YouTube’s Voice of Speedrunning Talks Music, GDQ, And New ‘Running With Speed’ Documentary
As a video game speedrunning historian, Summoning Salt has amassed over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube not by simply documenting speedrun world records, but by transforming the characters, competition, and strategy innovations behind the world records into brilliantly engaging stories.
Each video in his World Record Progression series details how speedrunners chipped away at world record times to complete video games as fast as possible, and his commitment to storytelling has built him an audience of millions that extends well beyond speedrunners themselves.
Summoning Salt is featured playing ‘Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out’ in Running with Speed.
Wild Arrow Media
As Summoning Salt explained to me in a recent interview, the broad appeal of speedrunning is part amazement and part nostalgia for the games: “Even if you’re not interested in speedrunning — you can appreciate a good story about a world record battle or how people lowered a record… And also just the idea of a game that you’re familiar with that you’ve played on a casual level being obliterated and destroyed by a ton of glitches or just a really clean glitch-free playthrough. It can be appealing to see a game that you love played on a level that you couldn’t even imagine.”
While Summoning Salt does not reveal his name or face for privacy’s sake, his voice has become synonymous with speedrunning for so many people — an accolade that he accepts with humility: “It’s not something that I expected. I don’t really love listening to the sound of my own voice, but you get used to it over time. It’s great that people associate me so strongly with [speedrunning]. It’s not something that I ever sought out, but I guess after you’ve been doing it for six years and have a pretty big following, it’s natural that would happen.”
His familiar voice made him the logical choice to narrate Running with Speed: The Fastest Gamers on Earth, a brand new feature documentary about speedrunning from directors Patrick Lope and Nicholas Mross.
The documentary (available for purchase through the official website) is a brilliant introduction to the origins and evolution of speedrunning, but also has plenty of intimate behind-the-scenes footage with community figures that reveals just how much it means to people, and how massive speedrunning has become as an emerging form of entertainment.
Redbull-sponsored Mario runner GrandPooBear is featured shortly after his Speedrun Sessions tour, where fans piled into barcades across the country to witness his elite skills, and Super Mario Bros. 3 record holder MitchFlowerPower recounts his feature on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Much of the documentary also focuses on how the marathon speedrunning event Games Done Quick (GDQ) grew from a basement couch to a twice-yearly gaming juggernaut that has raised over $41 million for charity.
These days, the event attracts hundreds of thousands of viewers, but it’s been a cornerstone of the community since its humble beginnings thirteen years ago. “It’s huge,” Summoning Salt said, “When it first started, people would submit all these different games to it, even though there were very few people who would attend it back in the day… But if you were a speedrunner, you watched GDQ every year, you got excited for it, that’s how it was. Even today, it’s still huge — even though the speedrunning community has gotten like 15 to 20 times as big, GDQ is still the biggest live speedrunning event, it’s retained a lot of its audience over the years, and people still get really excited for it.”
Summoning Salt was first featured in the documentary as the world record holder for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! but the directors soon re-approached him to join the project as a narrator and advisor: “They would send me some scripts, and I would look through it and provide some suggestions for what to change… they wanted to get some fact checking from me and thoughts on each segment, and then I would record the narration and send it back”
In the future, Summoning Salt is interested in contributing to projects like Running With Speed which “have a pretty big place in the community,” but plans on sticking to World Record Progression videos on his own channel. Most recently, he published The History of Lego Star Wars World Records, a 91 minute chronicle of how passionate runners simultaneously cooperated and competed to drive down the world record time.
A screenshot showing just a portion of Summoning Salt’s painstakingly researched document for his … [+] ‘Lego Star Wars’ video
Summoning Salt
The video itself is wildly interesting, but I found myself just as captivated by the behind-the-scenes video shared on Summoning Salt’s second channel, where he shares the painstaking process behind researching for the video alongside the Lego Star Wars community members who helped him. This close-knit group of runners tracked down videos of runs and helped explained the game’s complex tricks and techniques.
