Speedrunning Terms Explained: Any%, 100%, 1CC and Frame-Perfect

Summary: Most speedrunning vocabulary is category names, and a category name is really a ruleset: any% allows anything, 100% demands everything, 1CC bans continues, glitchless bans the shortcuts. The rest of the jargon is about timing and proof, because a run only counts if the clock is measured the way the leaderboard says and a moderator can verify it.

• Any% is the fastest route to the ending with no restrictions, glitches included.
• 100% means whatever that game's community has agreed counts as everything, which is not always the in-game counter.
• 1CC comes from arcades and means clearing the game on a single credit, no continues.
• Frame-perfect describes an input with a window of one frame, which is why runners practise single rooms for months.

Any%

Any% is the default category in most speedrunning communities: reach the end of the game as fast as possible with no qualifiers at all. The percentage refers to completion, so any% means any amount of the game is fine as long as you trigger the ending. Sequence breaks, clipping through walls and skipping most of the map are all legitimate.

This is why any% times can look absurd next to a normal playthrough. A game that takes forty hours to finish honestly can have an any% record measured in minutes, because a discovered exploit lets a runner jump straight to the credits. When that happens, communities usually add a second category rather than banning the trick.

100%

100% means collecting everything and completing every objective the category defines as required. Some games make this simple with an on-screen percentage counter. Plenty do not, and in those cases the definition is community consensus written into the leaderboard rules: all collectibles, all upgrades, sometimes all achievements, sometimes explicitly not achievements.

Between the two extremes sit the fractional categories: all bosses, all main missions, all dungeons. They exist because any% and 100% often skip the parts of a game people actually enjoy watching.

1CC and Credit-Feeding

1CC stands for one-credit completion, sometimes one-coin clear, and it comes straight out of the arcade era. Finishing an arcade game or an arcade-style shooter without using a single continue is the benchmark achievement in those communities, and in many cases it is harder than a speedrun of the same title.

Credit-feeding is the opposite: finishing by pumping in continues every time you die. Arcade machines were designed around it, since the continue countdown existed to extract another coin, and many arcade games were balanced so that reaching the ending without paying repeatedly was close to impossible. Home ports differ, with some capping the number of credits to preserve the challenge and others allowing unlimited continues for faithfulness.

Frame-Perfect, Frame Rules and Frame Advantage

A frame is one rendered image, so on a game running at 60 frames per second a frame is about 17 milliseconds. A frame-perfect trick has to be executed in exactly one of those frames, which is why runners drill single sections thousands of times and why input latency in a controller or keyboard is a real consideration rather than marketing. Wired peripherals from brands like Logitech remain popular in the scene for exactly that reason.

Two related terms cause confusion. A frame rule is when a game only checks certain events every few frames, so saving four frames of movement can save nothing at all while saving five saves a whole chunk. Frame advantage is a fighting game term for who can act first after an exchange, and has nothing to do with speedrunning despite sharing a word.

Glitchless, Low% and Other Restrictions

Restricted categories exist to keep a game runnable after a major exploit is found. Glitchless bans the exploits, though the boundary between a glitch and a technique is argued constantly. Low% inverts 100% and asks for the ending with the fewest possible items or upgrades. No major glitches sits between glitchless and any%, permitting movement tricks but not sequence breaks.

You will also see version and hardware restrictions in the category name, because an old cartridge release and a modern re-release often behave differently. Emulator runs are frequently listed separately from console runs for the same reason.

Timing Vocabulary: RTA, IGT and Splits

RTA means real time attack, a clock that runs from the first input to the final trigger and never stops, loading screens included. IGT is in-game time, the counter the game itself keeps, which often pauses during loads and cutscenes. A run that wins on IGT can lose on RTA, so the leaderboard states which one is authoritative.

• Splits: checkpoint times recorded by timer software during a run.
• PB: personal best, your own fastest completed run.
• WR: world record, the fastest verified run in a category.
• Sum of best: your best-ever time for each split added together, a theoretical target.
• Reset: abandoning a run early because a split went badly.
• Retiming: a moderator recalculating a submitted time from the video.
• IL: individual level, a run of one stage rather than the whole game.

Movement and Trick Terminology

Every game grows its own trick names, but a few recur across the hobby. Clipping is passing through geometry that should be solid. Out of bounds means leaving the intended playable space, often to skip a section. Buffering is queueing an input during an animation so it fires on the earliest possible frame. Sequence breaking is doing things in an order the developers did not plan for, and it is the backbone of most any% routes.

Two more worth recognising because they sound like cheating and are not: RNG manipulation means deliberately steering a game's random number generation with known inputs, and death abuse means dying on purpose because respawning is faster than walking back.

How Runs Get Verified

Leaderboards are community-run rather than official, and each game's moderators check submissions against the category rules before a time appears. The submission process expects video of the full run, a stated category, and a time that survives retiming; incomplete footage is the most common rejection reason. Site-wide moderation rules give moderators a window of a few weeks to process a queue, which is why a submitted run is not instantly visible.

Top categories often carry stricter proof requirements, such as a live stream or a handcam, precisely because a fabricated record is easy to produce and hard to disprove after the fact.

Choosing a Game to Learn On

The best first run is a short game with an active leaderboard, since you want a route that already exists and people who can tell you why your split is slow. Older and smaller titles are ideal, and stores such as Zaphira Games and GameSeal tend to carry them cheaply. Check which version the leaderboard uses before buying, because a remaster can be a different category entirely.

Picking a Category and Starting the Clock

Read the category rules first, because they answer nearly every question this vocabulary raises: which timer counts, which version is allowed, what proof is needed and whether the trick you found is permitted. Then pick a category that matches what you enjoy, since any% rewards exploit hunting while 100% and 1CC reward execution. If the game you want to learn lives on Switch, browse Nintendo gift cards and get the first attempt on the board.