> requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played I agree here, but I just want to emphasize that Any% speedruns (runs where you purposely

> requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played I agree here, but I just want to emphasize that Any% speedruns (runs where you purposely exploit glitches or flaws with the game engine to trigger the final cutscene as fast as possible) still take incredible amounts of skill. More skill than playing the game as it was intended to be played, in a lot of cases. The current Ocarina of Time route involves exploiting several glitches that require pressing the correct button combination on a specific frame (N64 games run at 20fps), jumping at just the pixel perfect angle to slide through a model's corner/collision tracking, etc. Much more difficult stuff than beating the game straight through. Super Monkey Ball 2 (Gamecube game) speedruns require pulling off maneuvers trickier than anything the levels were explicitly designed for, the difficulty of which is hard to overstate. That game is hard. Speedrunning a game with true RNG everywhere like Nethack is definitely a beast of its own since you can't memorize routes, but even runs with completely static routes are incredibly difficult to pull off.