Speedrunning: We talk to Angrish about the rare genre

I had the pleasure of talking to Sunil Sharma aka Angrish from Punjab, who is one of the only few Indian streamers who performs speedruns of various games on his stream. He started streaming since 27^th July, 2017 and has been speedrunning  live since then.

When did you first come across speedrunning and what got you interested in it?

I had no idea what speedrunning was. One day I was browsing on the internet, looking for Dark Souls 3 content and I came across people doing challenge runs on the game. I got really attracted to that and I wanted to do them myself. But when I jumped into it and started doing the challenges, I felt they were actually not challenging enough for me. Upon further research on the different challenges, I came across speedrunning, which felt like a real challenge. I did my first speedrun on January 2018, and the game was Bloodborne. I wanted to do my first run on Dark Souls 3 but my PC was broken at the time, so I had to rely on my PS4.

That’s a really interesting turn of events. What games did you do speedruns on?

Bloodborne was the first game I did a speedrun on. Later I did speedruns on games like Beyond Two Souls, God of War (2018) and Cuphead. Currently I am doing speedruns on Dark Souls 3.

Wow. You did speedruns on quite a few games already. What games can we expect to see your speedruns on, in the future?

I want to do speedruns on Dark Souls Remastered and Celeste.

I see, that would be fun to watch. When did you first start playing games on console/pc, what’s your story?

My maternal uncle used to sell consoles in the early 90s. So, we had the availability of consoles since back then and I have been playing since then. My first console was an NES and my first game was Mario.

Wow, so you have been playing games since you were really young. That’s amazing. Tell me more about your early days on Twitch.

When I first planned on starting a Twitch Channel, I planned on streaming FIFA 18. But after watching the toxicity in the competitive communities, I didn’t feel like being a part of them and I started disliking the game itself because of them. I feel like people in those communities are over-competitive and not really helpful. Later, I joined the Speedrunning communities and I felt like they were quite the opposite. You just have to post a message and you’ll see that all the people, even the world record holders, will always be open to helping out other people in their communities. This made me feel like home and I chose to stream speedruns on my streams instead. I even got hosts from world record holders on Twitch, while I was just learning the runs and that that gave me a really big boost.

You have been handling the Speedrunning section of the Indian Broadcasters community, tell me more about it.

Yes, we have been promoting Speedrunning in India and we are ready to help out anyone who is interested to learn more about it. Just join the Indian Broadcasters discord server and drop a message. Also, our community has an event planned on 21^st July, 2018. This event will have a Speedrun section in which the Cuphead community will do a live tutorial on how to speedrun that game and there will also be a tournament for speedrunners. Later, Angrish will be doing a speedrun and Miruscaststreams from Hyderabad is going to speedrun on Mirror’s Edge.

It was a lot of fun talking to Angrish and watching his stream. His streams are really entertaining and he keeps the viewers interested by constantly replying to everyone and answering everyone’s questions. Go check out his Twitch channel and say hello!