More than twenty years after The Simpsons: Hit & Run first brought players into the streets of Springfield, a French speedrunner known as HomerOfSteel helped transform the game’s competitive history. What began as a pursuit of faster completion times became one of the most remarkable rivalries in the speedrunning community, challenging records that had been refined over nearly a decade and ultimately establishing a new standard for one of gaming’s most enduring cult classics.
HomerOfSteel became particularly known for challenging LiquidWiFi, the Australian speedrunner whose dominance over The Simpsons: Hit & Run had seemed almost impossible to overcome. Through increasingly optimized routes, extensive practice, and a willingness to compete across numerous categories, HomerOfSteel emerged as one of the game’s leading competitors. His accomplishments have since been documented through verified Speedrun.com submissions, original gameplay recordings, and historical coverage from Summoning Salt and GamesRadar+.
His career offers an unusual example of how a player can become an important figure in video game history long after a game’s original release, helping preserve an older title while pushing its competitive possibilities into territory that its developers never anticipated.
The Simpsons: Hit & Run and the Origins of a Speedrunning Community
Released in September 2003, The Simpsons: Hit & Run was developed by Radical Entertainment and published by Vivendi Universal Games. The game allowed players to explore Springfield through a combination of driving, missions, exploration, and vehicle-based challenges, drawing considerable inspiration from the open-world design popularized by the Grand Theft Auto series.
Players controlled members of the Simpson family and other familiar characters across seven levels, completing missions while navigating recognizable locations such as the Kwik-E-Mart, Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and the family’s neighborhood. Its blend of television humor and surprisingly demanding gameplay contributed to a following that remained active long after the original console generation had ended.
Yet the game initially presented considerable challenges for competitive speedrunning. Completing its storyline required players to earn enough coins to purchase vehicles and other necessities, while difficult missions, unpredictable traffic, and the game’s driving physics could quickly undermine otherwise promising attempts. Certain methods of skipping missions also complicated the development of a category that accurately represented completing the entire story.
By the early 2010s, however, players had begun developing increasingly sophisticated approaches. Runners such as Pessimistic Mango and Pet Pet Iguana helped establish the foundations of modern All Story Missions competition, and in 2014 Pessimistic Mango became the first runner to break the two-hour barrier in that category.
The competition intensified as players discovered more efficient routes, methods of manipulating vehicles, and ways to reduce the time lost to unwanted police attention. These developments transformed what had once been a relatively overlooked speedrunning game into a contest measured through seconds rather than minutes.
The Long Reign of LiquidWiFi
Before HomerOfSteel became a leading figure in The Simpsons: Hit & Run, the game’s competitive history was closely associated with LiquidWiFi.
LiquidWiFi entered the world-record competition in 2015 and began challenging the records established by earlier competitors. His approach demonstrated the importance of managing coins and planning purchases throughout the run. Rather than simply taking the shortest immediate route through every mission, competitors increasingly considered how decisions made early in the game could save considerably more time during later levels.
The competition continued through 2015 and 2016, but LiquidWiFi’s position became especially dominant after he reclaimed the record in May 2017. Over the following six years, he recorded an extraordinary sequence of improvements, establishing 45 successive world-record times according to the history documented by Summoning Salt and later summarized by GamesRadar+.
The improvements reflected both technical discoveries and increasingly precise execution. Techniques such as E-brake boosting allowed players to accelerate more efficiently in certain circumstances, while out-of-bounds movement and other route optimizations created opportunities that earlier runners had not fully explored.
By March 19, 2020, Guinness World Records recognized LiquidWiFi’s All Story Missions performance of 1:22:45 as the fastest recorded completion of its kind at that time. The record continued to improve, and in April 2021 he established a 1:19 time that remained unbeaten for more than a year.
In January 2023, LiquidWiFi finally reached the 1:18 range, a milestone that seemed to reinforce his position at the top of the game. His extended dominance had made him the defining figure of the competition, but another runner was beginning to close the gap.
HomerOfSteel Enters the World-Record Race
HomerOfSteel’s competitive activity predates his rise in The Simpsons: Hit & Run. His Speedrun.com history includes a Super Mario Maker 100 Mario Challenge submission from approximately 2019, demonstrating his involvement with speedrunning years before the most widely documented accomplishments of his career.
