Longplay (video games)

A longplay is a play-through of a video game, created with the intent of completing it as fully as possible, mainly for the purposes of nostalgia, preservation, and possibly as a walkthrough. For people who are unable or unwilling to play a certain game, yet wish to know and experience its story, a longplay can be viewed simply as a long digitally animated movie. A longplay is distinct from a Let's Play, in that there is typically little to no commentary on the game by the player.

The defining characteristic of a longplay when compared to a speedrun is that few shortcuts, if any, are taken to finish the game. Dull moments may be ultimately edited out of the final video, and sidequests may be ignored, but in general every task necessary to reach the end is recorded, including cutscenes. Also unlike speedruns, there is no time constraint aside from those imposed by bandwidth/filesize concerns.

Creation

Games may be recorded in several ways: using screencast software, a feature built into an emulator, or via a video capture device connected to a console or another computer. Some games (for example, Doom) have a demo recording feature built into the game.

Neologism status

"Speedrun" and "game replay" emerged in recent years as a subset of "play-through" and gained popularity by being entertaining and competitive while needing only minutes of video. Video sharing websites accelerated their acceptance.