Sorry, Minecraft: Subway Surfers has become the most popular speedrun in the world
A viral tweet pointed out that Subway Surfers, a mobile infinite runner, has surpassed Super Mario 64 and Minecraft to become the most-popular speedrun in the world. It holds the number one position on speedrun.com in all major categories: Most Active, Most players, and Most runs.
This is not an easy win, especially with active users. Subway Surfers currently has around 17,950 active users. This is almost 38 times more active users than Super Mario 64 which currently occupies second place. Subway Surfers has over 26,000. This is more than twice the Minecraft Java Edition.
This is a surprising result for Americans, but it may not be for Brazilians. Many of these runs come from accounts that have a Brazilian flag. The No Coins category has 200 top runners. An astounding 64 percent of these runners are from Brazil. 26 percent of them have no nationality, so the number of Brazil-based runners could be even greater.
This development raises a few important questions. It’s an endless runner. How does one even manage a Subway Surfers speedrun? “No Coins” is the most popular category. Here, players attempt to get as far as possible while not collecting any coins. The fastest times are the longest so the category doesn’t fit the traditional definition. However, that hasn’t diminished the popularity of the game. There are many other categories that feel standards, such as 100 Coins and 38x multiplier.
The big question is where this all began. It’s difficult to determine the exact cause of this trend, but there are some possible causes. TikTok is one. A recent trend sees users upload text-to-speech audio clips from Reddit threads Subway Surfers gameplay. This is combined with the viral trend of recreating gameplay over an acapella cover of the opening music of the game with some big hits from the official Subway Surfers Account, and it’s easy to see why the Subway Surfers hashtag has more than 25 billion views.
