It's a mixed bag. The speedrunning community is pretty diverse in terms of age, though it does skew younger (not a lot of boomers) and tends to be males from upper income countries, though there are MANY exceptions.

A good person to watch for overviews of the speedrunning community is SummoningSalt on Youtube.

Here is a good video on the speedrunning of 1987's "Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!" on the NES while blindfolded, an incredible feat for humans regardless of the medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZT6JEOC3D8

Here is a good video on the speedrunning of 1999's 'PokeMon Snap' for the N64, a game thought impossible to speedrun early on. Nonetheless, it has been speedran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYcWQP1tWfQ

In general, the community is non-normal and seems a bit, well, pointless, to a lot of others. But it's something that a lot of people enjoy doing to some degree or another and like everything else on the internet there is a thriving fanbase.

I'd say it's a little of both. On a game like 007 GoldenEye (N64), people have been speedrunning the game for almost 20 years, and are now in their early or late thirties. But there are still younger people that are getting to the game just now and getting new World Record runs. And this is just one game as an example, every game is different.

https://rankings.the-elite.net/goldeneye

I think most of the popular / good speedrunners are Twitch livestreamers who make enough from donations / ads / sponsorships to do it full-time. You can see some Twitch stats here: https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/ (although of course not every Twitch streamer is a speedrunner).

> This hobby must be time consuming.

I watched a speed run of Half Life 2. It took them 4 years. That's equivalent to a university degree. Some things I'll never understand...

There are definitely hardcore adult gamers in the speedrunning community, who have day jobs and families. I'm friends with a world-record-holding speedrunner, and he treats it like any other hobby. He enjoys spending his free time practicing, and will attend speedrunning events for fun.

I mean any competitive activity is going to be time consuming. Speedrunning isn't any different.

I thought speedrunners were fuzzing games somehow. Are you saying they play the game manually?

Speedrunners are playing the game manually, and sharing the tricks they find for how to exploit game mechanics to speed things up.

There exist something called TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) where you use an emulator with save states and either slow motion or the ability to advance frame-by-frame in order to construct the "ideal" run, but runs constructed these ways generally aren't actually playable by hand because they rely too much on frame-exact timing.

Yes, speedruns are humans playing the game live.

If preprogrammed inputs or whatever are used, the term TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) is used. Calling a TAS a speedrun would be a faux pas.

There’s different varieties of speed running. Some people do it entirely manually, others do Tool Assisted Speedruns (often abbreviated to TAS) where a program provides all the input, allowing frame perfect moves which humans are incapable of. There’s also a slowly growing trend of letting machine learning algorithms loose on games like Mario - that stuff to my knowledge is still at the stage of trying to get an AI to even be able to finish the game at all, but I’m sure with some time and effort we’ll start seeing techniques no one has even thought to try.

Speedrunning is primarily done manually. Some players use fuzzers for discovering tech, but TAS is a separate genre of speedrun and generally more of a novelty than anything.