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The best speedrunning, glitches & game hacking videos, according to Hacker News
45 videos about speedrunning, glitches & game hacking that Hacker News commenters keep pointing each other to, ranked by how many separate months they were recommended. Part of Games & Game Development.
Praised as a brilliant, deadpan and inventive hardware hack, and a good starting point for Tom7's videos.
The go-to accessible introduction to neuroevolution and NEAT, praised for crediting prior research.
Constantly cited as the canonical example of arbitrary code execution through gameplay and of deep system knowledge among speedrunners.
HN loves the deep, hands-on look at N64 hardware quirks such as bus contention and the surprisingly large wins from low-hanging optimizations.
Strongly recommended as a gripping story and art piece worth watching even if you do not care about games.
HN recommends it as an engaging lesson in probability and in how statistics can expose cheating.
HN points to it as the standard demonstration of arbitrary code execution on a Game Boy, and of glitches and bugs being turned into a working computer.
HN commenters rate it a great GDQ watch and point to its feats, such as streaming video and Skype through controller ports, as inspiring hacks.
Recommended as a well-researched rebuttal of the idea that Nintendo simply forgot an optimization flag.
Praised as an engrossing, in-depth look at SM64 mechanics that is surprisingly compelling to watch.
HN recommends it as a gripping entry point into speedrunning and as a model of a well-made history video.
Recommended as an inspiring story of hardware reverse engineering and persistence.
Recommended as an entertaining, hilarious view of developers watching a speedrunner break their game.
Cited as a landmark of speedrunning, where a trick once limited to tool-assisted runs was pulled off live on hardware.
HN recommends it as a rigorous, fun example of reverse engineering a game to predict and conquer its RNG.
Recommended as an approachable, detailed look at console hardware architecture, FreeBSD in the PS4 and console hacking.
Recommended as a deep-dive rabbit hole showing extraordinary knowledge of game internals.
HN commenters recommend it as a showcase of the deep reverse-engineering and glitch knowledge behind speedrunning, and cite it for the wrongwarp trick.
Held up as a favorite tech talk and a great hard-debugging story about patching a game binary.
HN points to it as a stunning demonstration of arbitrary code execution in a console game and of what speedrunners effectively do as vulnerability researchers.
HN points to it as a fun, technically deep talk that makes memory-safety bugs vivid through a beloved game.
HN recommends it as the primary source on Sony's ECDSA nonce-reuse blunder and the history of console cracking.
Cited in anti-piracy discussions as a clear explanation of clever retro copy-protection tricks, though one commenter disputes a claim about Leander.
Shared as a favorite game-development anecdote with a clear technical explanation.
Cited as the original, accurate account of the Nocom exploit, a story of years of player tracking and impressive technical work.
HN recommends it as a thorough, well-researched history, and one commenter finds such videos more exhaustive than Wikipedia's sourced articles.
HN people cite it as the clearest explanation of how the credits warp exploit works.
HN points to it as a mind-blowing seed-cracking story related to other Minecraft RNG reversal work.
Recommended as a fun, detailed account of how the PS3's security was broken.
HN points to it as a showpiece of what Factorio's circuit network can compute, alongside other absurd in-game computing feats.
HN cites it as a source for how Valve uses machine learning on player behavior to detect cheating.
HN uses it as a showcase of extreme FPS movement skill, such as rocket and grenade jumping.
HN cites it as an impressive example of building computation inside Dwarf Fortress.
HN points to it as a funny, fun-to-watch example of what TAS can do to a game's input handling.
HN points to it as the concise explanation of the latest competitive NES Tetris technique.
Linked as the canonical video of the first fully automatic NetHack bot ascension in threads on NetHack and game-playing AI.
HN uses it as a showcase of what skilled bullet hell play looks like, with dense patterns dodged through a tiny hitbox rather than luck.
Used as a reference for how the Switch was actually broken, including the Tegra debug backdoor, and for facts about its non-FreeBSD kernel.
Cited as the classic example of arbitrary code execution inside a game, with later runs injecting Pong, Snake and Flappy Bird.
Pointed to as a walkthrough of the BASIC listing of a famous game partly written in BASIC.
Cited as the canonical example of Quake running on an exotic display, usually in 'will it run Doom' threads.
Pointed to as an early example of LLM-powered NPC dialog in games.
Used as the canonical example of arbitrary code execution through nothing but controller input, often in talks about speedrunning and exploits.
HN uses it as a reference when discussing anti-cheat limits, particularly external hardware and AI cheats that bypass kernel-level protection.
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