Identified on his competitive profile with the Pays de la Loire region of France, HomerOfSteel eventually developed a particularly strong association with The Simpsons: Hit & Run, a game he has described through his own YouTube channel as a childhood favorite.
His emergence as a serious challenger coincided with the period when LiquidWiFi’s increasingly advanced strategies were attracting renewed competition. GamesRadar+ reported that HomerOfSteel had encountered the speedrun through the techniques LiquidWiFi developed during the pandemic years, eventually progressing far enough to challenge the game’s established leader.
In January 2023, only hours after LiquidWiFi achieved a time in the 1:18 range, HomerOfSteel became one of the few competitors to complete All Story Missions in approximately 1:19. The achievement suggested that LiquidWiFi’s dominance, while historically extraordinary, was no longer beyond challenge.
Another runner, 12_Kelvin, also entered the competition at the highest level, creating a three-way rivalry that would define the next stage of the game’s history. Rather than a single competitor gradually improving an uncontested record, the leaderboard became the center of a renewed contest in which multiple runners could challenge the fastest times.
HomerOfSteel’s progress culminated in a major breakthrough in June 2024, when he established an All Story Missions performance in the 1:16 range that placed him more than a minute ahead of his nearest competition at that stage. The achievement represented a decisive change in the game’s competitive hierarchy and established him as the runner others would have to pursue.
The Pursuit of 1:15:58
HomerOfSteel did not stop after his 2024 breakthrough. His subsequent attempts continued to reduce the time required to complete The Simpsons: Hit & Run, even as improvements became increasingly difficult to obtain.
At the highest competitive level, optimizing a run involves more than simply discovering a dramatic shortcut. Players must repeatedly execute demanding movement, driving, and mission sequences while maintaining enough consistency to complete an entire attempt without losing valuable time. An unfortunate vehicle collision or poorly timed encounter with Springfield’s police can erase the advantage gained through several successful missions.
On February 3, 2025, HomerOfSteel published a run of 1:16:32 on YouTube. Although the performance was already extraordinarily fast, he acknowledged that it contained mistakes and suggested that breaking into the 1:15 range was becoming a realistic objective.
On February 27, 2025, he reached that milestone.
His verified All Story Missions submission recorded a load-removed time of 1 hour, 15 minutes, and 58 seconds, with an actual elapsed completion time of 1:16:30. The performance became one of the defining achievements of his career and established a benchmark that continued to lead the category into November 2026.
In the description accompanying the original video, HomerOfSteel explained that the attempt had concluded the longest and most difficult speedrunning grind of his life. He also suggested that while a completion in the 1:14 range might represent the next major barrier, reaching that mark was not a realistic immediate expectation.
The significance of the record extended beyond crossing another minute boundary. It demonstrated how far The Simpsons: Hit & Run had progressed from its early speedrunning history, when a completion under two hours had represented a major achievement. More than a decade of discoveries had gradually reduced the fastest completion times toward a limit that runners continued attempting to understand.
The Techniques Behind the Records
HomerOfSteel’s success also illustrates the technical demands of modern The Simpsons: Hit & Run speedrunning.
The All Story Missions category requires players to progress through the game’s storyline under a defined set of competitive rules. Although many casual players remember the game primarily for its humorous missions and open-world exploration, competitive runners approach Springfield as an interconnected series of routes, resource requirements, and carefully timed actions.
Coin collection remains one of the most important considerations. Players must collect enough money to make necessary purchases without spending excessive time gathering resources they do not need. Decisions about where and when to collect coins can affect the efficiency of several later missions, making resource planning an essential part of the route.
Driving optimization is equally important. Runners exploit their knowledge of acceleration, vehicle handling, collision behavior, and mission objectives to reduce the distance and time required to complete each task. Certain missions also permit unusual strategies involving enemy vehicles or the game’s artificial intelligence, while others depend heavily on navigating difficult sections without costly mistakes.
The game’s final levels became particularly important to the historical competition because of opportunities for advanced movement and route shortcuts. Although such techniques can provide considerable time savings, their effectiveness depends on the rules of the category and the player’s ability to execute them consistently.
In December 2024, speedrunning analyst tomatoanus published a detailed explanation of HomerOfSteel’s All Story Missions performance, breaking the game into its seven levels and examining how driving techniques, coin collection, and mission routing contributed to his completion time.
The video provided an accessible explanation of the technical work underlying an elite run and demonstrated that HomerOfSteel’s achievements were not simply the result of repeated play. They depended on a sophisticated understanding of a game whose underlying systems had been studied and refined for many years.
