Nobody Remembers These Games — That's Exactly Why Speedrunners Love Them

There's a particular kind of excitement that comes from being first. Not first to finish a game — first to understand it. First to realize that a wall in level three is slightly thinner than it looks, or that the jump animation can be canceled in a way the developer almost certainly never intended. In mainstream speedrunning, those discoveries happened years ago. Someone already mapped every frame of Celeste. Someone already wrote the wiki for Hollow Knight routing. But scroll far enough into the forgotten corners of indie gaming history, and you'll find entire worlds nobody has touched.

That's where things get genuinely interesting.

The Graveyard Has Good Bones

For every indie game that broke through — every Undertale, every Stardew Valley — there are hundreds that didn't. Games released to a handful of reviews on obscure forums, greenlit on Steam during a more chaotic era, or uploaded to itch.io on a Tuesday afternoon and never updated again. Most of these games weren't bad, exactly. They were just unlucky. Wrong timing, no marketing budget, no community traction.

Speedrunners are starting to treat that graveyard like a treasure map.

The appeal makes a lot of sense when you think about it. A forgotten indie game from 2013 hasn't had ten years of optimized routing. Nobody has spent thousands of hours isolating every frame-perfect input. The movement systems, the hitboxes, the collision quirks — all of it is essentially uncharted territory. For a competitive speedrunner who's tired of fighting over half-second improvements in a game that's been dissected to death, stumbling onto something completely untouched feels like finding a locked room in a house everyone thought they knew.

Unintentional Brilliance

Here's the thing about small indie games: they're often built by one or two people working with limited QA time and even more limited budgets. That's not a criticism — it's actually what makes them such fertile ground for speedrunning. The same constraints that kept these games from being polished to perfection are the exact constraints that left interesting cracks in the foundation.

A solo developer building a platformer in Game Maker probably wasn't stress-testing every possible movement combination. They were making sure the game didn't crash and that the story made sense. Which means the jump physics might interact with slopes in a completely unintended way. Which means there might be a room skip nobody ever found because nobody ever looked.

Speedrunners call these "unintentional exploits," and in forgotten indie games, they're everywhere. Sometimes they're tiny — a pixel-perfect ledge clip that saves three seconds. Sometimes they're massive — an entire late-game area that can be bypassed because of how the game tracks a single variable. Either way, discovering them feels electric in a way that modern AAA speedrunning rarely does anymore.

The Community Angle Is Different Here

Mainstream speedrunning communities can be intense. When millions of people are watching the same game, the stakes feel enormous and the gatekeeping can get real. But the communities forming around obscure indie speedruns have a completely different vibe — partly because everyone involved is basically a pioneer by default.

When a game has twelve people on its leaderboard, every single one of those runners knows each other. They're sharing discoveries in real time, building routing documents collaboratively, and genuinely celebrating each other's records because there's no ego in being the world record holder for a game that most of the internet has never heard of. The motivation is pure curiosity rather than clout.

Some of these communities have actually reached out to the original developers, who are often floored to discover their abandoned project suddenly has a Discord server and a weekly race event. A few indie devs have quietly pushed patches specifically to support the speedrunning scene that formed around their forgotten game — fixing certain crashes without patching out the exploits that made the run interesting. That kind of relationship between developer and community almost never happens at the AAA level.

What Makes a Good "Graveyard Run"

Not every forgotten indie is worth the effort. Speedrunners who hunt in this space have developed a pretty good instinct for what makes a game worth pursuing. A few things tend to show up consistently.

First, the game needs movement. Pure puzzle games or visual novels don't have much room for optimization — there's no routing to discover when the path is linear. But a janky 2D platformer with inconsistent physics? A top-down action game where the hitboxes were clearly eyeballed? That's where the magic hides.

Second, the game needs to be completable. Some abandoned indie projects are genuinely broken — softlocks, missing assets, crashes that make a full run impossible. Those are interesting artifacts of gaming history, but they're not speedrun candidates. The sweet spot is a game that's rough around the edges but technically functional from start to finish.

Third — and this is the part that's hard to quantify — the game needs some kind of soul. The best forgotten indie speedruns aren't just technical exercises. They're games that had a genuine idea behind them, something that made them worth finishing even if the execution was imperfect. Runners who spend weeks optimizing a game tend to develop a real affection for it, and that affection is easier to sustain when there's something worth caring about underneath the jank.

Tiny Games, Lasting Records

There's something fitting about the speedrunning community circling back to indie gaming's forgotten corners. The whole indie scene was built on the idea that small games could matter — that a project made by one person in a spare bedroom could mean as much as anything with a hundred-million-dollar budget. Speedrunners hunting through the graveyard are essentially making that argument all over again, just with a timer running.

These games didn't get their moment the first time around. But in a weird, roundabout way, they're getting it now — not through reviews or Steam sales, but through a handful of dedicated runners who decided that being the best at something nobody else knows about is still worth doing.

Honestly? That tracks perfectly with why people fell in love with indie gaming in the first place.