#oneshorteye

And I don't think this is because Eye covers adventure games and Salt (mostly) covers racing games, platformers, and Punch-Out! Playing a game at a top speedrunner level is just different than playing casually, especially for games designed to be played slowly and thoughtfully. When speedrunning Space Quest, you know all (non-RNG-based) inputs you'll make long before you make them—but the same is true of Mario Kart! In both cases, the skill comes from inputting them correctly, as quickly as possible.

And OneShortEye points this out. He points out how certain runners are skilled at certain things, both at finding new exploits and at execution, some in general and some focused on specific games. Summoning Salt will occasionally note that one player is "more skilled" than others, but aside from the odd button-masher, I can't recall him ever explaining what skills set one speedrunner ahead of others.

Let me repeat that. OneShortEye puts more focus on the skills possessed by individual runners, but his videos frame speedrunning as a communal challenge rather than an individual competition.

Why? Well, part of it is just that the adventure game speedrunning community is tighter-knit. speedrun.com only lists a couple dozen speedrunners of the King's Quest series, fewer than run specifically All Night Nippon Super Mario Brothers, a game you've probably only heard about from that one jan Misali video. It's easier to find a feeling of community when most of the speedrunners in a video share a Discord server.

But it's also easier to find a feeling of community when you look. Even if Summoning Salt covered a game with a community the size of OneShortEye's, he wouldn't show as much of that community, because for the most part, Salt doesn't do interviews. He looks at the stats, digs through old community posts, and presents his findings.

To be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad way to make videos. It works! I like his videos! But it also means that Salt's personal voice is very strong, shaping the video and its "message" even more than it would if he "just" wrote, narrated, and edited everything. And also, AFAIK, Salt is not a speedrunner—or at least, not a speedrunner who shows up in the middle of videos to claim a world record. {EDIT: It turns out he actually is a speedrunner. I still think my thesis holds, though.}

I'm not sure what the alchemy is here. Some of it is OneShortEye's personal beliefs about speedrunning, which he had explicitly stated even before he started making videos. Some of it is that the people he interviews also share those beliefs. But I think some of it is that Eye has that insider's view, that he knows what it's like to be a speedrunner, that he embraces it.