Dominance Beyond All Story Missions
Although All Story Missions brought HomerOfSteel considerable attention, his competitive accomplishments extend far beyond a single category.
His verified Speedrun.com profile records hundreds of full-game submissions and even more individual-level performances. By November 2026, the archive contained more than 1,200 total runs across numerous games, including extensive competition within The Simpsons: Hit & Run and its related categories.
Among his most significant achievements is a 100% completion time of 2:41:58, a verified performance recorded in 2026. This category requires a substantially different approach from All Story Missions because players must complete a broader range of the game’s content, making efficient planning and consistency especially important.
His profile also documents a 50:41 completion in restricted Any% and a 48:56 performance in unrestricted Any%, illustrating how different rulesets can fundamentally alter the fastest possible approach to the game.
Other notable records include 1:59:52 in All Tasks NLR, 1:28:53 in No Mission Warps, and 2:53:11 in 99% NLR. Each represents a different collection of objectives or restrictions, requiring its own preparation and route development.
His participation in the game’s category extensions demonstrates an even broader commitment. HomerOfSteel has recorded competitive times in specialized challenges involving collectible items, doorbells, street races, alternative progression rules, and combinations of multiple categories.
One particularly demanding submission is his Multi% All Categories performance of 9:43:57 in load-removed time. Instead of completing only one traditional objective, the challenge combines several extensive runs into a single competitive undertaking, making endurance and consistency as important as individual technical skill.
Taken together, these records suggest that HomerOfSteel’s career cannot be adequately understood through his most famous world record alone. His broader achievement has been the repeated application of elite-level optimization to almost every aspect of a game that he continued studying long after reaching its highest competitive level.
Individual Levels and the Search for Perfection
Another important part of HomerOfSteel’s competitive history involves individual-level speedrunning.
Rather than completing the entire game in one attempt, individual-level competition measures how quickly players can finish a specific section. This allows runners to develop highly specialized strategies that may not always be practical during a complete playthrough.
The official Speedrun.com individual-level leaderboard for the PC All Story Missions category listed HomerOfSteel in first place across all seven levels during the November 2026 review.
His recorded times included 10:10 for Level 1, 10:55 for Level 2, and 8:58 for Level 3. The remaining levels were recorded at 13:41 for Level 4, 11:23 for Level 5, 9:18 for Level 6, and 7:43 for Level 7.
These performances are significant because they demonstrate mastery of the game’s separate sections as well as its full-length route. Maintaining leading individual-level times requires a willingness to practice specific missions repeatedly, analyze small improvements, and explore strategies that may save only fractions of a second.
HomerOfSteel’s individual mission records extend this specialization even further. The game’s category-extension leaderboards contain numerous performances under his name for specific missions, offering a detailed record of how individual challenges continued to be optimized long after the game’s original release.
The resulting archive preserves not only the fastest overall completions but also the smaller competitive discoveries that made those achievements possible.
Randomizers, Fan Modifications, and Community Involvement
HomerOfSteel’s involvement with The Simpsons: Hit & Run also expanded into its community-created modifications and randomizer challenges.
Randomized versions of the game introduce additional uncertainty by changing elements of the normal experience, forcing players to adapt to conditions that differ from established routes. The competitive categories distinguish between seeded and unseeded attempts and may impose restrictions on mission skips, warps, and level returns.
HomerOfSteel’s verified randomizer submissions include a 1:27:42 performance in seeded All Story Missions NLR/NMMW and a 1:29:26 completion in the corresponding unseeded category. His records also include a 1:36:28 seeded No Mission Skips/Warps run and a 2:20:51 seeded All Tasks NLR/NMMW performance.
His interest in modifications extended into fan-made campaigns, including Storm Over Springfield, A Christmas in Springfield, Ooze & Booze in Springfield, and Annoy Squidward. These projects demonstrate the continued creativity of the game’s community, which has developed alternative experiences from the original title.
The competitive archive records HomerOfSteel completing Storm Over Springfield in 27 minutes for All Story Missions and 41:17 for 100% completion. He also submitted a 23:46 run of Ooze & Booze in Springfield and a 28:59 completion of A Christmas in Springfield.
