, precise combat, and absence of an easy mode meant that mastery was visible and meaningful, and their interconnected levels were full of shortcuts, sequence breaks, and exploitable enemy behaviors. The community responded with an entire vocabulary of self-imposed challenges: runs at Soul Level 1, never leveling up; "no-hit" runs in which a single hit means starting over; all-bosses runs; runs on unusual controllers such as dance mats and instrument-shaped peripherals; runs without shields, without rolling, without armor. Streaming made these feats into shows, and the Soulslikes genre made the Souls community a template for how action RPGs are played in public.
The games' multiplayer design also shaped a distinctive etiquette. Players can leave messages for one another and summon strangers to help with bosses. In Elden Ring (2022), a player whose character wore no armor but a jar for a helmet volunteered through the summoning system to fight the notoriously hard boss Malenia on other people's behalf. Known as "Let Me Solo Her," the player was credited with thousands of victories (by his own count, 6,000–7,000 by early 2024) and became a folk hero. Meanwhile speedrunners discovered a "zip glitch" that warps characters across the map, and pushed the game's completion time under five minutes.
Legacy
Challenge runs changed what finishing a game means. For many players of RPGs today, the credits are the start: the first run learns the world, and the later ones test the player. The practice also changed the relationship between developers and fans. Designers now anticipate speedrunners and challenge-runners, sometimes adding achievements or modes that echo community rules, while communities preserve old techniques such as Save scumming only to forbid them in their own rulesets.
The lineage runs across this museum: from the voluntary hardships of NetHack and the rigid honor codes of tabletop players who refuse to fudge a roll, through Pokémon Nuzlockes, to the Souls community's level-one heroes, and back into design itself in games that treat Permadeath and mastery as features rather than punishments.
Marginalia
- Organized speedrunning is usually traced to Doom demo files; the COMPET-N leaderboard launched in November 1994.
- Quake Done Quick, a full-game Quake speedrun released in June 1997, introduced speedrunning to a broad audience.
- Games Done Quick began in January 2010 as Classic Games Done Quick and had raised more than $59.8 million for charity by January 2026.
- The Nuzlocke challenge was created in 2010 by UC Santa Cruz student Nick Franco in a webcomic about playing Pokémon Ruby.
- Twitch Plays Pokémon finished Pokémon Red on March 1, 2014, after more than 16 days, with over 1.16 million participants.
- Elden Ring players found a 'zip glitch' that lets them warp across the map; the game has been beaten in under five minutes.
- The Elden Ring player known as 'Let Me Solo Her' was credited with defeating the boss Malenia for other players thousands of times.
Quick answers
- What is Challenge Runs, Speedruns & the Souls Community?
- Players who had already beaten the game invented new ways to lose: finishing RPGs at level one, without being hit, blindfolded, in minutes, or under self-imposed rules of permadeath, and turned it into a spectator sport.
- When did Challenge Runs, Speedruns & the Souls Community begin?
- 1990s to the present.
- Why does Challenge Runs, Speedruns & the Souls Community matter?
- Challenge runs and speedruns turned finished single-player RPGs into endlessly replayable competitions and communities, and FromSoftware's Souls games made that culture central to how modern action RPGs are designed, streamed and discussed.
