Why do speedrunners race Super Metroid?
Because the 1986 original graded your time, and the 1994 one turned the grading into a sport, then into a charity’s main event.
Metroid may be the first series to ask to be raced: the original ends with five different screens depending on your clear time. Super Metroid inherited the clock, added categories, any-percent, 100 percent, low-percent, races, and became the traditional centrepiece of the Games Done Quick charity marathons.
SAVE OR KILL
The most famous donation in speedrunningThe choice
In Super Metroid’s escape sequence, Samus can detour to free the Etecoons and Dachora, the animals who taught her. It costs seconds. Since about 2011, GDQ audiences have bid real donation money on the outcome: save the animals, or kill the animals and take the faster time.
The creators’ ruling
Asked by Nintendo in a 2017 interview, director Yoshio Sakamoto and composer Kenji Yamamoto settled it: save them. The animals were put there to be rescued. The bids, of course, continue.
The receipt
Canon sides with the donors who save: the same animals reappear, alive and escaping, in the finale of Metroid Fusion. The detour is the true ending whether the clock likes it or not.
Why this game
Super Metroid runs are short, dense, and legible: a great run reads as mastery rather than glitch-hunting, and a race of three runners can stay undecided until the escape. It is the marathon’s reliable finale for a reason.