The Death of PACE

Did we really appreciate its ripples throughout our space?

October 9, 2025

This June, I finally had the means to fly out to Minneapolis and experience a GDQ event in person. GDQ was something I’d been hearing about online for practically my entire conscious life. PACE was not.

Major speedrun events are the realization of a hobby that continually struggles to escape esoterica when attached to any game that isn’t Super Mario 64. Wii Sports, for one, is one of the most abundant games to ever exist. Put a timer next to it, and immediately it bears the dreaded adjective “niche”. It’s impossibly optimized, yet hilarious and novel. It’s brought countless people together, yet cannot be considered in any serious way. GDQ, which showcases hundreds of games every year, seems like the only organization big enough to defy these limits.

So the fact that PACE ever existed should surprise you. Every other event we’ve seen is propped up by an external superpower. GDQ, in its current state, is managed by people with over a decade of corporate experience. Fast 50 was managed by Ludwig, one of the most popular livestreamers on the planet. It's no coincidence, then, that these marathons have fielded sentimental complaints. To some, GDQ has begun to feel faceless. Fast 50 received bouts of initial criticism from people who felt it didn't adequately represent the speedrunning community.

The one advantage PACE held over the world was not having that problem. It committed to an authenticity no one else could provide, no matter how much less logistically practical that made it. It was by speedrunners, for speedrunners, forever. But I never really thought about it like that until we lost it.

I had no idea what to expect when I registered for Summer PACE 2024. It just seemed like the better choice when I realized my friends would be attending in droves. (Not needing a plane ticket was pretty cool, too.) For reference, every GDQ event is held in a major city. Minneapolis and Pittsburgh, the locations of its two main venues, are places any American has heard of. Laurel, Maryland, on the other hand, is not. It’s the former home of Xanadu Games, a dedicated facility for various competitive Super Smash Bros. tournaments–and, of course, PACE.

Laurel is a suburb situated almost exactly between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It’s mainly known for horse racing. In fact, Xanadu Games shared a building with the race track lobby. Walk too far out from the central happenings at PACE, and you might find yourself almost accidentally betting on a horse at what you thought was a change machine. But let’s say you haven’t even gotten there yet. If you were starting from the hotel and trying to walk over to Xanadu, as of June 2024, here’s what you would have had to do:

And that’s assuming you’re staying at the Sleep Inn. If you’re staying at the Best Western, you have to mosey down Second Street and jaywalk over to the Sleep Inn before you do any of that.

Here's what that same process looks like at GDQ:

  1. Go downstairs.

So, okay. I know it seems like GDQ is far in the lead here. I can’t speak for Pittsburgh, but Minneapolis is probably the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in. The only thing GDQ attendees widely dislike about it is how early everything closes - PACE definitely takes the point there for the 24/7 Denny’s just down the main road. Besides that, though, Laurel was actively made fun of by PACEgoers. American attendees were often amused by the fact that Europeans were coming all the way across the Atlantic just to see this one random town in Maryland. Of course, you could easily visit D.C. or Baltimore, too - those are the start and end points of that train I mentioned earlier. But that’s not necessarily part of the deal. Xanadu Games itself functioned as an oasis in suburbia.

So, just one question, then. Why was PACE so fun?

What I’m describing is not a universal experience. It is not difficult to craft a situation in which you’d have positively zero fun at a speedrun marathon, and even being a speedrunner isn’t quite enough to prevent that. That’s because PACE was compartmentalized - it couldn’t claim to be as diverse as GDQ. There were probably more Wii Play runners at Summer PACE 2024 than runners of some notably popular games. That being said, the communities it housed were unendingly passionate. If you happened to be into 3D Mario, like I was, you were really, really in luck.

The Super Mario Odyssey any% LTA came at the perfect time. Odyssey had managed to build enough credibility and entertainment value to justify such an event just before PACE ceased to exist. What I considered even more serendipitous was the opportunity I got to commentate it. At the time, it had seemed to me like the first and only chance I’d get to do in-person commentary. (I’ve already been proven wrong on that, but you know what they say about hindsight.) The only reason I didn’t completely collapse under those nerves was the people around me. I can’t really extend enough thanks to the people I commentated with over the course of that week – Phillie, Zack, Jay, and Mulan – for being so kind, and so patient with my awkward, teenage demeanor. I do still look back on that and think “wow, that really happened”.

It is that comfort that makes me confront the true meaning of speedrunning, which is the people. The games we play are cool, but they’re superficial. Once you’ve jumped through the relatively large hoop of having a common interest and an excuse to meet up, what you’ve achieved is called friendship. Not only can friendship occur in ordinary places, it usually does. For example, when me and about 15 friends carpooled a ways away from the PACE hotels to an ice skating rink. I'm thoroughly awful at ice skating. I do not understand how it's physically possible. And yet, a favorite memory lingers from that day, when I slipped and fell into someone’s arms. It's ironic.

Those times, of course, have passed. It’s 2025. Even if PACE was still an option this summer, GDQ held the opportunity of meeting my eight closest friends. And even if not for those friends, I had felt like GDQ was just… better. If the essence of speedrunning is people, I felt like my experience could only improve with the presence of more people. That could not have been farther from the truth. SGDQ 2025 was a whirlwind. Probably the most enjoyable a whirlwind could possibly be, but still. When there’s 2500 people attending an event, it is impossible to know most of them. You are going to be surrounded by strangers most of the time. The exceptions are fleeting moments, instantaneous collisions of tight groups, where you might not even have the reaction time to say “hi”. Unless you plan to supersede that by organizing larger hangouts, that’s sort of all the socialization you can expect.

This is what led me to the realization that I probably met more meaningful people at PACE 2024 than I ever will, anywhere, at any event, for the rest of my life. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s a real prediction. Unless I get really into something like Melee, a game that has an exceptionally strong culture at the local level, which… isn’t entirely out of the question right now, but don’t worry about that. The point is, I now recognize PACE as an unfathomable collective of my acquaintances, my friends, and my role models. I wasn’t grateful enough for that. It remains true that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

In my traditional fashion of burying the lede, I have once again waited until the end of an article to actually explain the main topic. Good work, me. On November 26th, 2024, the head of Xanadu Games announced that the venue would be shutting down at the end of the year. In their own words, “the company [they] had a contract with is ceasing to exist”. For a short while, PACE sought out potential replacement venues on the East Coast. None could be secured.

There is a core irony in speedrunning that doesn’t get discussed enough. Whenever I explain speedrunning to someone who doesn’t do it, it comes off to them as a deeply solitary activity. In some ways, it is. Sitting in your room and becoming inseparable from a character in your monitor that exists in equal or less dimensions than you, and coaxing it into perfection over, and over, and over again, is admittedly quite solitary. The funny thing is that for most people, that’s not even close to the fun part. The fun part is streaming on Twitch. The fun part is comparing your times with people you don’t know. Or maybe people you do. Maybe the fun part is meeting friends, or best friends, or lovers. All of the above happens all the time, whether you know it or not. Most of the time, it is not because of the speedrun.com forums - it is because we choose to forge our own communities out of the games we love.

The death of PACE should serve as a reminder to us all: If we as individuals do not preserve those communities, no one will.