Few of his videos are created without this close collaboration with each game’s community, but every group of runners that Summoning Salt has worked with are slightly different:
“A lot of these communities are really really tightly knit and they’re all really great friends despite being kind of like competitors — They’re each trying to get the record. I just did a video on Lego Star Wars and those guys were all in a Discord call when the video dropped because they were all excited and they all wanted to see themselves and also their friends in the community in the video. So some of them are really tightly knit like that at the top, and others [like Super Mario 64’s community] are a little more decentralized, where people kind of do their own thing. There’s still friendships in the community but it’s not necessarily the kind of thing where all the top ten runners know each other really well, like it sometimes is in a smaller community…”
While many of speedrunning’s most popular games are driven by gamers’ nostalgia for the 80s or 90s, a new generation of speedrunners are nostalgic for an entirely different era of games, including Lego Star Wars. However, Summoning Salt thinks the classics are here to stay: “I don’t think people are going to stop running Super Mario Brothers or Ocarina of Time any time soon, or games like that. Those are always going to be there. I think these games that were popular a little more recently, like 10-15 years ago, like you said, as time goes on and nostalgia builds, people are going to want to run them more. And then those are the games that people are going to put a lot of time into optimizing, because they weren’t previously as optimized.”
Other speedrunning games’ popularity are driven by influencers, such as YouTuber MoistCr1TiKaL’s recent challenge for a (terrible) game called Amok Runner: the player who had the world record time at the end of a two week period would win $10,000. While some communities would recoil from the idea of a mega-popular YouTuber creating a sudden influx of newcomers, Summoning Salt thinks it’s good for speedrunning at large:
“I think it’s great for speedrunning. Any time you’re going to create hype around an event where a lot of people can try it and contribute, I think that’s a really good thing. I guess I do feel a little bad for moderators on speedrun.com who have a bunch of runs, but a lot of the time I think those situations are worked out in advance, where they know there’s going to be something coming up so they have a lot of moderators ready. As a whole I think it’s a really really good thing and I hope more events like it take place.”
Just as recognizable as Summoning Salt’s voice and painstakingly researched scripts is the music used throughout his videos. We’re Finally Landing by 90’s synthwave band Home welcomes viewers to almost every one of his videos, and he hand-selects tracks to accompany major moments throughout his longform content:
“I think music is something I spend a lot of time on that people don’t always think I would. People just go ‘oh cool, there’s good music in the video,’ but to get it there, there’s a lot of time and effort that goes into finding artists, contacting them, getting their permission, and then very carefully selecting what track fits with the mood or the feeling of a certain scene in a video… Music sets the tone of what you want the audience to be feeling. If you know there’s going to be a serious moment, you can tell your audience without saying any words… A lot of the time, music speaks louder than words in conveying an emotion that you want from a scene. And I think it would be good for YouTube if people focused more on adding the right music to their videos to get it feeling the way they want it to feel.”
Summoning Salt cites Jon Bois as a massive influence on his own YouTube channel, both because of his masterful use of music, and because of the way he transforms videos about sports into highly-engaging stories for a more general audience:
“With Jon Bois and I, we both make videos about stories, and his stories happen to be about sports, and mine happen to be about speedrunning. But they’re both very similar in the type of videos they are… He is the same way where he, I believe, selects very carefully what music he wants to go in each scene, and uses it to craft part of the narrative, so he was a big influence. I started watching him around the same time that I started making YouTube videos myself. So yeah, he’s probably the biggest influence on me.”
Summoning Salt’s dedication to research, production quality and, above all else, storytelling makes him one of the most-viewed gaming channels on YouTube. He is a narrator who knows the joys and heartbreaks that come with speedrunning and embodies the role of dedicated historian among the communities with which he collaborates. While he wouldn’t tell me which game he’s researching next (I did ask), his 1.5 million captivated subscribers and I are sure to tune in.
