speedrun.com and Twin Galaxies: two churches

There are two churches.

Twin Galaxies keeps score. Walter Day opened the arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, on 10 November 1981, walked more than 100 other arcades that year writing numbers down, and published the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard on 9 February 1982. Ottumwa's mayor declared the town Video Game Capital of the World. Guinness printed the numbers. The unit is points. Bigger wins, until a kill screen says otherwise.

speedrun.com keeps time. Peter Chase, from Waterford, Ireland, put the site up in 2014. It was built to be easier to submit to than Speed Demos Archive, and it became the default table for people who finish a game as fast as they can. Wired called it the definitive leaderboard. By July 2021 it held boards for more than 20,000 games. The unit is seconds. Smaller wins.

They are not rivals in the way two newspapers are rivals. They do not print the same list and argue about the order. They measure different things, with different evidence, for different rooms. Calling either of them "the leaderboard" is how you start a fight that does not need to happen.

We are not here to replace them. We are here because a third object is missing: a cross-game table that can hold a point score and a time in the same world without mashing them into one column.

How Twin Galaxies became a church

Day did not start a website. He started a room, then a notebook, then a magazine table. Video Games, Joystick, USA Today and a handful of others printed what he had. In January 1983 ABC filmed a championship for That's Incredible!. In July 1983 the US National Video Game Team left Ottumwa in a 44-foot bus. The 1983 Masters Tournament fed the 1984 US Guinness book.

The method was the method of a referee. A human being looked at a machine, or later at a tape, and said yes or no. Hardware mattered. The cabinet was the altar. MAME, the emulator, became a heresy when a score claimed to come from a cabinet and the pixels said otherwise. That fight ate Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong records in 2018, split Twin Galaxies from Guinness in 2020, and ended in 2024 with the scores parked in a historical database rather than on the live board.

A church that old accumulates relics and schisms. Ownership changed after Day left in 2010. Jace Hall took custody in 2014. Submissions acquired a fee. The site still calls itself the official supplier of video game records to Guinness, a sentence that has been true, false, and half-true depending on the year.

What did not change is the unit. Twin Galaxies is a score church. Time exists there, in later speed-run sections, but the founding sacrament is a number that goes up.

How speedrun.com became a church

Speedrunning is older than the site. Doom demos in 1994, COMPET-N, Quake Done Quick in 1997, Speed Demos Archive from 1998, TASVideos from 2003. For years the public record of a fast run was a file on a specialist board, or a tape mailed to Twin Galaxies that nobody else could watch. SDA published the fastest run and not a table of everyone else. Verification was slow on purpose.

Chase's site inverted the cost. Categories multiplied. Any%, 100%, low%, glitchless, no major glitches. Moderators are volunteers who know one game. Evidence is a video, often with a timer, often with a hand-cam if the game has been burned before. Cheating is a solved-enough problem that the community writes forensic essays about splicing, TASbotting and luck files. Dream's Minecraft runs became a public statistics lesson. Todd Rogers, whose Dragster 5.51 sat in Guinness as the longest-standing video game record, was taken apart by a disassembly that said 5.57 was the floor.

Elo, a company founded in 2012, acquired the site in 2020. The church got a landlord. The liturgy did not change. Time in, video in, moderator, board.

What did not change is the unit. speedrun.com is a time church. Points exist there when a community invents a score category, but the founding sacrament is a number that goes down.

Time versus score is not a preference

A time is a path. You can watch it. You can split it. You can put it on a marathon couch and raise money for doctors. The audience understands "faster" without a manual.

A score is a stay. Six hours of Pac-Man. Sixty-seven and a half hours of Joust, James Vollandt, 107,216,700 points, 1985. The audience has to believe a number it cannot sit through. The evidence is a photograph, a referee, a tape, a stream, a machine that still holds the digits when the player steps back.

That is why the churches diverged, and why each is right inside its walls.

Twin Galaxies spent forty years learning how a point score lies: extra lives, dip switches, the wrong ROM, an emulator that paints a cabinet, a friend who is also the referee. speedrun.com spent a decade learning how a time lies: a spliced MP4, a slowed clock, a modified JAR, a credits warp the category did not allow.

Borrowing one church's rules for the other church's unit is how you get nonsense. A Pac-Man kill-screen score is not a speedrun. An Ocarina of Time any% is not a high score. They can live in the same world. They cannot share a sort.

What we are, if we are careful

HISCORE already has the only sentence that matters here. Two numbers are comparable when game, mode, rules, unit and dir match. A time and a point score never match. They should never sit in one ranked list. The protocol can carry both. The table can show both. The rank cannot mix them.

That is the whole product idea, and it is smaller than it sounds.

• Twin Galaxies is the specialist for arcade score, hardware, referees, the long memory.
• speedrun.com is the specialist for completion time, categories, video, the wide memory.
• We are the cross-game table for games that have nowhere else to put a number: jam games, browser games, things built in an afternoon, things that will never justify a referee or a moderator team.

If a Donkey Kong score belongs on Twin Galaxies, it should go there. If a Celeste any% belongs on speedrun.com, it should go there. If a game we have never heard of wants a board tonight, that is the gap.

Import is not replacement. A row that says imported and names its source is a citation. A row that pretends to be the new official record of a scene that already has a church is a raid.

The churches will keep doing the hard work we are not staffed to do. Hardware authentication. Frame-perfect video review. Decades of category law. We should cite them, link them, and stay out of their nave.

The missing object is still missing: one place a player can stand and see a life across games, with the units honest, with the churches still standing. That place is a table, not a throne.

Honesty table

Sources

• Twin Galaxies: founding dates, Ottumwa, National Scoreboard, USNVGT, 1988 Guinness pause, 1998 book, Day's 2010 departure, Jace Hall 2014, Mitchell and Rogers cases
• Twin Galaxies site
• Speedrunning: COMPET-N, SDA, TASVideos, speedrun.com 2014, 20,000-plus games as of July 2021, Wired
• Peter Chase as founder: Crunchbase; Elo acquisition 2020 as reported on the site's own forum and community wikis
• HISCORE argument and the standard: comparison key, unit, dir, imported
• Mitchell resolution 2024: Ars Technica, Twin Galaxies statement

Retrieved 18 August 2026.