A speedrun leaderboard tells you who is fastest now. F-Zero World Record History tries to answer the much harder question: who was fastest before anybody thought to save the video?
Visit F-Zero World Record History
The site tracks time-trial records across F-Zero on Super Nintendo, F-Zero X, Maximum Velocity, and GP Legend. Current records are presented with players, countries, dates, modes, vehicles, and links to video where available.
But the useful part is the history.
Individual game sections let visitors inspect records by date, see recent improvements, rank players, and look at the longest-lasting records. The SNES archive reaches back into 1991 and 1992, when record evidence often came from Japanese publications rather than YouTube uploads or emulator files.
That creates an unusual preservation problem.
Modern competitive gaming expects proof. Old competitive gaming often left a number in a magazine.
The site keeps both.
A leaderboard with sediment layers
The SNES section records performances that lasted for years because nobody had a centralized global mechanism for continuously challenging them.
Some old entries include approximate dates because the surviving source identified a month but not a precise day. Later records become more exact. Eventually video links appear. The evidence changes as the Internet changes.
That makes the database more than a list of fast times.
It documents the transition from local and magazine-based competition into the modern speedrunning environment, where players from different countries can upload attempts, compare techniques immediately, and shave hundredths of a second from runs that have already been optimized for decades.
The site is still active. Records from 2026 sit beside performances attributed to players in the early 1990s. On some tracks, historical records held for thousands of days before being replaced.
Those long reigns are almost impossible to appreciate from a current leaderboard alone. Once a new number takes the top row, the old achievement vanishes unless somebody deliberately retains the sequence.
F-Zero World Record History does.
That matters particularly for games with long competitive lives. A record is not just a time. It is a relationship between a player, the techniques known at that moment, the hardware and regional version being used, and every previous attempt that established what people thought the limit was.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes specialist gaming archives like this because the history of play disappears surprisingly fast when databases keep only the current winner.
The stopwatch remembers one number.
The website remembers the argument that produced it.