His participation was not limited to submitting times. In a Speedrun.com forum discussion concerning additional modification categories, HomerOfSteel asked whether more fan-created campaigns could be included on the competitive leaderboard. When a moderator explained that new categories required sufficient community participation, he responded that he would look for other runners interested in competing.
The exchange provides firsthand evidence of his interest in expanding organized competition rather than simply participating in the categories already available.
He also appears as the contributor of a Speedrun.com guide entry for SHAR Wiki, a resource directing players toward a website that gathers guides and information about the game. This connection further illustrates his involvement with the community resources used by runners seeking to learn the game’s techniques.
A Career Beyond Springfield
While The Simpsons: Hit & Run has become HomerOfSteel’s defining competitive game, his broader Speedrun.com history includes performances across Nintendo franchises, racing games, and cooperative challenges.
His early Super Mario Maker record establishes a history of participation dating back to approximately 2019. Later submissions include performances in Super Mario 64, Super Mario Odyssey, New Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Maker 2, and several Mario Kart titles.
He also participated in cooperative Super Mario 64 speedrunning, where players work together to complete objectives substantially faster than would be possible in ordinary single-player competition. One verified 120 Star cooperative submission involving a team of between ten and sixteen players recorded a time of 9:49.200. The achievement belongs to the participating team collectively, rather than to any individual runner.
His profile also includes competition in Cars, the 2006 racing game based on the Pixar film, along with numerous specialized category extensions across other titles.
These performances demonstrate that HomerOfSteel’s speedrunning interests were not confined to a single franchise. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of his The Simpsons: Hit & Run submissions makes that game the clearest representation of his competitive career.
Summoning Salt and the Recognition of a Speedrunning Rivalry
HomerOfSteel’s rise became more widely recognized in November 2024, when speedrunning historian Summoning Salt published The History of The Simpsons Hit & Run World Records.
The approximately 73-minute documentary traced the game’s competitive evolution, beginning with its early runners and following the discoveries that gradually transformed the leaderboards. Particular attention was given to LiquidWiFi’s extraordinary period of dominance and the emergence of HomerOfSteel as a challenger capable of ending that reign.
The documentary introduced the rivalry to viewers who might never have followed the game’s competitive history directly. Its historical approach emphasized how individual discoveries accumulated over time, allowing players to accomplish what earlier generations of runners had considered nearly impossible.
GamesRadar+ subsequently published coverage of the competition, describing the remarkable sequence of world records and the eventual rise of HomerOfSteel, LiquidWiFi, and 12_Kelvin as the central figures in the renewed battle for the fastest completion.
The documentary even attracted attention from Joe McGinn, the original lead designer of The Simpsons: Hit & Run at Radical Entertainment. According to GamesRadar+, McGinn expressed surprise at the techniques developed by the speedrunning community and explained that the development team had not known about the optimizations demonstrated in the documentary.
His reaction offered an unusual connection between the original developers and the players who continued exploring the game’s systems more than twenty years later.
The documentary appeared before HomerOfSteel’s February 2025 record of 1:15:58, meaning that the historical competition it documented was still developing. His subsequent achievement added another major milestone to a rivalry that had already attracted attention well beyond the game’s original community.
The Legacy of HomerOfSteel in Video Game History
HomerOfSteel’s career illustrates a distinctive form of achievement within competitive gaming. Unlike traditional esports, where recognition is often associated with major tournaments, professional teams, or prize money, speedrunning history frequently develops through individual accomplishments preserved in public archives.
The records themselves become historical documents. Each verified submission establishes that a particular performance was achieved under a defined set of rules, while the associated recordings preserve the techniques, mistakes, and discoveries that shaped the competition.
For HomerOfSteel, these records document more than the defeat of a long-standing rival. They demonstrate the progression from a challenger in 2023 to a leading competitor in 2024 and 2025, followed by continued achievements across the game’s principal categories, individual levels, randomized versions, and community modifications.
His career also reflects the collaborative character of speedrunning. Many techniques are discovered or refined by different players over time, and even an apparently dominant record depends on years of shared experimentation. HomerOfSteel’s performances built upon that history while creating new benchmarks for future competitors.
As of November 2026, the official All Story Missions leaderboard continued to recognize his 1:15:58 performance as the fastest verified PC completion in the category, ahead of LiquidWiFi and 12_Kelvin. Other records throughout his career remained part of an evolving competitive archive where rankings could change as new strategies were discovered and additional runs were submitted.
