STG "World Record History"?

[XoPachi]

Speedrunning is huge now. There's notable YouTubers that chronicle exhaustive history of legendary world record runs. Amazing content creators like Karl Jobst and Summoning Salt.
Does the STG scene have an equivalent to folks like them for the genre's more prestigious scoring achievements? I feel like that would be incredibly interesting to see the progression, drama, and ingenuity documented in video or at least article format. This sort of thing tells cool stories that always end on an uplifting high note. And I feel like the more technical games, you know which ones, would make for something quite riveting. Might even bump the community's numbers up even more (not to imply they're faltering or need a boost, but it's a net positive).

[schleichfahrt]

Plasmo exists. Look him up

[CStarFlare]

Plasmo and Gemant might be two people who would be capable of this - maybe EOJ for Cave games; there's probably someone in the Touhou community who could help there and I think there have been a few WR comparison videos on Touhou games. The key difference between speedrun WRs and shmup WRs is that speedruns have always had a culture of providing video proof, while arcade shmup records were historically communicated through magazines and either not recorded or widely shared. Records for other games - doujin titles, home releases etc - almost never existed until things like online leadeboards were added to games.

There are some good stories to tell, though. There are enough oldschool Garegga people still around and enough interviews to cite that you could probably pull a very interesting history together. I seem to recall hearing of some drama about the Ketsui Second Apocalypse DVD and a special board that allowed the player to practice DOOM. The history of "teams" in operation during the golden age (T3? TWZ? IIRC there was one or two in the west as well) is something I know nothing about nor do I know much about the scene that used to produce and release superplays on VHS/DVD.

[ZPScissors]

This would be great but the problem is how poorly documented most shmup WRs are.

[XoPachi]

This would be great but the problem is how poorly documented most shmup WRs are.

Cabinets, especially in Japan, probably have seen hundreds of world records so. But much like Karl and Salt, I guess the easiest thing to do is to just go back to the earliest, concrete, documented records. Stuff that's very easily verifiable today. Preferably video proof.

[Jeneki]

Perhaps try "strategy progression" instead of "world record". This has a bigger paper trail than scores. If information only exists in text form, a good player can create a video example. In the case of unknown techniques, simply bringing attention to them could potentially spark new investigation or get someone to come forward (DDP as a recent example).

[Rastan78]

I love Summoning Salt videos and I dont even really care about speedrunning lol. It would be cool to see this happen with shmups, but there are so many reasons it wouldn't work. Shmups will probably never be the spectator sport that speedrunning has become but that's ok.

The best hope of learning more about the history of the scene would probably lie in tracking down Japanese super players and getting them to do interviews.

Shmuplations is a great source that has some translated player interviews.

Icarus has some of the best videos in terms of annotating why a player does certain strategies for score. These kinds of things can be a bit obtuse if you're not already trying to learn the game yourself. Can that kind of info translate for a casual audience the way seeing a crazy speedrunning glitch performed on a familiar game does?

If I had to sum up the difference between speed running and playing shmups for score it would be this:
Speedrunning is playing familiar games in an unconventional way.
Scoring shmups is playing obscure games in a conventional way.