Popular speedrunner Mitch Fowler is slated to be a guest on U.S. TV program The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tomorrow, where he’ll be performing a live speedrun of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. 3.
How does this affect the art and business of game development? It doesn’t, really. But it does reflect the rising popularity of watching other people play games, especially if they’re highly skilled.
This will also likely afford the speedrunning community a bit of a “Colbert bump” given that the program is one of the more popular late-night talk shows in the U.S.
This isn’t the first time Colbert’s Late Show has trucked with video games, either. At least one of the show’s writers, Rob Dubbin, is also a developer who helped produce a Twine game based on the show (Escape from the Man-Sized Cabinet) as well as a politically-themed tapping game, Bubble Burst Bernie, with onetime game developer Darius Kazemi.