About my Metroid Prime 1:49 run

I am writing this as I am watching a modern speedrun of the game, and it reminded me that back in 2014, I was a Metroid Prime speedrunner. Or rather, one day, one time, in 2014, I was a Metroid Prime speedrunner. It was the only run I ever did:

It's a very shitty run because I wasn't a Metroid Prime speedrunner. I tried to be for a while, but the game is very difficult and I was bad at it. I learned some tricks here and there, and I really enjoyed watching nate's run of it at AGDQ 2011 (I'm pretty sure my run tried to follow that), but I had never beaten the game in a single sitting, and I had never attempted a speedrun of it. And yet somehow on that faithful day in 2014, I did.

It's so odd to me that I was ever this "good" at Metroid Prime (good enough to be able to do a single segment speedrun of it with sequence breaks and glitches), because I have tried playing it recently again, and I can't remember anything. It's like I'm playing it for the first time.

Sure, I remember the music, space jump first, and general vibes, but I can't remember where anything is or what order to do things in. I feel like it wasn't me who did that run, it must've been someone else.

What's also weird about that run is where I did it. I think this also plays a big part in why I think this run is so odd.

I lived with my parents at the time (in 2014 I would've been 18), and for some reason I did the run in our guest room. We had a guest room with a sofa-bed, and a huge black CRT. I don't have a picture of that exact setup, but here's a photo I found from 2013 where I had the same CRT (and probably TV stand) in our laundry room:

So why on earth did I decide on that faithful day to hook up my Wii and presumably my school laptop in our guest room and attempt a Metroid Prime speedrun? I have no f***ing clue.

That's the main mystery. I can't imagine why I thought attempting a run of this game on a whim in our guest room, recording it through a EasyCAP on my school laptop was a good idea. I hadn't even beaten the game many times, probably only 3-4 times, maybe, at that point.

I had not practiced doing a full run of the game. I'm pretty sure I couldn't even imagine doing a full run. I barely knew where everything I needed was (I haven't looked through the run completely, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has a long pause at some point because I needed to look up where something was.).

I'm pretty sure it might be the first time I ever got the wild artifact early (happens around 25 minutes in). It's a trick that I remember being very difficult, and if you screw it up you have to reset.

So the only thing I can imagine, why I did this run, was that I just felt like playing Prime, knew that I would screw up early wild, and just wanted to know how it felt to play a game in the guest room, as weird as that is.

But then why did I decide to bring out my school laptop and EasyCAP and start recording? It makes no sense to me.

That's the thing I want to convey about this run: it shouldn't exist. I was not a Metroid Prime speedrunner. I probably hadn't even played the game in a year. I had not been practicing for a full run. I had (probably) never gotten early wild. I wasn't good at the game. I barely knew where anything was.

It's just so weird and cool to me that I have video evidence of this run. Without it, I'm pretty sure this run would be completely erased from my mind. If I saw on a leaderboard somewhere that I had a Metroid Prime run I would've thought it was a mistake.

ABR - Always Be Recording. I guess that's the lesson here.

Or maybe the lesson is "just do it". You never know what could happen.

Either way, this post is a mess. I am just in disbelief I ever did a run of this game and I needed to dump my brain.

I really wish I could go back to 2014 and ask myself what I am doing. But it's also kinda fun not knowing. It's just this artifact from 2014 and I have no idea why it came to be, but I am really happy that I did what I did.