Overview

What is Arena?

This is a series of Ancient Cave challenges - one challenge per month.

You can do any number of attempts within that month's timeframe, and either run in secrecy or stream your attempts. You can participate in as many challenges as possible with the prospect of becoming the overall champion, or you can cherry-pick the ones that look fun to you. Challenges will hopefully be interesting to seasoned runners, but also accomplishable by newcomers, and both are equally welcome.

To participate, no signup or qualification is necessary. For each individual challenge, you can choose to submit a video, which is all you need to participate. This can be done regardless of whether you entered or plan to enter any of the other challenges.

Runs will be verified as soon as possible, and published on a leaderboard on the respective challenge page. At the end of each month, the overall ranking will be updated.

Check the Details page for precise information of how the event works, and keep reading for a more general description of what to expect.

What will the challenges be like?

You can check previous years' challenges to get an idea for the kind of event that might await you. In general, they will be short, and intended to be interesting in their own right rather than being similar to existing speedrunning challenges. The average challenge will be clearable in well under two hours for intermediate runners.

As far as routing and strategy goes, participants as well as others are allowed and even encouraged to exchange thoughts and strats as much as possible, and help each other out where necessary.

What's in it for the winners?

Other than the spirit of a friendly competition, you will be eternalized on the monthly leaderboards and overall ranking page if you participate.

Additionally, the overall winner will be awarded the 2025 Champion community discord role.

What else?

This event has been well-received in previous years by runners and viewers alike, so I hope for an upwards trajectory.

It is still an event aimed at making people play and talk about the Ancient Cave more, not anything overly serious, so I hope you'll find it's easy to participate, not much you can do wrong, and hopefully you'll have a great time in trying to beat the challenges!

Some challenges will only be possible if you can and are willing to run a patched ROM, and rompatches will be provided through my rompatcher for near-effortless patching. No challenges will require Game Genie codes, so running on actual hardware will always be possible as long as you are able to run ROMs off of a special cartridge on it - and of course, you're always free to participate on emulator.