Post
A family of speedrun techniques where players slam into geometry in specific ways to force clips, skips, or ejections.
A 'bonk' is any impact-triggered glitch: a rider hitting a wall to clip through, a character slamming a corner to reset a state flag, a repeated collision to trigger a position reset. Each game has its own bonk vocabulary, often named after the runner who found it. The technique sits at the junction of physics exploits and frame-perfect execution, and good bonks can save minutes.
Example
Super Mario 64's 'bonking' against walls for speed resets. Dark Souls 2's 'bonks' for out-of-map access. Breath of the Wild's parasail-bonk routing. Sonic Adventure 2's famous wall-bonk cancels. Many mod tools now let runners find potential bonk surfaces programmatically.
Why it matters
Bonks are a perfect example of how speedrunning turns engine quirks into an expressive discipline. Learning to spot bonk potential is part of what makes route-discovery such a creative, community-driven activity.
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