The importance of HomerOfSteel’s accomplishments therefore extends beyond whether every record remains unbeaten. His performances helped mark an important transition in the history of The Simpsons: Hit & Run, demonstrating that even after two decades, dedicated competitors could continue finding new ways to master Springfield.
For a game released in 2003, that continued evolution may be its most remarkable legacy. What began as a humorous adventure through a familiar television world became the setting for a sustained pursuit of competitive perfection, with HomerOfSteel securing a lasting place among the runners who pushed that pursuit forward.
Sources & Further Reading
Bailey, Dustin. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run’s Own Lead Designer Can’t Believe the Open-World Game’s Speedrunning Scene: ‘I Don’t Think We Knew about a Single One of These Optimizations.’” GamesRadar+, November 23, 2024. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/open-world/the-simpsons-hit-and-runs-own-lead-designer-cant-believe-the-open-world-games-speedrunning-scene-i-dont-think-we-knew-about-a-single-one-of-these-optimizations/.
European Speedrunner Assembly. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run Speedrun VODs.” ESA Vods. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://esavods.com/game/the-simpsons-hit-run.
Guinness World Records. “Fastest All Story Missions Completion of The Simpsons: Hit & Run (PC).” Record achieved March 19, 2020. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/571681-fastest-all-story-missions-completion-of-the-simpsons-hit-run-pc.
HomerOfSteel. “The Simpsons Hit And Run All Story Missions In 1:16:32.” YouTube video, February 3, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZjdSruQKpc.
HomerOfSteel. “The Simpsons Hit And Run All Story Missions In 1:15:58.” YouTube video, February 27, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msct7NHm0CE.
HomerOfSteel. “My Top 100 Simpsons Hit And Run Speedrun Highlights.” YouTube video, March 1, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dIAnDwsNqk.
HomerOfSteel. “HomerOfSteel.” Speedrun.com. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/users/HomerOfSteel.
HomerOfSteel. “Adding News Mods Categories?” Speedrun.com, The Simpsons: Hit & Run Mods Forums. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar_mods/forums/e7wjp.
Jones, Ali. “The Simpsons Hit & Run Has Quietly Been the Arena for an Incredible 10-Year Speedrunning Gauntlet, Dominated by One Runner Who Broke 45 Records in a Row.” GamesRadar+, November 14, 2024. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/action/the-simpsons-hit-and-run-has-quietly-been-the-arena-for-an-incredible-10-year-speedrunning-gauntlet-dominated-by-one-runner-who-broke-45-records-in-a-row/.
LiquidWiFi. “LiquidWiFi’s Commentary of Summoning Salts Hit & Run World Record History Video.” YouTube video, November 17, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEz2-JRhaUY.
RetroAchievements. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run (GameCube).” Game archive and competitive leaderboards. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://retroachievements.org/game/2199.
SHAR Wiki. “SHAR Wiki.” Speedrun.com, The Simpsons: Hit & Run Guides. Updated by HomerOfSteel. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar/guides/0946l.
Speedrun.com. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run.” Official game leaderboard, records, categories, and competitive history. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar.
Speedrun.com. “All Story Missions in 01:15:58 by HomerOfSteel.” The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Verified competitive submission. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar/runs/yoq0p50z.
Speedrun.com. “100% in 02:41:58 by HomerOfSteel.” The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Verified competitive submission. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar/runs/ydp0x60y.
Speedrun.com. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run: Category Extensions.” Competitive leaderboards and alternative rulesets. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar_ex.
Speedrun.com. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run: Individual-Level Records.” Competitive leaderboard for individual levels. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar/levels.
Speedrun.com. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run Mods.” Community modifications and competitive leaderboards. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar_mods.
Speedrun.com. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run Randomizer.” Randomized speedrunning categories and competitive records. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/randomizer.
Speedrun.com. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run Randomizer: Resources.” Community documentation and randomizer modification resources. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/randomizer/resources.
Speedrun.com. “The Simpsons: Hit & Run: Related Games.” Category extensions, modifications, and randomizer archives. Accessed November 8, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/shar/games.
Summoning Salt. “The History of The Simpsons Hit & Run World Records.” YouTube video, November 9, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po9aCHS2kfc.
tomatoanus. “How Speedrunners Beat All Story Missions in The Simpsons: Hit & Run (SPEEDRUN EXPLAINED).” YouTube video, December 13, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvKach-Y7I4.